13: On Vegetarianism (1901)

This essay first appeared in an earlier English translation in The Humane Review 1 (January 1901): 316–24, while the French version, “Le Végétarisme,” was published later the same year in La Réforme alimentaire (March 1901): 37–45. The text was later reprinted as a pamphlet in both French and English and has been circulated up to the present time.

Highly qualified experts in hygiene and biology have done thorough research into questions relating to common foods, so I will be careful not to demonstrate my incompetence in offering my own opinion concerning animal and vegetable diet. Every man to his trade. Since I am neither a chemist nor a physician, I will make no references to nitrogen or albumin, nor will I report the results of laboratory analyzes. Instead I will limit myself simply to presenting my own personal impressions, which probably coincide with those of many vegetarians. I will follow the path of my own experience, stopping occasionally for comments suggested by various small incidents.

First of all, I should say that the search for absolute truth played no role in the early impressions that turned me into a virtual or potential vegetarian when I was a small child still wearing baby clothes. I remember distinctly my horror at the sight of the shedding of blood. Once, a family member put a plate in my hand and sent me off to the village butcher, asking that I bring back some bloody scrap or other. Innocently obeying, I set out blithely to run the errand and entered the courtyard where one finds those executioners who slit animals’ throats. I still remember this sinister courtyard in which terrifying men went by holding large knives that they wiped on blood-spattered smocks. On a porch hung an enormous carcass that seemed to me to take up an extraordinary amount of space. From its white flesh a pink liquid ran in rivulets. I stood trembling and dumbfounded in this bloodstained courtyard, unable to advance and too terrified to run away. I have no idea what happened next. I have not the slightest memory. I think I was told that I fainted and that a sympathetic butcher carried me to his home. I weighed no more than one of the lambs he slaughtered each morning.

Other such incidents cast a gloom over my early years and, like my experience at the slaughterhouse, are landmarks in my young life. I can still see the sow belonging to some peasants who were amateur butchers, the cruelest kind. One of them bled the animal slowly, so that the blood fell drop by drop, for it is said that to make really good blood sausage, the victim must suffer a great deal. And indeed, she let out a continuous cry, punctuated with childlike moans and desperate, almost human pleas. It seemed as if one were listening to a child.

And in fact the domesticated pig is for a year the baby of the household, gorged with food to fatten him. He responds with sincere affection for all this care, though its only real aim is to add on a thick layer of bacon. But when there is a meeting of hearts, when the housewife charged with caring for the pig befriends her ward, pets him, pampers him and speaks to him, doesn’t she appear ridiculous, as if it were absurd and almost disgraceful to love an animal who loves us! One of the strongest impressions of my childhood comes from witnessing a rural tragedy. A pig was slaughtered by a whole populace in revolt against a good old woman, my great aunt, who would not consent to the murder of her fat friend. The crowd from the village forced its way into the pigpen and then led the beast away by force to the rustic slaughterhouse where the machinery of butchery awaited. Meanwhile, the miserable lady collapsed on a stool, silently weeping. I stood next to her and watched her tears, not knowing whether I should share her grief or believe like the crowd that the slaughter of the pig was just and legitimate, dictated by both common sense and fate.

Each of us has witnessed some such barbarous act committed by the carnivore against the animals he eats, and this is especially true of those who have lived among the common people, far away from humdrum cities where everything is carefully pigeonholed or hidden away. There is no need to go to a Porcopolis[446] of North America, or into a saladero of La Plata[447] to gaze upon the horrifying massacres that are a precondition for the food we eat each day. But such impressions fade away in time. They give way to the baneful influence of everyday life, which tends to pull the individual in the direction of normality, while robbing him of anything that might make him into a unique being, a real person. Parents, official and informal educators, and doctors, not to mention that all-powerful person referred to as “everybody,” all work together to harden the character of the child in relation to this “meat on feet,” which, nevertheless, loves as we do, feels as we do, and might also progress under our influence, if it does not regress along with us.

And such regression is indeed one of the most deplorable results of our carnivorous practices, for the animals sacrificed to man’s appetite have been systematically and methodically made ugly, weakened, deformed, and degraded in intelligence and moral worth. The very name of the animal into which the wild boar has been transformed has become the nastiest insult. The mass of flesh that one sees wallowing in a foul-smelling puddle is so repulsive to behold that we very carefully avoid any similarity of name between the animal and the dishes made out of it. What a difference there is between the mouflon’s[448] physique and bearing as it leaps from rock to rock in the mountains, and that of the sheep, which is forever robbed of all individual initiative, reduced to mere inert flesh at the mercy of its fears. It never dares to stray from the flock and even throws itself into the jaws of the dog that pursues it. The same kind of degeneration is evident in the cow that we see moving laboriously across the pasture, transformed by its breeders into an enormous ambulatory mass, shaped geometrically as if it were designed explicitly for the butcher’s knife. And it is to the creation of such monstrosities that we that we apply the term “breeding”! This is how man carries out his mission as educator in relation to his animal brethren!

