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Agenda for a New America
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The Politics of Vegetarianism

By: Vasu Murti
Chapter 11 - Violence

Meat-eating contributes to the fear in the world by putting us in a position in which there is not enough to go around.  But that's not all.   Meat-eaters ingest residues of the animal's biochemical response to the horrors of the Slaughterhouse.  Programmed to fight or flee when in danger for their lives, the animals react to the slaughterhouse in sheer terror. Powerful biochemical agents are secreted that pump through their bloodstreams and onto their flesh, energizing them to fight or flee for their lives.

Like screaming air rain sirens, these chemical agents produce instinctual panic.  Today's slaughterhouses virtually guarantee that the animals will die in terror.

The Maoris would eat the flesh of a slaughtered enemy in order to possess the enemy's courage and strength.  The people of the lower Nubia, likewise, would eat the fox, believing that by so doing, they would be possessed of his cunning.   In upper Egypt, the heart of the hoopoe bird was eaten in order to acquire the ability to become a clever scribe.  The bird would be caught and its heart would be torn out and eaten while it was still alive.  On the other hand, certain Native American tribes would not eat the flesh of an animal who died in fear, because they did not want to take into themselves the terror of such an animal.

When we eat animals who have died violent deaths we literally eat their fear.  We take in biochemical agents designed by nature to tell an animal that its life is in the gravest danger, and it must either fight or flee for its life.   And then, in our wars and our daily lives, we give expression to the panic in which the animals we have eater died.

"Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them.  We live by the death of others.  We are burial places!  I have since an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men will look upon the murder of animals as they look upon the murder of man."

---Leonardo da Vinci

Go on to Chapter 12 - Historical Comparisons
Return to The Politics of Vegetarianism Table of Contents

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