Plutarch on Why Eating Animals Is Repulsive

Plutarch · Down to Earth Series · 14 pages

First published under the title “Of eating of flesh” in Plutarch's Morals, translated from the Greek by several hands, corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin with an introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1878, Vol. V, pages 3–16, in William Baxter's translation. The frontispiece image is by Cheryl Hill. The text is arranged as two tracts, the first opening on the question of why Pythagoras abstained from flesh.

A summary at the front lists thirteen numbered arguments, and the tracts work through them. The first is the reaction the title names — that the very idea of eating the carcasses of slain animals is repulsive — followed by the historical question of who could have begun the practice except from the direst necessity, and the answer that men must have been driven to it when the supply of food from the vegetable world had utterly failed. The turn is then made to the present: we have no such necessity. The argument from constitution follows, that man is not by nature a carnivorous animal and that the whole business of slaying animals and preparing them for food is against nature. Three consequences are drawn: that animal food is injurious, clogging and confusing the mind; that it operates unfavourably on character; and that passing the bounds of nature in feeding gratifies intemperate appetites and induces cruelty to mankind as well. A concession is included — that if flesh must be eaten it should be with sorrow and pity, and without tormenting the animal beforehand. The closing arguments appeal to the animals' faculties, asking whether it is right to extinguish senses capable of seeing, hearing and understanding, and end on the doctrine of transmigration, with the possibility that the bodies of animals contain the souls of the deceased. Plutarch opens the first tract by professing his own wonder at the practice, in answer to a correspondent's question about Pythagoras.

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