Isn’t this moreover the way that we act in relation to all of nature? Let loose a pack of engineers in a charming valley, in the midst of meadows and trees, or on the banks of a beautiful river, and you will soon see what they are capable of doing to it. They will do everything in their power to make their own work conspicuous and hide nature under piles of gravel and coal. They will be quite proud to see the sky crisscrossed by streaks of filthy yellowish or black smoke from their locomotives. These same engineers also sometimes claim to beautify nature. Thus when some Belgian artists recently protested against the devastation of the countryside along the Meuse River, the Minister in charge quickly assured them that he would make them happy in the future by having all the new factories built with Gothic turrets! Similarly, butchers display dismembered carcasses and bloody pieces of meat before the eyes of the public, even along the busiest streets, next to perfumed shops decked with flowers. They even have the audacity to decorate the hanging hunks of flesh with rose garlands to make them esthetically pleasing.

When reading the news of the war in China,[449] one is amazed that the atrocities reported are a sad reality rather than a bad dream. How is it possible that men who once had the joy of their mothers’ caresses and were taught in school words such as “justice” and “kindness” turn into wild beasts with human faces who take pleasure in tying Chinese people together by their clothing and pigtails and then throwing them into a river? How is possible for them to finish off the wounded and force prisoners to dig their own graves before shooting them? Who are these terrifying assassins? They are people like ourselves, who study and read as we do, who have brothers, friends, wives, and fiancées. We are likely to meet them sooner or later and shake their hands without noticing any traces of blood on them.

But isn’t there a direct causal relationship between the food eaten by these executioners, who call themselves “civilizers,” and their brutal deeds? They often praise bloody flesh as a source of health, strength, and intelligence. And without disgust they go into butcher shops with slippery reddish pavement and breathe the sickly sweet odor of blood! How much difference is there between the dead carcass of a cow and that of a man? Their severed limbs and entrails mixed in with one another look quite similar. The slaughter of the former facilitates the murder of the latter, especially when an order resounds from a superior, or when one hears from afar the words of his royal master, “Show no mercy!”

A French proverb says that “any evil deed can be denied.” There was a certain degree of truth to this as long as the soldiers of each nation committed their acts of cruelty in isolation, for the reports of their atrocities could then be dismissed as the products of jealousy and national hatred. But today in China, the Russians, French, English, and Germans no longer conceal things discretely from one another. Eyewitnesses and even the culprits themselves inform us of them in many languages, though some do it with open cynicism and others more reluctantly. Since the truth can no longer be denied, it has become necessary to create a new morality to explain it. This morality holds there are two laws for mankind, one law for those with yellow skin and another law that is the prerogative of the whites. Apparently, in the future it will be permissible to kill or torture the former, while it will still be wrong to do so to the latter.

But isn’t morality equally flexible when applied to animals? By goading dogs on to tear a fox to pieces, the gentleman learns how to send his marksmen after the fleeing Chinese. The two kinds of hunt are part of one and the same “sport,” though when the victim is a man the emotion and pleasure are no doubt more intense. One might ask the opinion of the officer who recently invoked the name of Attila, pointing to that monster as a model for his soldiers!

It is in no way a digression to mention the horrors of war in connection with massacres of cattle and carnivorous banquets. People’s diet corresponds closely to their morality. Blood calls for blood. On considering one’s acquaintances, one usually finds that the agreeable manners, kindness of disposition, and equanimity of the vegetarians contrasts markedly with the qualities of the inveterate meat-eaters and avid drinkers of blood.

Such qualities are not held in very high esteem by those “supermen” who, without actually being superior to other mortals, excel in arrogance and imagine that they advance themselves by belittling the humble and exalting the strong. In their view, the meek are weak and sickly; they block our path, and it would be a noble deed to sweep them aside. If they are not killed, they should at least be allowed to die! But it is precisely such gentle people who might well be more resistant to ills than the violent. Those with a ruddy complexion are not usually the ones who live the longest. The truly strong are not those who exhibit their strength on the surface, in a flushed face, bulging muscles, or huge, glistening bulk. Statistical studies could quickly settle this point conclusively, and would have probably done so already were there not so many biased individuals using figures, whether true or false, as ammunition to defend their pet theories.

