There is a well-known story of an American statesman who was reared by Vegetarian parents in the country, and taken while still a small boy to dine at a neighbour’s. During the progress of the meal a large platter was borne into the room, on which lay something the like of which he had not seen on any table. He stared in wonder, and finally located the resemblance and shouted, “Why, mother, if that isn’t a dead hen!” Habit had not overcome his horror of that particular dead thing as food, as it would have done had he seen dead hens served as food all his life.
As to the inconvenience caused my friends when I am at their tables, I consider it of such small consequence compared to the fact that even one child should be standing almost knee-deep in blood in some slaughter-house, working to supply my wants, that it is not worth a second thought. No one need go hungry from any well-planned dinner, even though no extra preparation has been made for the non-meat-eating guest; but if my hostess knows in advance that I do not eat meat, and wishes to have prepared an especial dish, I give her the benefit of the doubt, and believe that she is as pleased to do it as I would be in her place. We like to take a little extra trouble to entertain our friends, and the thought expended to give others pleasure is perhaps the real joy of hospitality.
Another class of objector likes to remind us that we take life when we eat vegetables, or drink, or breathe. A friend, who has since ceased to consider the unnecessary and cruel slaughtering of thousands of creatures daily a fit subject for joking, once sent me in raillery a sonnet which rehearsed the sad death suffered by a cabbage to satisfy a Vegetarian’s selfish cravings. I find no qualms in my own conscience on this subject, but should I ever come to feel as these over-sensitive claim I should, I hope I will not then eat even the “innocent cabbage.”
Again, if the germs in the water we drink and the air we breathe do die by reason of our drinking and breathing I endure no self-condemnation. Man cannot be required to do the impossible by any Principle of Good, and to do each day what good he is able to do, to avoid the evil he can avoid, and in every difficulty choose what he thinks to be the lesser of two evils, is perhaps as much as even Divine Love expects of him to-day.
It is well to face the unpleasant fact that there are occasions when in our present state of development it seems necessary to kill in self-defence, as it were, moths, rats, etc.; but even in this we can “do our best,” and it has been well said, “angels can do no more.” We can by care in our households greatly reduce this necessity, and we can always see that no creatures, although destroying our property, pilfering or stealing, are in their death made to suffer. In this connection I would urge every one who reads these lines to never permit a piece of sticky fly-paper to be brought into the house, for of all cruel ways of destruction, this slow method, by which the unfortunate fly almost dismembers itself in its frantic efforts to escape, is one of the most fiendishly contrived.
An advocate of Vegetarianism has truly said, “A vegetable diet is as little connected with weakness and cowardice as meat eating is with physical force and courage.” That Vegetarians are not physical weaklings is no mere matter of opinion, but is proven by the giant Japanese wrestlers; the ancient Greek wrestlers; those Indian regiments of the British army showing most endurance; by the peasantry of the world, which is seldom able to afford meat, and above all, by those famous Vegetarians who march around the globe doing the work carnivorous man is too weak to do,—the horse, the ox, the camel, and the elephant. One of our best-known cooking teachers and food experts printed this statement not long ago: “While meat seems necessary to the rapid development of the American, I must contend that a well-selected vegetable diet will give greater health, bodily vigour, and mental strength,” which would seem contradictory, for even an American would not seem to require other food than that which will give him greatest health, bodily vigour, and mental strength.
Nor have we cause to feel ashamed of the mentality of the guests at Ceres’ table, which is graced by a goodly company; the list of names encircling the cover of “The Vegetarian Magazine” reads, “Adam, Hesiod, Gautama, Isaiah, Daniel, Plato, Zoroaster, Aristotle, Seneca, Ovid, Plutarch, Pope, Swedenborg, Leonardo da Vinci, Voltaire, Franklin, Westley, Linnæus, Shelley, Tolstoi, and King Oscar II.” Others are Bernard Shaw, and Maurice Maeterlinck (who is said to have become a non-meat eater to gain greater endurance for his favourite pastime of mountain climbing), Richard Wagner, and General Booth.
But after all, the one great argument for a fleshless diet is the humanitarian one, and it does not seem possible that persons exist to-day who do not know of the horrors of cruelty which take place hourly, in order that meat may be eaten by men and women who could not look without sickening at the process which has made possible the roast upon their tables, but who are nevertheless the employers of every fainting child in the stock-yards, and every brutalised man in the shambles, whose wages they pay with every pound of meat they buy. The real butcher of an animal is the one for whom it receives its death blow, not the one who actually deals that blow.
A man who recently visited some stock-yards writes: “We were sorry to see the Thor man make mislicks at a pretty heifer. His first stroke did not fell her, and she staggered and looked at him so wonderingly and pathetically. He could not strike her while her head was in that position, and after giving her two or three more ineffectual blows, she looked at him so reproachfully, as if pleading, ‘Why do you treat me so cruelly? What have I ever done to you?’ Finally he got her down and out of her misery. I shall never take a bit of steak on my fork without seeing that pretty heifer lifting her stunned head to that awkward pounder.”
Perhaps nothing more revolting than this same writer’s remarks anent pig-killing has been written, but since the words are accurately true, they should be fit to read, for if the words which tell the truth about meat as food are unfit for our ears, the meat itself is not fit for our mouths. He describes the pig-sticking, the skinning, and the process which makes the pig into pork, and then adds: “He goes into the cooling room, and the whole effort from that time is to keep him from crumbling back into dust, attacked by worms. Salt and brine and smoke and cold prevent the corpse from utter dissolution. The refrigerator is a sort of Purgatory where the brute stays until he finally finds a cemetery in the human alimentary canal.” Yet this man expects to again have meat “on his fork”!