"No man who aims at making his life an harmonious whole, pure, complete, and harmless to others, can endure to gratify an appetite at the cost of the daily suffering and bloodshed of his inferiors in degree, and of the moral degradation of his own kind. I know not which strikes me most forcibly in the ethics of this question the injustice, the cruelty, or the nastiness of flesh-eating. The injustice is to the butchers, the cruelty is to the animals, the nastiness concerns the consumer. With regard to this last in particular, I greatly wonder what persons of refinement—aye, even of decency—do not feel insulted on being offered, as a matter of course, portions of corpses as food! Such comestibles might possibly be tolerated during sieges, or times of other privation of proper viands in exceptional circumstances, but in the midst of a civilised community able to command a profusion of sound and delicious foods, it ought to be deemed an affront to set dead flesh before a guest."
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Novelists from EnglandPoets from EnglandActivists from EnglandWomen authors from EnglandAnimal rights activists
Original Language: English
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Addresses and Essays on Vegetarianism (1912); quoted in Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb by Rod Preece (Routledge, 2002), p. 344.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anna_Kingsford
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Anna Kingsford
, née Bonus (16 September 1846 – 22 February 1888), was an English anti-vivisection, vegetarian and women's rights campaigner. She was one of the first English women to obtain a degree in medicine, and the only medical student at the time to graduate without having experimented on a single animal.
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