Shall We Slay to Eat? (1899)

AUTHOR: Kellogg, John Harvey

KEYWORDS: animals, Christianity, disease, food, health, nation, Temperance

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, revised Deborah Madsen):

Kellogg surveys noted contemporary and historical vegetarians: Wendell Phillips, “the orator and reform, stated to the writer a few years before his death that he had been a vegetarian for forty years” (139); “Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Alcott were vegetarians, as were also Greeley and Dana in their early years, and a large coterie of kindred spirits who entered upon the historically famous Brook Farm experiment” (139). Historical vegetarians include Pythagorus, Socrates, Seneca, Plutarch, Christian vegetarians, and Buddha. According to Kellogg, “The Bible on Vegetarianism” is Gen. 1.29, 1.30: “It is an interesting fact that the description of the diet assigned by the Creator to the human family, according to Genesis, agrees precisely with the bill of fare that science assigns man by the consideration of his anatomical structure and his physiological needs” (125).

Kellogg promotes a plant diet for the negative health impacts of meat-eating, which produces diseases and reduces the capacity of the human constitution to fight disease, while vegetarian and fruit based-foods prevent germs. A “flesh diet” (beef tea especially) produces bodily and blood poisons. However, he also argues that non-human animals are sentient beings that should not be exploited:

The basis for the ethical argument against flesh eating is to be found in the fact that lower animals are, in common with man, sentient creatures. We have somehow been accustomed to think of our inferior brethren, the members of the lower orders of the animal kingdom, as things; we treat them as sticks or stones, as trees and other non-sentient things that are not possessed of organs of sense and feeling. We are wrong in this; they are not things, but beings (126).

Kellogg argues that if animals could speak, we would not be able to kill them: “But although the sheep goes dumb to the slaughter, do not its eloquent eyes appeal for mercy? Do not the bleating of the calf, the bellowing of the bull, … and the cries of hundred of other creatures that we call dumb, but to each of whom nature has given its characteristic mode of speech, rise in eloquent protest against the savagery to which the instincts inherited from our cannibalistic ancestors habitually lead us?” (127). Kellogg argues that it is a step too far to call flesh-eating “murder,” but “it is not too much to say that to destroy animal life carelessly, needlessly, or for the mere purpose of personal pleasure, is a sin” (132-33). “To the writer, nothing much short of a wholesale massacre of human beings could be more hideous than going out with a shotgun to kill birds, or with a rifle to destroy the graceful antelope or busy rabbits and squirrels, all actively at work performing their God-given offices in the economy of nature” (133). “The slaughter of animals of any sort for mere pleasure ought to be prohibited by law” (133).

Thus, in the chapter “The Mental and Moral Influence of Flesh Eating” he argues: “The popular notion that a flesh diet has in some way contributed to the intellectual superiority of the English-speaking races can not be shown to have any real foundation in fact ... The advantages which the English-speaking and other civilized nations enjoy over semi-civilized and uncivilized nations and tribes are due to other causes than the use of flesh food” (137). Further evidence, in “Flesh Eating and Morals,” is his observation that the Japanese are known for their universal politeness, linked to their vegetarian diet (142).

In his discussion, “Influence of a Flesh Diet upon Character,” he proposes that meat makes tame carnivorous animals savage again and goes so far as to argue, in “The Butcher’s Legacy,” that “the business of slaughtering animals is a training-school for murderers” (143). “It is a significant fact that in most countries it is a recognized custom to exclude butchers from juries in the trial of cases of murder” (143). “Who will dare to call the butcher’s business honorable, and with the same breath denounce the bull-fight as a national disgrace, an outrage against public morals, a school of murder and of all crimes of violence?” (150). While not defending bullfighting, which the author decries as a disgusting abuse, Kellogg says that in bullfighting, the bull at least has the chance to defend itself and kill the matador. The abattoir is worse than bull-fighting (147). “The influence of the abattoir, of the common slaughter-house, is equally shown in the moral deterioration evident in the men whose lives are devoted to the slaughtering of innocent beasts” (156-59).  “The slaughter-house, the abattoir, is a blot upon our civilization” (161). Killing animals for food, regardless of how it is done,

is simply unprovoked, premeditated, systematic murder. Does the word sound harst? It is only because our conscience has been seared, our sensibilities have become blunted, our judgment perverted, our natural instincts reversed; we have false conceptions of things; we look upon the animal as we look upon a stone or a tree, forgetting that it is, like ourselves, a sentient being (162).

Kellogg links vegetarianism with Temperance and the eating of meat with Intemperance: “In the treatment of a large number of cases of inebriates, it has been constantly observed that the absence of meat is one of the most efficient means of subduing the appetite for alcohol” (165). Thus, he goes on to offer dietary advice on replacing meat with nuts and legumes.
 

Last updated on July 7th, 2024

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