We have never had any idea of good and evil, save in relation to
ourselves. The sufferings of an animal seem to us evils, because,
being animals ourselves, we feel that we should excite compassion if
the same were done to us. We should have the same feeling for a tree
if we were told that it suffered torment when it was cut; and for a
stone if we learned that it suffers when it is dressed. But we should
pity the tree and the stone much less than the animal, because they
are less like us. Indeed, we soon cease to be touched by the awful
destiny of the beasts that are intended for our table. Children who
weep at the death of the first chicken they see killed laugh at the
death of the second.
It is only too sure that the disgusting carnage of our butcheries and
kitchens does not seem to us an evil. On the contrary, we regard this
horror, pestilential as it often is, as a blessing of the Lord; and
we still have prayers in which we thank him for these murders. Yet
what can be more abominable than to feed constantly on corpses?
Not only do we spend our lives in killing, and devouring what we have
killed, but all the animals slaughter each other; they are impelled
to do so by an invincible instinct. From the smallest insects to the
rhinoceros and the elephant, the earth is but a vast battle-field, a
world of carnage and destruction. There is no animal that has not its
prey, and that, to capture it, does not employ some means equivalent
to the ruse and rage with which the detestable spider entraps and
devours the innocent fly. A flock of sheep devours in an hour, as it
crops the grass, more insects than there are men on the earth.
What is still more cruel is that in this horrible scene of
reiterated murder we perceive an evident design to perpetuate all
species by means of the bloody corpses of their mutual enemies.
The victims do not expire until nature has carefully provided for
new representatives of the species. Everything is born again to be
murdered.
Yet I observe no moralist among us, nor any of our fluent preachers
or boasters, who has ever reflected in the least on this frightful
habit, which has become part of our nature. We have to go back to the
pious Porphyry and the sympathetic Pythagoreans to find those who
would shame us for our bloody gluttony; or we must travel to the land
of the Brahmans. Our monks, the caprice of whose founders has bade
them renounce the flesh, are murderers of soles and turbots, if not
of partridges and quails. Neither among the monks, nor in the Council
of Trent, nor in the assemblies of the clergy, nor in our academies,
has this universal butchery ever been pronounced an evil. There has
been no more thought given to it in the councils of the clergy than
in our public-houses.
Hence the great being is justified of these butcheries in our eyes;
or, indeed, we are his accomplices.