What follows will comprise mostly of quotes from Henry Salt's writings.
Henry Salt was one of the 'pioneers' of vegetarianism. Notice how it's becoming more and more acceptable these days. But, not so long ago us vegetarians were regarded as weird. Anyway back to Henry Salt... He was born in India in 1851 and came to England in 1852. At school he became known for his campaigns, for food reform (vegetarianism) and also, against animal experimentation. He was also a pacifist and political radical.
"I suggest that in proportion as man is truly humanized, not by schools of cookery but by schools of thought, he will abandon the barbarous habit of his flesh-eating ancestors, and will make gradual progress towards a purer, simpler, more humane and therefore more civilized diet-system.....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 carcasses, stiffened into a ghastly semblance of life, the joints 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 ugliest 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 humanities of diet lies clear and unmistakable before us?" (Henry Salt. 'The Humanities Of Diet')
"...these curious people delight to mask their rudeness in a cloak of fallacies and sophisms and to represent themselves as "lovers" of those very creatures whom they habitually torture for "sport", "science", and the "table". They actualy have a law for the prevention of cruelty to animals, under which certain privileged species, classed as "domestic", are protected from some specified wrongs, though all the time they may, under certain conditions be subjected with impunity to other and worse injuries at the hands of the slaughterman or the vivisector, while the wild species, though presumably not less sensitive to pain, are regarded as almost enirely outside the pale of protection, and as legitimate subjects for those brutalities of
"fashion" and "sport" which are characteristic of the savage mind.....
....almost every conceivable form of cowardly slaughter is practised as "sportsmanlike" and commended as "manly". All this, moreover, is done before the eyes and for the example of mere youths and children, who are thus from their tenderest years instructed in the habit of being pitiless and cruel...
...it does not so greatly matter whether this or that particular form of cruelty is prohibited; what matters is that all forms of cruelty should be shown to be incompatible with progress...
...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 "beast", has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty.....
Reformers of all classes must recognize that it is useless to preach peace by itself, or socialism by itself, or anti-vivisection by itself, or vegetarianism by itself, or kindness to animals by itself. The cause of each and all of the evils that afflict the world is the same the general lack of humanity, the lack of the knowledge that all sentient life is akin, and that he who injures a fellow-being is in fact doing injury to himself....
....It is useless to hope that warfare, which is but one of many savage survivals, can be abolished, until the mind of mand is humanized in other respects also...As long as man kills the lower races for food or sport, he will be ready to kill his own race for emnity. It is not this bloodshed, or that bloodshed, that must cease, but all needless bloodshed - all wanton infliction of pain or death upon our fellow-beings...."(Henry Salt. 'Seventy Years Among Savages.')
"...when we turn to the protection of animals, we sometimes hear it said that we ought to help men first and animals afterwards. But if the principle which prompts the humane treatment of men is the same essentially as that which prompts the humane treatment of animals, how can we successfully safeguard it in one direction while we violated it in another? By condoning cruelty to animals, we perpetuate the very spirit which condones cruelty to men. Humanitarians do not say that the lower forms of life must be treated in the same way as the higher forms, but that in both cases alike we must be careful to inflict no unnecessary, no avoidable, suffering..."
(Henry Salt. 'The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics')
"...We have to decide, not whether the practice of fox-hunting, for example, is more, or less, cruel than vivisection, but whether all practices which inflict unnecessary pain on sentient beings are not incompatible with the higher instincts of humanity...
...The immediate question that claims our attention is this - if men have rights, have animals their rights also?...
..From the earliest times there have been thinkers who, directly or indirectly, answered this question with an affirmative. The Buddhist and Pythagorean canons, dominated perhaps by the creed of reincarnation, included the maxim "not to kill or injure any innocent animals." The humanitarian philosophers of the Roman empire, among whom Seneca and Plutarch and Porphyry were the most conspicuous, took still higher ground in preaching humanity on the broadest principle of universal benevolence. "Since justice is due to rational beings," wrote Porphyry, "how is it possible to evade the admission that we are bound also to act justly towards the races below us?"...
...during the churchdom of the middle ages, from the 4th century to the 16th, from the time of Porphyry to the time of Montaigne, little or no attention was paid to the question of the rights and wrongs of the lower races...
...it was not until the 18th century, the age of enlightenment and "sensibility," of which Voltaire and Rousseau were the spokesmen, that the rights of animals obtained more deliberate recognition....
...To Jeremy Bentham in particular, belongs the high honour of asserting the rights of animals with authority and persistence. "The legislator," he wrote, "ought to interdict everything which may serve to lead to cruelty. The barbarous spectacles of gladiators no doubt contributed to give the Romans that ferocity which they displayed in their civil wars. A people accustomed to despise human life in their games could not be expected to respect it amid the fury of their passions. It is proper for the same reason to forbid every kind of cruelty towards animals, whether by way of amusement, or to grtify gluttony. Cock fights, bull baiting, hunting hares and foxes, fishing and other amusements of the same kind, necessarily suppose either the absence of reflection or a fund of inhumanity, since they produce the most acute sufferings to sensible beings, and the most painful and lingering death of which we can form any idea. Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes...
...If the use of flesh-meat can itself be dispensed with, how can it be argued that the pain, which is inseperable from slaughtering, can be otherwise than unnecessary also?...
..Nothing is necessary which abhorent, revolting, intolerable, to the general instincts of humanity. Better a thousand times that science should forego of postpone the questionable advantage of certain problematical discoveries, than that the moral conscience of the community should be unmistakably outraged by the confusion of right and wrong. The short cut is not always the right path; and to perpetuate a cruel injustice to the lower animals, and then attempt to excuse it on the ground that it will benefit posterity, is an argument which is as irrelevant as it is immoral. Ingenious it may be (in the way of hoodwinking the unwary), but it is certainly in no true sense scientific...(Henry Salt. 'Animals Rights')
