Grumpy Vegan

‘A merry Christmas, uncle God save you’ cried a cheerful voice. ‘Bah’ said Scrooge. ‘Humbug’

Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870), English novelist

Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his immortal soul, and the soulless “beasts”, has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty.

Henry S. Salt (1851-1939). Learn more about Henry Salt.

When the Huntsman claims praise for the killing of foxes,
Which else would bring ruin to farmer and land,
Yet so kindly imports them, preserves them, assorts them,
There’s a discrepance I’d fain understand.

When the Butcher makes boast of the killing of cattle,
That would multiply fast and the world over-run,
Yet so carefully breeds them, rears, fattens and feeds them

Here also, methinks, a fine cobweb is spun.
Hark you, then, whose profession or pastime is killing!
To dispel your benignant illusions I’m loth;
But be one or the other, my double-faced brother,
Be slayer or saviour — you cannot be both.

“Mr Facing Both Ways” by Henry S. Salt (1851-1939). Learn more about Henry Salt.

I advance no exaggerated or fanciful claim for Vegetarianism. It is not, as some have asserted, a “panacea” for human ills; it is something much more rational–an essential part of the modern humanitarian movement, which can make no true progress without it. Vegetarianism is the diet of the future, as flesh-food is the diet of the past. In that striking and common contrast, a fruit shop side by side with a butcher’s, we have a most significant object lesson. There, on the one hand, are the barbarities of a savage custom–the headless carcases, stiffened into a ghastly semblance of life, the joints and steaks and gobbets with their sickening odour, the harsh grating of the bone-saw, and the dull thud of the chopper–a perpetual crying protest against the horrors of flesh-eating. And, as if this were not witness sufficient, here, close alongside, is a wealth of golden fruit, a sight to make a poet happy, the only food that is entirely congenial to the physical structure and the natural instincts of mankind, that can entirely satisfy the highest human aspirations. Can we doubt, as we gaze at this contrast, that whatever intermediate steps may need to be gradually taken, whatever difficulties to be overcome, the path of progression from the barbarities to the human-of diet lies clear and unmistakable before us?

Henry S. Salt (1851-1939) Excerpted from “The Humanities of Diet” (Manchester: The Vegetarian Society, 1914), serialised on The Grumpy Vegan and available in full at the Animal Rights Library. Learn more Henry Salt.

I have now shown what I mean by those “humanities of diet,” without which, as it seems to me, it is idle to dispute over the question of the “rights” of animals. A lively argument was lately raging between zoophilists and Jesuits, as to whether animals are “persons;” I would put it to both parties, is not the battle an unreal one, so long as the “persons” in question are by common agreement handed over to the tender mercies of the butcher, who will make exceeding short work of their “personality”?

Henry S. Salt (1851-1939) Excerpted from “The Humanities of Diet” (Manchester: The Vegetarian Society, 1914), serialised on The Grumpy Vegan and available in full at the Animal Rights Library. Learn more Henry Salt.