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(p. 61)
1. SOCIAL CONSIDERATIONS (1)
IS
it morally lawful for cultivated and refined persons to impose upon a whole
class of the population a disgusting, brutalising, and
unwholesome occupation, which is scientifically and experimentally demonstrable
to be not merely entirely needless, but absolutely inimical to the best
interests of the human race?
Butchers are the Pariahs of the western world; the very name itself of their
trade has become a synonym for barbarity, and is used as a term of reproach in
speaking of persons notorious for brutality, coarseness, of love of bloodshed.
The common exclamation, “What a butcher is So-and-so!” in reference to such men,
betrays the horror and reprobation with which are instinctively regarded the
followers of a trade created and patronized chiefly by the “refined” classes!
In the report of a “diseased meat” case given in the Leeds
Mercury of 6th March 1880, the ensuing passage occurs: –
“Mr. J. Ellis, President of the Leeds Butchers’ Association, stated that there
was no disease about the lungs of the animal at all. Blood had probably been
forced into them by some person jumping on the animal’s body after it had been
felled.
“Mr. Bruce: Is it a common practice when a beast in dying for a person to
jump upon it to force the blood out of it?
“Witness: Yes.”
In the course of the celebrated Tichborne case a
certain metropolitan butcher was called to testify to the claimant’s identity.
This man averred that
employés
in slaughter-houses habitually make use of clogs to avoid soaking their feet in
the pools of blood which continually inundate the pavements of these places.
Really, when one thinks of these unfortunate and brutalised
men, thus condemned by modern “civilisation” – Heaven
save the mark! – to pass their days in the midst of
(p. 62)
spectacles
and practices so foul and loathsome, taking part daily in wholesome massacres,
and living only to take away life, it is impossible not to conclude that such
men are deprived of all chance of becoming themselves
civilised, and are consequently disinherited of their human rights and
defrauded of their human dignity. And not only the slaughterers themselves, but
all those who are directly of indirectly associated with this abominable traffic
– cattle-drivers and dealers, meat-salesmen, their apprentices and clerks – all
these live in familiar, if not exclusive, contact with practices and sights of
the vilest and most hideous kind; all these are condemned to the degradation or
suppression of the most characteristic features of Humanity.
With people in general, the very look and touch of raw flesh excite a disgust
which only a special education can overcome. So that in the butchers and cook
persons are condemned to work which their employers deem altogether repulsive.
It is absurd to suppose that if kreophagy were really
natural to mankind, the sentiment in regard to butchers and their trade, to
which allusion has been made, would find such spontaneous and universal
expression among us. The true carnivora and omnivora have no horror of dead bodies; the sight of blood,
the smell of raw flesh, inspires them with no manner of disgust. If all of us,
men and women alike, were compelled to dispense with the offices of a paid
slaughterer an to immolate our victims with our own
hands, the penchant for flesh would not long survive in polite society. It
would be indeed hard to find a man or woman of the upper or middle classes who
would willingly consent to undertake the butcher’s duties, and go the
cattle-yard armed with pole-axe or knife to fell an ox or to slit the throat of
a sheep or lamb, or even of a rabbit, for the morrow’s repast. On the other
hand, there is no one, however delicately bred or refined, who would not readily
take a basket and gather apples in an orchard or peaches in a garden, or who, if
need should arise, would object to make a cake or an omelette.
It would, alas! require many long pages to cite the
innumerable cruelties and sufferings which the gluttony and luxury of
flesh-eating man impose on the innocent herb-feeders – sufferings which,
whatever may be said to the contrary, are absolutely inevitable and inseparable
from modern European habits of diet. Sufferings by sea and land, in transit
(p. 63)
from different ports, by rail and by
road, sufferings in the live-stock markets, in the pens of the slaughter-houses
while waiting their turn for death, sufferings by thirst, blows, terror,
apprehension, exhaustion, neglect, to say nothing of the wanton barbarity to
which they are too often subjected, such, under the present hateful and
unnatural system, is the woeful lot of the patient, gentle, laborious creatures
who should be ploughing our fields, and yielding us,
not their flesh and blood, but milk and wool and the fruits of their willing
toil. (1)
FOOTNOTES
(61:1) From The
(63:1) Here follow harrowing
details, given by various ewe-witnesses, of cruelties and sufferings connected
with and inseparable from the cattle-traffic and the slaughter-house.
An Act consolidating and amending the law as to cruelty to animals has recently
been passed. By section I of the Protection of Animals Act 1911, provision is
made for the punishment of persons who shall be convicted of certain acts of
cruelty, therein specified, to domestic or captive animals, as therein defined,
but the same section contains a proviso in favour of (inter
alia) “the destruction, or preparation for destruction, of any animal as food
for mankind”: and in favour of coursing and
hunting captive animals, and in favour of legalized
vivisection. The effect of this Act is to enlarge the class of legally protected
animals, but, unless a more liberal and humane construction is put upon it than
was put upon the former Act – the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1849 –
which also was passed with the object of protecting certain animals against
cruelty and ill-treatment, it will be but a poor protection: for, the judges,
having decided that the former Act was direct against only unnecessary abuse, that is, abuse which flesh-eaters would
consider to be unnecessary – held, that an act such as the branding of the lambs
on nose with a hot iron for the purpose of their identification, was not cruel:
and, while the very painful operation of dishorning
cattle by sawing off their horns close to their heads for the purpose of
slightly increasing their value, and for convenience in feeding and packing, was
held by an English judge to be unnecessary and cruel, and therefore
unjustifiable; judges in Scotland and Ireland declined to follow such holding,
and decided that dishorning cattle was not an offence!
It was urged, on behalf of the practice of dishorning
cattle, that it made them graze better and fatten more quickly. When, in the
first instance, this case came before the justices, they found that the farmer
who had dishorned the cattle had “acted under the
belief that the operation was for the benefit of the animals themselves
as well as for his own benefit as grazer.” It was held, under the old Act, that
a painful operation performed on an animal,
benefiting the owner by increasing the values of the animal, was not
legally cruel, even though the operation was in fact unnecessary and useless
(e.g. the operation of spaying sows). Such was the construction put by
flesh-eating judges on an Act passed for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals!
It will be observed that all these cruelties were done for and on behalf of the
flesh-eaters as such. For how long is this state of things to continue? So
degraded has this nation of England become under a regime of flesh, that such
wantonly cruel and heartless acts as the following can be openly perpetrated
without remonstrance of fear of punishment, and without adverse comment in a
daily paper giving publicity to them. The Daily Express, of 2nd
November 1911, without a word of condemnation or disapprobation, says: “A seal
was seen in the Thames yesterday [All Saints Day] and chased into the
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