Be that as it may, we merely contend that for the great majority of vegetarians, the question is not whether their biceps and triceps are firmer than those of carnivores, nor even whether their constitutions are better able to cope with the trials of life and the risk of death—as important as these matters may be. For them, the real concern is to recognize the bonds of affection and kindness that link man to animals. It is to extend to our brothers who have been dismissed as inferior the feelings that have already put an end to cannibalism within the human species. The arguments that cannibals once gave against the elimination of human flesh from their daily diet have the same merit as those that the typical meat-eater employs today, and the arguments that were used against that abominable custom are precisely the ones that we now present. The horse and the cow, the wild rabbit and the cat,[450] the deer and the hare—these are more valuable to us as friends than as meat. We are eager to have them either as respected fellow workers, or simply as companions in the joy of living and loving.

“Nevertheless,” we are told, “if you abstain from the flesh of animals, then other carnivores, whether man or beast, will eat them instead, or else hunger and the elements will see to it that they die.” Indeed, the balance of nature will be maintained as always, in accord with the hazards of life and the conflict of appetites. But at least in the struggle between species the job of destroyer will belong to others. We will develop the part of the earth that falls to us so as to make it as pleasant as possible, not only for ourselves, but also for the animals of our household. We will take seriously the role of educator that man has claimed since prehistoric times. Our share of responsibility in the transformation of the universal order does not extend beyond ourselves and our immediate environment. Even though we can do only a little, this little will at least be our own work.

If we had the chimerical idea of taking the practice of our theory to its ultimate and logical conclusion, without taking into account any other considerations, we would surely fall into complete absurdity. In this way, the principle of vegetarianism is exactly the same as any other principle; it must be adapted to the normal conditions of life. Obviously, we have no intention of dedicating all our practices and actions, every hour and every minute, to respecting the life of the infinitely small. We will not let ourselves die of hunger and thirst, like a Buddhist lama, when a microscope shows us a drop of water teeming with animalcules. We will not hesitate occasionally to cut a stick in the forest or pick a flower in a garden. We will even go so far as to use lettuce, cabbages, and asparagus for our food, although we fully acknowledge that life exists in plants as well as in animals. But we are not interested in founding a new religion and chaining ourselves to it with sectarian dogmatism. Our goal is to make our existence as beautiful as possible, and, as best we can, to adapt it to the esthetic conditions of our environment.

Just as our ancestors became disgusted with eating their fellow humans and one fine day stopped serving them on their tables, and just as there are many carnivores today who refuse to eat the flesh of man’s noble companion, the horse, or that of those pampered guests in our homes, the dog and the cat—in the same way it is repugnant to us to drink the blood and chew the muscle of the steer, an animal whose labor helps supply us with bread. We no longer want to hear the bleating of sheep, the bellowing of cows, or the grunts and piercing cries of pigs as they are led to the slaughterhouse. We look forward to the day when we will no longer have to rush quickly past hideous sites of killing to see as little as possible of the rivulets of blood, the rows of cadavers hanging from sharp hooks, and the blood-stained workers armed with gruesome knives. We hope to live one day in a city in which we no longer risk seeing butcher shops full of carcasses next to silk and jewelry stores, or across from a pharmacy, a stand with fragrant fruit, or a fine bookstore full of engravings, statuettes and works or art. We want to be surrounded by an environment that pleases the eye and is an expression of beauty.

And since we know from physiologists and even more from our own experience that this vile diet of dismembered flesh is not necessary to sustain our existence, we put aside all these awful foods that our ancestors once enjoyed and that most still do today. We hope that before long the meat-eaters will at least have the discretion to hide their food. Slaughterhouses are already banished to the outskirts of town. Butcher shops should be treated similarly. Like cowbarns, they should be tucked away in dark corners.

It is also because of their ugliness that we abhor vivisection and all dangerous experiments, except when they are heroically carried out by the scientist on his own person. And it is also because of the ugliness of the act that we are disgusted when a naturalist pins live butterflies in his specimen box or destroys an entire anthill in order to count the ants. We turn with repugnance from the engineer who defaces nature by imprisoning a waterfall in cast-iron pipes, and from the logger in California who cuts down a tree that is four thousand years old and three hundred feet high in order to show its rings at fairs and exhibitions. Ugliness in persons, in actions, in life, and in the natural environment are all the enemy par excellence. Let us become beautiful ourselves, and let our life be beautiful!

Which foods then seem most in accord with our ideal of beauty, both in their nature and in the manner in which they are produced? Precisely those that have always been most appreciated by those who lived a simple life, the foods that have no need for deceptive culinary tricks. These include eggs, grains, and fruits, in other words, the products of animal and vegetable life that represent both the temporary cessation of the organism’s vitality and the concentration of the materials necessary for the formation of new life. The eggs of an animal, the seeds of a plant, and the fruit of a tree are the end of an organism that no longer exists, and the beginning of an organism that does not yet exist.[451] Man collects them for his food without killing the being that provides them since they are formed at the point of contact between two generations. Moreover, do not the scientists who study organic chemistry tell us that the egg of the animal or plant is the repository par excellence of every vital element? Omne vivum ex ovo.[452]