I have had a lifelong love of history and philosophy. So, naturally, when I became a vegan/animal-rights activist, I was immensely interested in what the great thinkers – the philosophers, the scientists, the artists – through the ages had to say on the subject. What I learned may be of surprise to many of you. In fact, I’d hazard a guess that most people, including perhaps most vegans, think of animal rights as a late 20th Century construct, something that was born with Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975 or maybe PETA’s founding in 1980. But the truth is, practically all arguments for the adoption of an ethical vegan lifestyle, including on environmental grounds, have existed and been promulgated for centuries, even millennia.
So today, I’d like to share a few of my favorite passages. I find them fascinating, and I hope you will too. Also, as an aside, it’s nice to know we modern vegans are in pretty good company.
(A couple of quick notes before we start: The word “vegetarian” was not widely used till the 19th Century and the word “vegan” not coined till 1944. But there can be no mistaking what writers prior to these dates were talking about. Also, my first selected writer references Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher who lived some 2,500 years ago. It is thought by many that Pythagoras was a vegetarian, and in fact, prior to coinage of that word, those who eschewed meat in England were called Pythagoreans. Unfortunately, however, there are no surviving writings from Pythagoras. And finally, I have stopped short of the 20th Century as I plan on presenting those arguments in a later episode.)
Plutarch (c. 46-c. 120), a Greek philosopher who lived and died in the 1st Century AD. So we’re talking almost 2,000 years ago. Please contemplate that as you’re listening. This comes from his essay, “On the Eating of Animal Flesh.”
“Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man who did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench?”
Plutarch then goes on to address a criticism that remains to this day – that veganism is a luxury and that we vegans, especially in the west, are pampered and privledged and have our heads in the sand. Most people, the argument goes, have no choice but to consume animal parts and products. Once again, please bear in mind that these words were written some 2,000 years ago:
“Or would everyone declare that the reason for those who first instituted flesh-eating was the necessity of their poverty? But you who live now, what madness, what frenzy drives you to the pollution of shedding blood, you who have such a superfluity of necessities? Why slander the earth by implying that she cannot support you? … You call serpents and panthers and lions savage, but you yourselves, by your own foul slaughter, leave them no room to outdo you in cruelty; for their slaughter is their living, yours is a mere appetizer.”
He goes on to say: “It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace….
“But nothing abashes us, not the flower-like tinting of the flesh, not the cleanliness of their habits or the unusual intelligence that may be found in the poor wretches. No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being. Then we go on to assume that when they utter cries and squeaks their speech is inarticulate, that they do not, begging for mercy, entreating, seeking justice, each one of them say, ‘I do not ask to be spared in case of necessity; only spare me your arrogance! Kill me to eat, but not to please your palate!’ Oh, the cruelty of it!”
Then, anticipating the modern argument that man is designed for eating meat, Plutarch wrote these words, once again 2,000 years ago:
“We declare, then, that it is absurd for them to say that the practice of flesh-eating is based on Nature. For that man is not naturally carnivorous is, in the first place, obvious from the structure of his body. A man’s frame is in no way similar to those creatures who were made for flesh-eating: he has no hooked beak or sharp nails or jagged teeth…. If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, unaided by cleaver or cudgel of any kind or axe. Rather, just as wolves and bears and lions themselves slay what they eat, so you are to fell an ox with your fangs or a boar with your jaws, or tear a lamb or hare to bits. Fall upon it and eat it still living, as animals do. But if you wait for what you eat to be dead, if you have qualms about enjoying the flesh while life is still present, why do you continue, contrary to nature, to eat what possesses life?
“Even when it is lifeless and dead, however, no one eats the flesh just as it is; men boil and roast it, altering it by fire and drugs, recasting and diverting and smothering with countless condiments the taste of gore so that the palate may be deceived and accept what is foreign to it.”
Plutarch closes with a reference to the Pythagorean idea that souls simply switch bodies after death – “transmigration,” it is called:
“For what sort of dinner is not costly for which a living creature loses its life? Do we hold a life cheap? I do not yet go so far as to say that it may well be the life of your mother or father or some friend or child, as Empedocles declared. Yet it does, at least, possess some perception, hearing, seeing, imagination, intelligence, which every last creature receives from Nature to enable it to acquire what is proper for it and to evade what is not.”
In other words, says Plutarch, it is wholly irrelevant if the animal, or at least his soul, was a human in a past life. Their lives matter just as they are. They merit moral consideration simply by dint of their sentience. In short, the other thinking, feeling beings with whom we share the planet have intrinsic value.
