Publisher's Synopsis
Henry Stephens Salt (1851-1939) was an English writer and campaigner for social reform in the fields of prisons, schools, economic institutions, and the treatment of animals. He was a noted ethical vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist, socialist, and pacifist, and was well known as a literary critic, biographer, classical scholar and naturalist. It was Salt who first introduced Mohandas Gandhi to the influential works of Henry David Thoreau, and influenced Gandhi's study of vegetarianism.Salt is credited with being the first writer to argue explicitly in favour of animal rights, in his Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1894)Arguments for vegetarianism: moral, scientific, economic, health, social, and aesthetic. Amazingly comprehensive, devastating critiques of 31 anti-vegetarian arguments (some so silly they are humorous, but many of these arguments still in use).The arguments or claims made by opponents of vegetarianism: (1) Consuming eggs and diary products contradicts the meaning of "vegetarian."(2) There is no difference between roasting an ox and boiling an egg.(3) Vegetarians who do not immediately and completely shun all animal products are hypocrites.(4) No great empires (Roman, British) were ever founded by vegetarians.(5) Human canine teeth prove the necessity of flesh-eating.(6) The human stomach is much different than that of true herbivore.(7) History shows that humans are omnivorous. (8) Vegetarianism is contrary to the laws of nature, red in tooth and claw; to kill is natural.(9) It is necessary to destroy life in order to live.(10) Raising food animals in pleasant conditions and killing them painlessly is not cruel.(11) Eating animals is no worse than using them for labour.(12) The rapid death of food animals is preferable to the agonising death of humans. (13) Food animals, free of the fears and dangers experienced by wild animals, are happier.(14) It is better for animals that we use them for food than that they do not exist at all.(15) Vegetarians who eat eggs and diary products are inconsistent.(16) Consistent vegetarians could never kill lice or germs.(17) Flesh-eating is just as aesthitic as vegetarianism.(18) Vegetarians are sentimentalists. (19) Meat eating is necessary for strength.(20) Flesh-food is easier digested than vegetarian food.(21) Flesh diet is necessary in cold climates ("What would become of Eskimoes if all became vegetarians?").(22) What difference does it make whether we eat flesh or non-flesh, so long as the spirit in which we eat be a proper one?(23) Vegetarianism is economically impractical.(24) Vegetarianism is an inconvenient diet.(25) Eating flesh is necessary for developing a manly spirit.(26) How could we exist without leather? Soup? Candles?(27) How could land be fertilised without manure from food animals?(28) If the life of animals be regarded as sacred as human life, civilisation will revert to a primitive condition.(29) If we turn loose all the food animals they will over-populate, overrun the land, starve, lie dead on highways and in the suburbs.(30) We were given permission by God to eat animals.(31) Vegetarians do not give sufficient priority to more important social reforms (war, poverty, etc.).
