The Retort

Peace on Your Plate, Peace in the World

March 26th, 2010 by Nathan Morgan For The Retort

Throughout time, insightful individuals have seen the link between the cruelty of war and the cruelty of consuming meat. An animal must be killed to provide meat. Pythagoras, an ancient Greek philosopher, wisely said, “As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap the joy of love.” Echoing the sentiment of Pythagoras, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy made this observation, “Flesh-eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to moral feelings – killing.” Moreover, he concluded, “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.”

More recently, the famous pacifist Albert Einstein also recognized the importance of a vegetarian diet, saying “It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.” As a well-known anti-militarist and pacifist, surely one of these beneficial influences would be the prevention of war through the elimination of consuming animal flesh.

Killing animals is murder. What is war but murder on a larger scale? As Jewish Nobel laureate Isaac Singer said, “As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, and no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.” It is a simple, observable truth that those who torture and kill animals are more willing to torture and kill human beings.

For human appetite, animals live in terrible conditions against their will. Chickens are debeaked, crammed into cages, plucked, and sent into insanity by their captors. Mother cows are forcibly impregnated, their calves stolen from them to be made into veal, their milk robbed for human consumption, and when spent of milk they are processed into meat just like their children. A society that feasts upon dead animals encourages a society of torturers, murderers, and corpse eaters. Our country would be wise to embrace this teaching of Mohandas Gandhi, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated... I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.”

Torturing and murdering animals promotes a spiral of violence that culminates in war. Only when all of us recognize the inherent right of animals to live their lives free from human predation will war be extinguished. If you desire peace in the world, remove flesh from your plate.