Porphyry (c. 234-305), Greek philosopher, from “On Abstinence from Animal Food.”
“[T]o destroy other things through luxury, and for the enjoyment of pleasure, is perfectly savage and unjust. And the abstinence from these neither diminishes our life nor our living happily. … [T]o deliver animals to be slaughtered and cooked, and thus be filled with murder, not for the sake of nutriment and satisfying the wants of nature, but making pleasure and gluttony the end of such conduct, is transcendently iniquitous and dire.”
Porphyry then speaks to the nonsense of plant sentience, a nonsense that, as we modern vegans well know, remains to this day. Plant sentience is, in my opinion, but a cynical attempt to neutralize the animal-rights message:
“[T]o compare plants, however, with animals is doing violence to the order of things. For the latter are naturally sensitive, and adapted to feel pain, to be terrified and hurt; on which account also they may be injured. But the former are entirely destitute of sensation, and in consequence of this, nothing foreign, or evil, or hurtful, or injurious, can befall them.”
Both of the preceding writings come from classical antiquity. But then, notably, there came a centuries-long drought, at least in the public sphere, on the subject of ethical vegetarianism. The most obvious explanation for this is the rise, and subsequent dominance, of Christianity, with its core tenet that only humans have souls and thus only humans are entitled to moral consideration.
But around the 18th Century, the ethical case for animal rights begins to return. One theory for this rebirth of sorts is an almost-visceral backlash against the Cartesian – named after the 17th Century French philosopher, scientist, and importantly, Catholic Rene Descartes – notion that animals are mere automatons, machines. With no soul, Descartes argued, animals are impervious to pain and incapable of true suffering, and thus any kind of grisly thing could be done to them with complete moral impunity. One of the first to take up the counter to this was the Dutch/English philosopher Bernard Mandeville. This comes from the second edition of his “The Fable of the Bees” in 1723.
“When a creature has given such convincing and undeniable proofs of the terrors upon him, and the pains and agonies he feels, is there a follower of Descartes so inured to blood, as not to refute, by his commiseration, the philosophy of that vain reasoner?
“I have often thought, if it was not for this tyranny which custom usurps over us that men of any tolerable good-nature could never be reconciled to the killing of so many animals for their daily food, as long as the bountiful earth so plentifully provides them with varieties of vegetable dainties. … But in such perfect animals as sheep and oxen, in whom the heart, the brain and nerves differ so little from ours, and in whom the separation of the spirits from the blood, the organs of sense, and consequently feeling itself, are the same as they are in human creatures; I cannot imagine how a man not hardened in blood and massacre, is able to see a violent death, and the pangs of it, without concern.
“Some people are not to be persuaded to taste of any creatures they have daily seen and been acquainted with while they were alive; others extend their scruple no further than to their own poultry, and refuse to eat what they fed and took care of themselves; yet all of them will feed heartily and without remorse on beef, mutton, and fowls when they are bought in the market. In this behaviour, methinks, there appears something like a consciousness of guilt; it looks as if they endeavoured to save themselves from the imputation of a crime…by removing the cause of it as far as they can from themselves, and I can discover in it some strong remains of primitive pity and innocence, which all the arbitrary power of custom, and the violence of luxury, have not yet been able to conquer. … [W]e are born with a repugnancy to the killing, and consequently the eating of animals….”
Here, Mandeville turns to an inconvenient logic on animal suffering. He writes:
“Everybody knows that surgeons, in the cure of dangerous wounds and fractures, the extirpations of limbs, and other dreadful operations, are often compelled to put their patients to extraordinary torments, and that the more desperate and calamitous cases occur to them, the more the outcries and bodily sufferings of others must become familiar to them. For this reason, our English law…allows them not to be of any jury upon life and death, as supposing that their practice itself is sufficient to harden and extinguish in them that tenderness, without which no man is capable of setting a true value upon the lives of his fellow-creatures. Now, if we ought to have no concern for what we do to brute beasts, and there was not imagined to be any cruelty in killing them, why should of all callings butchers, and only they, jointly with surgeons, be excluded from being jurymen by the same law?”
Percy Shelley (1792-1822), English poet, “A Vindication of Natural Diet.”
“Comparative anatomy teaches us that man resembles frugivorous animals in everything, and carnivorous in nothing: he has neither claws wherewith to seize his prey, nor distinct and pointed teeth to tear the living fibre. A Mandarin of the first class, with nails two inches long, would probably find them alone inefficient to hold even a hare.
