The Commonest Form of Cruelty (1898)

AUTHOR: Lovell, Mary Frances

KEYWORDS: animal welfare, anti-vivisection, cattle transportation, slaughterhouses

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

In this article Lovell promotes veganism as the only viable way to end the cruelties of cattle transportation and slaughter. The former, Lovell writes, “rivals some forms of scientific cruelty” (i.e., vivisection), amounting to nothing but “torture” (103). Those who advocate for the abolition of the meat industry are convinced “that cruelty can not be eliminated from it; that it is inferior as a means of providing man with food, and demoralizing in its effects upon those engaged in it” (103). Lovell maintains that there is “an even stronger array of proof of the needlessness of using animal food than there is of the needlessness of vivisection” (103). She lists in detail “the cruelties attendant on the traffic in, and butchery of, cattle for food” (103):

• exposure to thirst, hunger, and cold during the winter months on the Great Plains
• extremely close packing in railway cars for transportation
• journeys of up to “seventy-two hours, – without rest, food, or a drop of water” (103)
• mistreatment and abuse (such as providing salted hay to cattle to make them drink more in order to increase their weight before selling them on the market)
• the particularly extreme cruelties of “the transatlantic cattle trade,” including mutilation, disease, and death (103)
• the “frequency” and “magnitude” of the “prolonged sufferings” in slaughterhouses (104)
• the industrial scale of butchery: “Some … have welcomed the great abattoirs and packing-houses as an improvement, hoping that through the despatch used less cruelty would exist. Let them undeceive themselves, and learn that the larger and more systematic methods in such places as the great Chicago packing houses simply means [sic] brutal haste, and that animals are as truly vivisected, skinned and cut up alive 'while still kicking,' as one visitor reported – in these hells, as they are in the physiological laboratories” (104).

Given that meat is not a dietary necessity – Lovell enlists as proof that “of the 1,400 millions of people in the world, not one in ten touches it” (104) – veganism is an imperative for all adherents of the “humane movement,” because “[t]he only way to stop” the cruelties in the production of meat is “by the gradual lessening of the demand for its product, flesh food” (104).

Last updated on October 24th, 2024

SNSF project 100015_204481

@VLS@veganism.social | VeganLiteraryStudies | @veganliterarystudies | @vegan_lit_studies