Meat eating, or, perhaps, more properly, meat getting, involves a certain moral impairment of man. Butchering animals is a brutalizing and demoralizing occupation; because brutality brutalizes. The taking of life is highly revolting to the higher nature of man and, as our feelings are as much a part of our better natures as our teeth are parts of our bodies, this instinctive revolt against butchery and preying must always bear great weight in any decision respecting the dietetic character of man.

George Bernard Shaw, writing on the wastefulness and stupidity of those who find pleasure in destroying animal life, says: "Wanton slaughter of birds is caused by indifference to the beauty and interest of bird and song, and callousness to glazed eyes and blood-bedabbled corpses, combined with a boyish love of shooting." Who can say that this indifference and callousness and love of shooting never results in the killing of men? Or, even if it never goes this far is it not probable that it results in much other of "man's inhumanity to man?" Who can confine the callousness of a man to one channel? Who can prevent the hunter or the butcher, or the fisherman from being cruel to his children or to his wife?

While comparatively few meat eaters today kill their own flesh-food, and are therefore saved from the brutalizing influence of this brutality, they are not absolved from the brutalization of those proxies who kill for them. I have seen many women who delighted in eating chicken but who could not be induced to kill a chicken under any circumstances. Which is the ideal: the tenderness of such women or the callousness of the butcher or the hunter or the fisherman.

Tenderness and mercy and gentility, and all the spiritual qualities that set man off so greatly from beasts of prey, are lacking in the lion, tiger, wolf and other carnivores.

The claim that man has evolved to such a high mental and spiritual plane that he must have meat is exactly the opposite of the facts. He must crush and harden his higher nature in order to hunt and fish and prey. If he relishes the carion feast, or the jackal's or the vulture's meal, it is either because he is debased, or because someone else is debased. If we eat meat miles from the shambles, after the butcher has done the bloody work, we must not think that we are not responsible for the debasement of the butcher.

The hunter and the butcher are not symbols of spirituality. They are not embodiments of the higher mental, moral and social powers of man's nature.

Meat, egg and milk production involves man's slavery to animals. G. B. Shaw truly says: "My own objection to being carnivorous, in so far as it is not instinctive, is that it involves an enormous slavery of men to beasts as their valets, nurses, mid-wives, and slaughterers."

Man's slavery to meat-animals is appalling. He lives with them in the most unhygienic conditions, in order that he may eat dead carcasses. He little dreams of the gigantic waste of human energy and of food that this practice involves.