Why I am a Vegetarian (1895)

AUTHOR: Moore, J. Howard

PUBLICATION: Why I Am a Vegetarian: An Address Delivered before the Chicago Vegetarian Society. Chicago: Frances L. Dusenberry, 1895.
https://archive.org/details/whyiamavegetarian

KEYWORDS: Abolition, animals, animal welfare, labor rights, women's rights

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Like the eponymous article (1895) in the Union Signal, this published speech explains Moore's reasons for being vegan. The Preface states his aim “to help, if ever so infinitesimally, in ridding the human of that terrific instinct of inconsideration toward the sub-human races. Solidarity is its plea, human and universal” (5). Moore, who in the Preface calls his pamphlet a “projectile” (5), begins with the comparison of meat-eating with slavery: “I am not here to convert you to vegetarianism. I know too well the nature of mind to commit any such blunder. I am here to talk English and, if possible, give you glimpses. I can not hope in half a hundred minutes to rinse from your brains sand bars that have been ages in depositing. It is no holiday matter to emancipate one’s self from an old, inveterate slavery” (7).

Drawing on evolutionary theory he contends that humans are still “somnambulistic” (8), primarily instinct-driven rather than rational. He continues the analogy with slavery, and adding to his critique capitalism and the oppression of women:

Washington was the father of a country, but he held human beings as slaves and paid his hired help in Virginia whisky. It took Americans one hundred years to find out that “all men” includes Ethiopians. Men who risked their lives to achieve personal and political liberty for black men deliberately doom white women to a similar servitude. Rich men give millions to museums or universities, when they would know, if they had the talent to stop and think, that the thousands who make their wealth work like wretches from morning till night and suffocate in garrets and feed on garbage, in order that they may be munificent. Human beings preach as the cardinal of morality that they should act upon others as they would be pleased to have others act upon them, and then take the most sensitive and beautiful beings all palpitating with life, and chop them into fragments with a composure that would do honor to the managers of an inferno (8-9).

Moore's goal is “to dynamite” his readers' “minds, to havoc their foundations and reconstruct them in harmony with the proposition I champion” (10). He then returns to the analogy with slavery, pointing out that Abolitionists, too, initially had to deal with

formidable volleys of objection. Those objections seem puerile today, but in the days in which this proposition found few heads in which to hide, they were axioms of ethical and political science. So when you take an attitude on this proposition remember there are future generations as well as this one, and be careful that you do not make the same spectacle of yourself that poor old Webster and other blind men made when they poured cold water down the spines of early Abolitionists (11).

He emphasizes the ethical nature of his veg*nism, his intent not to live “at the incessant expense of misery and death to others” (12). “The grinding of the tissues of my fellow beings,” he notes, “seemed horribly akin to the chewing of the emotions of my friends” (12-13). Now, at the time of writing, the “flesh-tearing performances which I am compelled everywhere to behold seem to me to be the lurid deeds of maniacs rather than the timed and premeditated acts of sane beings” (13). Moore therefore has no hesitation in calling meat-eaters “cannibals” (13). He  explains his intersectional vegan stance:

Vegetarianism is the neglect by one being to suppress another for nutritive purposes. I believe in it. I believe I should neglect to suppress the interests and lives of non-human beings for identically the same reason that I should neglect to suppress the interests and lives of human beings. The exploitation of birds and quadrupeds for human whim or convenience is an offense not different in kind from the offenses denounced in human statutes as robbery and murder. And the same logic which impels abstinence from one of these offenses impels everyone who has the power to be consistent to refrain from all of them (14).

These are all forms of “exploitation” (14), and Moore refuses to engage in any of them. Given his confidence in evolution, Moore is ultimately convinced “that life in its highest forms, that is, as represented by the most cultured aggregates of the human species, is evolving rapidly and irrepressibly toward the ideal, that is, toward a social state in which the interests and life of each individual being are more and more equally precious” (17). He explicitly notes the intersectional nature of ethical veganism, based on the refusal of exploitation:

Vegetarianism, therefore, that is, abstinence from non-human exploitation or the recognition of universal solidarity, is related from this exalted standpoint to the logic of the Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence and the modern movements of social reform. The sympathies of the consistent vegetarian go out naturally to the stricken and oppressed everywhere – to Cuba in her struggle for autonomy, to Ireland in her misery, to the helpless quadruped quivering under the pole-ax, and to the pitiable proletarian who goes up and down the monopolized universe seeking in vain for opportunities to earn honest nutrition (18-19).

Moore emphasizes that veganism accompanies evolution, as “the ethical corollary of evolution. It is simply the expansion of ethics to suit the biological revelations of Charles Darwin” (19), which have taught us “the kinship of all creatures” (20). Humans only differ “in degree but not in kind from the creatures below and around” them (20). Moore is particularly keen to emphasize the capacity for sentience shared by all life:

Fear, love, fidelity, hate, jealousy, joy, selfishness, curiosity, remorse, are all found everywhere, and they are the same passions that heave your breast and mine. Chastity, sobriety, obedience, personal cleanliness, industry, sympathy, self-control, friendship, heroism, sagacity – many dogs and other semi-civilized animals have all these qualities, and in a degree greater even than whole races of men. And these faculties and capacities of the non-hominine world are the same identical faculties and capacities that you have and I have (20-21).

Unfortunately, humans are “the butchers of the universe” (23-24). Moore maintains that “if Christians can do these crimes and yet so act as to earn celestial ecstasies, hell will be uninhabited” (41).

Intermittently, Moore notes all kinds of human mistreatment of non-humans. Continuing the analogy with slavery, he points out that the horse, for example, is viewed, and treated, as nothing “but a slave” (26). In addition to condemning “the cold-blooded manner in which human beings cut the throats, dash out the brains, and discuss the flavor of their victims at their cannibalistic feasts” (28), he also calls attention to the cruelties of fashion (the use of furs and feathers), science (vivisection), and hunting (particularly hunting as a pastime). “A universe,” Moore concludes, “is, indeed, to be pitied whose dominating inhabitants are so unconscious, so irresponsible, and so ethically repulsive that they make life a commodity, mercy a disease, and systematic massacre a pastime and a profession” (30).

In contrast, he is guided by the golden rule, extended to all life in the universe, human and nonhuman: “Act toward others as you would that others would act toward you” (30). Moore writes: “I do not eat my fellow creatures, for the same reason I do not enslave my brother and treat my sister as an appendage and otherwise monopolize the sweets and opportunities of the planet. There are on this ball billions of beings. They are my fellow creatures. So far as I can make out they have approximately the same right to existence and to the enjoyment of existence as I have” (33).

Rehearsing the common arguments for a plant-based diet that is healthier, more nutritious, more natural, more economic, overall better suited to human needs (34-38), Moore denounces “cannibalism as” simply “unnecessary” (38). “Live and help live” is Moore's battle cry (43). If heeded,

[t]he same spirit of sympathy and fraternity that broke the black man’s manacles and is today melting the white woman’s chains will tomorrow emancipate the workingman and the heifer, and as the ages bloom and the great wheels of the centuries grind on, the same spirit of leaven shall banish Selfishness from the earth and convert the planet finally into one unbroken and unparalleled spectacle of Peace , Justice and Solidarity (44).