“8. Because observing that carnivorous propensities among animals are accompanied by a total want of sympathetic feelings and gentle sentiments—as in the Hyæna, the Tiger, the Vulture, the Eagle, the Crocodile, and the Shark—he conceives that the practice of these carnivorous tyrants affords no worthy example for the imitation or justification of rational, reflecting, and conscientious beings.
“9. Because he observes that carnivorous men, unrestrained by reflection or sentiment, even refine on the most cruel practices of the most savage animals [of other species], and apply their resources of mind and art to prolong the miseries of the victims of their appetites—bleeding, skinning, roasting, and boiling animals alive, and torturing them without reservation or remorse, if they thereby add to the variety or the delicacy of their carnivorous gluttony.
“10. Because the natural sentiments and sympathies of human beings, in regard to the killing of other animals, are generally so averse from the practice that few men or women could devour the animals whom they might be obliged themselves to kill; and yet they forget, or affect to forget, the living endearments or dying sufferings of the being, while they are wantoning over his remains.
“11. Because the human stomach appears to be naturally so averse from receiving the remains of animals, that few could partake of them if they were not disguised and flavoured by culinary preparation; yet rational beings ought to feel that the prepared substances are not the less what they truly are, and that no disguise of food, in itself loathsome, ought to delude the unsophisticated perceptions of a considerate mind.
“12. Because the forty-seven millions of acres in England and Wales would maintain in abundance as many human inhabitants, if they lived wholly on grain, fruits, and vegetables; but they sustain only twelve millions [in 1811] scantily, while animal food is made the basis of human subsistence.
“13. Because animals do not present or contain the substance of food in mass, like vegetables; every part of their economy being subservient to their mere existence, and their entire frames being solely composed of blood necessary for life, of bones for strength, of muscles for motion, and of nerves for sensation.
“14. Because the practice of killing and devouring animals can be justified by no moral plea, by no physical benefit, nor by any just allegation of necessity in countries where there is abundance of vegetable food, and where the arts of gardening and husbandry are favoured by social protection, and by the genial character of the soil and climate.
“15. Because wherever the number and hostility of predatory land animals might so tend to prevent the cultivation of vegetable food as to render it necessary to destroy and, perhaps, to eat them, there could in that case exist no necessity for destroying the animated existences of the distinct elements of air and water; and, as in most civilised countries, there exist no land animals besides those which are properly bred for slaughter or luxury, of course the destruction of mammals and birds in such countries must be ascribed either to unthinking wantonness or to carnivorous gluttony.
“16. Because the stomachs of locomotive beings appear to have been provided for the purpose of conveying about with the moving animal nutritive substances, analogous in effect to the soil in which are fixed the roots of plants and, therefore, nothing ought to be introduced into the stomach for digestion and for absorption by the lacteals, or roots of the animal system, but the natural bases of simple nutrition—as the saccharine, the oleaginous, and the farinaceous matter of the vegetable kingdom.”[250]
Perhaps his most entertaining book is his Morning Walk from London to Kew (1817). In it he avails himself of the various objects on his road for instructive moralising—as, for example, when he meets with a mutilated soldier, on the frightful waste and cruelty of war; or with a horse struggling up a precipitous hill in agony of suffering from the torture of the bearing-rein, on the common forms of selfish cruelty; or again, when he deplores the incalculable waste of food resources, by the careless indifferentism of owners of land and of the State in allowing the country to remain encumbered with useless, or comparatively useless, timber, in place of planting it with valuable fruit trees of various sorts according to the nature of the soil.