“It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust. Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the steaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror, let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise in judgment against it, and say, Nature formed me for such work as this. Then, and then only, would he be consistent.”
William Alcott (1798-1859), American physician and educator, from “Vegetable Diet.”
“The destruction of animals for food, in its details and tendencies, involves so much of cruelty as to cause every reflecting individual – not destitute of the ordinary sensibilities of our nature – to shudder.”
Richard Wagner (1813-1883), German Composer, from “Fellow-Suffering.”
“Recently, while I was in the street, my eye was caught by a poulterer’s shop; I stared unthinkingly at his piled-up wares, neatly and appetizingly laid out, when I became aware of a man at the side busily plucking a hen, while another man was just putting his hand in a cage, where he seized a live hen and tore its head off. The hideous scream of the animal, and the pitiful, weaker sounds of complaint that it made while being overpowered transfixed my soul with horror. Ever since then I have been unable to rid myself of this impression…. It is dreadful to see how our lives – which, on the whole, remain addicted to pleasure – rest upon such a bottomless pit of the cruellest misery! This has been so self-evident to me from the very beginning, and has become even more central to my thinking as my sensibility has increased.”
I’ll close with some words from Anna Kingsford. Anna was an extraordinary woman, who, alas, most people have never heard of. She became a medical doctor at a time – 1880 – when such a thing was practically unheard of. She was also an author and women’s-rights activist, and, of course, an ethical vegetarian. This first passage comes from a letter she wrote a year before graduating medical school. In it, she describes the effects the dog experiments then being conducted there had on her. It should be noted that while a med student, Anna was the only one in her school who refused to participate in these experiments. This passage also helps explain her unrelenting animal-rights activism.
“I have found my Hell here in the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, a Hell more real and awful than any I have yet met with elsewhere, and one that fulfills all the dreams of the mediaeval monks. The idea that it was so came strongly upon me one day when I was sitting in the Musée of the school, with my head in my hands, trying vainly to shut out of my ears the piteous shrieks and cries which floated incessantly towards me up the private staircase … Every now and then, as a scream more heart-rending than the rest reached me, the moisture burst out on my forehead and on the palms of my hands, and I prayed, ‘Oh God, take me out of this Hell; do not suffer me to remain in this awful place.'”
But then Anna explains why it’s not enough to be against just one particular form of animal cruelty – in this case, animal experimentation – or just one particular form of injustice. These passages come from addresses Anna made to the British Vegetarian Society.
“I always speak with the greatest delight and satisfaction in the presence of my friends, the members of the Vegetarian Society. With them I am quite at my ease. I have no reservation. I have no dissatisfaction. This is not the case when I speak for my friends the Anti-Vivisectionists…or the advocates of freedom for women. I always feel that such of these as are not abstainers from flesh-food have unstable ground under their feet, and it is my great regret that, when helping them in their good works, I cannot openly and publicly maintain what I so ardently believe – that the vegetarian movement is the bottom and basis of all other movements towards Purity, Freedom, Justice, and Happiness.”
In our own era of so-called intersectionality, Anna’s words ring loud and true. What I hear is that if you are against any form of oppression and discrimination, you should be against all of them. Reason – and compassion – demand it. And, as Anna suggests, veganism should be the baseline.
She went on: “People talk to me sometimes about peace conventions, and ask me to join societies for putting down war. I always say: You are beginning at the wrong end, and putting the cart before the horse. If you want people to leave off fighting like beasts of prey [predators, that is], you must first get them to leave off living like beasts of prey.”
And finally this: “Mr. Ruskin has said that the criterion of a beautiful action or of a noble thought is to be found in song, and that an action about which we cannot make a poem is not fit for humanity. Did he ever apply this test to flesh-eating? Many a lovely poem, many a beautiful picture, may be made about gardens and fruit-gathering, and the bringing home of the golden produce of harvest, or the burden of the vineyards, with groups of happy boys and girls….
“But I defy anyone to make beautiful verse or to paint beautiful pictures about slaughterhouses, running with streams of steaming blood, and terrified, struggling animals felled to the ground with pole-axes; or of a butcher’s stall hung round with rows of gory corpses, and folks in the midst of them bargaining with the ogre who keeps the place for legs and shoulders and thighs and heads of the murdered creatures!”
As I mentioned, in a future episode we’ll get into the 20th Century and perhaps cover a few older writers not presented today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you found this as interesting and provocative as I do.
