On Eating Animals

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His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama on Tibet, 1935-
I do not see any reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. After all, man can live without meat. It is only some carnivorous animals who have to subsist on flesh. Killing animals for sport, for pleasure, for adventures, and for hides and furs is a phenomenon which is at once disgusting and distressing. There is no justification in indulging in such acts of brutality. [TOP]

Rev. J. Tyssul Davis
Why is it that kindly persons, people endowed with pity and compassion, folk of quick sympathy, who have tears for the lightest ailment of their pet cat or dog, can endure this daily rottenness, this daily massacre, this sacrifice the voices of whose victims rise up to heaven in wearisome lament, in an unending scream of despairing appeal? The outstanding reasons are an utter dearth of imagination and the terrific power of habit. There is not a single person present who would or could be so heartless, or so blood-thirsty, or so barbarous as to go out and prepare a dinner by taking a lamb frolicking in the field, "the lamb that looks you in the face," as Shelley said, and kill it. There is not one who would have the heart to stay it in its innocent play, and deprive it of its life, of its game with its companions in the pasture; not one who could descend to this unmentionable savagery. [TOP]

Leonardo Da Vinci
Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: We are burial places!
 Also: I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men. [TOP]

Pierre Gassendi, 1592-1655
Man lives very well upon flesh, you say, but he thinks this food to be natural to him, why does he not use it as it is, as furnished to him by Nature? But, in fact, he shrinks in horror from seizing and rending living or even raw flesh with his teeth, and lights a fire to change its natural and proper condition... [TOP]

Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish, MD, DD
Because certain animals live upon their prey, it does not prove that one has a right to eat them in turn, any more than a man has a right to prey upon his neighbors. The animal kingdom must be redeemed by the life of the higher and nobler species, not by eating the animals, but by loving and recognizing in them the reflection of our own ideas and ideals, which in their case have not yet been completely developed. [TOP]

John Harris, Animals, Men and Morals
Suppose that tomorrow a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth, beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals. Would they have the right to treat you as you treat the animals you breed, keep and kill for food?
      Also: The vast majority of those who eat meat never consider in rights and wrongs; society condones it, and that is sufficient reason to think no further. So it is the vegetarian who is called upon to explain his odd behavior, and not those who support the unnecessary slaughter that meat-eating requires. It requires very little moral sense to realize that the taking of life is an important matter, yet for most people the choice between a nut cutlet and a beefsteak is about as important as that between chipped and boiled potatoes; a matter of taste, not morality.
      Also: No one can claim to have a genuine interest in the welfare of animals if they continue to condone their unnecessary slaughter. To continue to eat the object of your concern is a stunning piece of self-deception. [TOP]

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
At the same instant the ear was assailed by a most terrifying shriek; the visitors started in alarm, the women turned pale and shrank back. The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing — for once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley, and went sailing down the room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another, until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy — and squealing. The uproar was appalling, perilous to the ear-drums; one feared there was too much sound for the room to hold — that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack. There were high squeals and low squeals, grunts, and wails of agony; there would come a momentary lull, and then a fresh outburst, louder than ever, surging up to a deafening climax. It was too much for some of the visitors — the men would look at each other, laughing nervously, and the women would stand with hands clenched and the blood rushing to their faces, and the tears starting in their eyes. [TOP]

T. Casey Brennan
Poor animals! How jealously they guard their pathetic bodies ... that which to us is merely an evening's meal, but to them is life itself. [TOP]

Peter Singer
For most humans, especially those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form of contact with nonhuman animals is at meal time: we eat them. It is here, on our dinner table and in our neighborhood supermarket or butchers' shops, that we are brought into direct touch with the most extensive exploitation of other species that has ever existed. [TOP]

Shri Morarji Desai
I was persuaded to sustain one's life at the expense of the life of another of God's creatures is not conducive to one's spiritual growth. There is an extreme sect of vegetarians who even refrain from taking milk or milk products for fear of depriving certain living creatures of what is their right. Some will not use silk or skins either, for the same reason. Such people I would reckon as belonging to a plane higher than mine. [TOP]

Albert Einstein
It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind. [TOP]

Ralph Waldo Emerson
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity. [TOP]

Mahatma Gandhi
I hold today the same opinion as I held then. To my mind the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man. [TOP]

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864
...and we have so far improved upon the custom of Adam and Eve, that we generally furnish forth our feasts with a portion of some delicate calf or lamb, whose unspotted innocence entitles them to the happiness of becoming our sustenance. [TOP]

David Hartley, 1705-1757
With respect to animal diet, let it be considered that taking away the lives of animals in order to convert them into food does great violence to the principles of benevolence and compassion. [TOP]

Clementine Homilies, Second Century
The unnatural eating of flesh-meats is as polluting as the heathen worship of devils, with its sacrifices and its unpure feasts, through participation in which a man becomes a fellow-eater with devils. [TOP]

Robert Louis Stevenson
We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.
    Also: Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on the Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not on our own. [TOP]

Henry David Thoreau
Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. [TOP]

Leo Tolstoy
A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral. [TOP]

Prince Paul Troubletzkoy
As I cannot kill, I cannot authorize others to kill. Do you see? If you're buying from a butcher you are authorizing him to kill to kill helpless, dumb creatures who neither you or I could kill ourselves. [TOP]

Rev. Dr. Walter Walsh
If those benevolent-minded people could but visualize the agonies connected with the breeding, raising, railing, shipping, deriving and slaughtering of the defenseless victims of human voracity they would abhor the bloody morsel they now pick so daintily from their dinner plates. [TOP]

Richard of Wyche (Bishop of Chichester), 1197-1253
On seeing animals being killed for food
You, who are innocent, what have you done worthy of death? [TOP]

Francis Brett Young, 1884-1954
Like beasts that prey with tooth and claw... Nay, they Must slay to live, but what excuse had I? [TOP]

Jessamyn West
Why do men who eat cows condemn cats who eat birds? [TOP]

C.W. Leadbeater, 1847-1934
I read how one boy, for whom a minister had secured a place in the slaughterhouse, returned home day after day pale and sick and unable to eat or sleep, and finally came to that minister of the gospel of the compassionate Christ and told him that he was willing to starve if necessary, but that he could not wade in blood another day. The horrors of slaughter had so affected him that he could no longer sleep. Yet this is what many a boy is doing and seeing from day to day until he becomes hardened to the taking of life; and then some day, instead of cutting the throat of a lamb or a pig, he kills a man, and straightway we turn our lust for slaughter upon him in turn, and think that we have done justice. [TOP]

Henry S. Salt
What appeal can be made to people whose first instinct, on seeing a beautiful animal, full of joyousness and vitality, is to hunt or eat it?
    Also: I cannot see how there can be any real and full recognition of kinship as long as men continue either to cheat or to eat their fellow beings. [TOP]

George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950
A dinner! How horrible! I am to be made the pretext for killing all those wretched animals and birds, and fish! Thank you for nothing. Now if it were to be a fast instead of a feast; say a solemn three days' abstention from corpses in my honor, I could at least pretend to believe that it was disinterested. Blood sacrifices are not in my line.
    Also: On being asked why he was a vegetarian
Oh, come! That boot is on the other leg. Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that. [TOP]

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All Heaven in a Rage: Essays on the Eating of Animals (edited by Laura A. Moretti) is available for $10 (includes shipping) from MBK Publishing, 1354 East Ave #252, Chico, CA 95926.

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