Page:Substance of the Work Entitled Fruits and Farinacea The Proper Food of Man.djvu/33

 Few of those who feed upon flesh are aware of the enormous amount of excruciating pain that is inflicted to satisfy their appetite. The slaughter-house is seldom visited by persons whom its struggles and shrieks will deeply pierce. Young people early trained to slaughter gradually lose all sympathy with the beasts, and have their feelings blunted. Were every one forced to kill for himself all the animals whose limbs he devours, his sympathies would be a check on his desire for flesh. "The feelings of the heart," says Nicholson, "point more unerringly than the dogmas and subtleties of men, who sacrifice to custom the dearest sentiments of humanity." In all God's works there is harmony of design. It is not for nothing that he has implanted in us such an aversion to taking life, such a horror of shedding blood, and such a heart-sickness on witnessing it. If we shrink from the task of butchery and shun the scene of slaughter, can it be right to impose it on others, not for any necessity to us, but purely to gratify, to pamper our appetite?

The opinions of others on this subject may not be unacceptable to the reader—

"Nothing can be more shocking and horrid," says Pope, "than one of our kitchens sprinkled with blood, and abounding with the cries of creatures expiring, or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up here and there. It gives one the image of a giant's den in romance, bestrewed with scattered heads and mangled limbs."

Diogenes observed that "we might as well eat the flesh of men as the flesh of other animals." And Cicero remarked that "man was destined to a better occupation than that of pursuing and cutting the throats of dumb creatures."

Plutarch remarks: "How could man bear to see an impotent and defenceless creature slaughtered, skinned, and cut up for food? How could he endure the sight of the convulsed limbs and muscles? How bear the smell arising from the dissection? Whence came it that he was not disgusted, and struck with horror, when he came to handle the bleeding flesh, and clear away the clotted blood and humours from the wounds? We should therefore rather wonder at those who first indulged themselves in this horrible repast than at such as have humanely abstained from it."

Dr. Cheyne says: "I have sometimes indulged the conjecture that animal food and made or artificial liquors, in the original frame of our nature and design of our creation were not intended for human creatures. They seem to me neither to have those strong and fit organs for digesting them (at least such as birds and beasts of prey have that live on flesh); nor those cruel and hard hearts, nor those diabolical passions, which would easily suffer them to tear and destroy their fellow creatures; at least, not in the first and early ages, before every man had corrupted