Why I am a Vegetarian (1895)

AUTHOR: Moore, J. Howard

PUBLICATION: “Why I Am a Vegetarian.” The Union Signal  Vol XXI no. 23 (6 June 1895): 3 (col. 2-3).
https://archive.org/details/mdu-043100/page/354/mode/2up

KEYWORDS: Abolition, animals, animal welfare, women's rights

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

In this short article Moore explicitly promotes ethical veganism as an intersectional endeavor, explaining his reasons for being a vegetarian. He distinguishes hygienic (i. e. health-based) motives from ethical veg*nism. The former is “selfish,” whereas the latter is concerned with the welfare “of the creatures whose corpses I would otherwise gnaw” (col. 2). He also links ethical veg*nism to Abolition when he writes: “To my mind it is just as demonstrable that it is wrong to slay an ox for fun or food as that a human chattel is hideous. They are both phases of the same selfishness” (col. 2).

Moore grounds his ethical veg*nism in evolutionary theory, which has “taught us the kinship of all creatures” (col. 2). For Moore, sentience is a particularly important feature shared by humans and all other animals:”Fear, love, fidelity, hate, joy, selfishness, curiosity – are all found everywhere and they are the same passions that heave your breast and mine” (col. 2). In an biting remark, Moore notes that “[t]he ingenious ant,” for example, “tends its fields, gathers its harvest, keeps slaves and armies and goes to war and performs about all the antics of civilized man, except maltreating the females and drinking gin” (col. 3). Accordingly, Moore is “a vegetarian, because anything else is hideous and unnatural” (col. 3).

He repeats some of the common arguments in favor of veganism, namely that a vegan diet contains all necessary nutrients, that it is less prone to cause disease, and that it is the real source of sustenance including for carnivorous animals. He also mentions the golden rule: “Act toward others as you would that others would act toward you” (col. 3), which he would like to see extended to include all nonhuman animals. Moore draws an analogy with human slavery and the transatlantic slave trade to decry human speciesism: “It hasn't been very long since all the Christian nations hunted their dusky brethren in Africa, and sold and loaned and lashed them as we do the horse to-day. … After so many centuries of infamy we can see the solidarity of our species, but we are such babies we cannot see the solidarity of all the animal world” (col. 3).

Moore notes that the basis of both human and animal exploitation is the same, once again drawing an analogy with slavery and with the oppression of women: “The Ethiopian and the woman had no rights that were inconvenient to respect, because they had no soul and because their subordination was God-ordained. And the honest ox and the faithful dog have no rights to-day, because they were made to be murdered! ” (col. 3). Rejecting such a hierarchical and exploitative stance, Moore says: “I do not eat my fellow creatures for the same reason I do not enslave my brother or treat my sister as an appendage.” The corollary of such a truly universal ethics is the “rational application of the Golden Rule” (col. 3).

 

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