Page:Substance of the Work Entitled Fruits and Farinacea The Proper Food of Man.djvu/35

 an acquired habit, which (as I shall hereafter show) only mars and abridges his existence—cuts short their innocent pleasures, and causes them to agonise to no useful purpose. "By long habit and familiarity with scenes of blood, men at length view them without emotion. But observe the young child, which is told that the chicken it has fed and played with is to be killed. Are not the tears it sheds, and the agonies it endures, the voice of nature itself crying within us, and pleading the cause of humanity?" "The merciful man is merciful to his beast," and the man of sensibility "will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct. It will be a contemplation full of horror and disappointment to his mind that beings capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies should take delight in the deathpangs and last convulsions of dying animals."

"There is no antipathy between man and other animals which indicates that nature has intended them for acts of mutual hostility. Numerous observations of travellers and voyagers have proved that in uninhabited islands, or in countries where animals are not disturbed or hunted, they betray no fear of men; the birds will suffer themselves to be taken by the hand, the foxes will approach him like a dog." These are no feeble indications that nature intended him to live in peace with the other tribes of animals.

Pythagoras, according to Ovid, draws the line for slaughter, as follows:—

.—"Why were sheep and oxen created if not for the use of man?" But it is only pride and imbecillty in man to imagine all things made for his sole use. There exist millions of suns and their revolving orbs which the eye of man has never perceived: myriads of animals enjoy their pastime unheeded and unseen by him; many are injurious and destructive to him. All exist for purposes but partially known. Yet we must believe, in the general, that all were created for their own enjoyment, for mutual advantage, and for the preservation of universal harmony in nature. If, merely because we can eat sheep pleasantly, we are to believe that they exist only to supply us with food, we may as well say that man was created solely for various parasitical animals to feed on, because they do feed on him.

But again, it is said: "If we allow sheep and oxen, and hares