Do not kill applies not only to the killing of human beings, but also to the killing of all living things. And this commandment was inscribed in the human heart before it was heard on Mount Sinai.
No matter how convincing the arguments against vegetarianism may be, a human being cannot but feel pity and be repulsed by the slaughter of a sheep or a chicken, and most people will always prefer to deprive themselves of the pleasure and benefits of meat than to have to do the slaughtering themselves.
“But if we are to spare sheep and rabbits, then we must also spare wolves and rats,” say the opponents of vegetarianism. But we do spare them and try to spare them, reply the vegetarians, and we try to find ways to reduce their harm without resorting to killing them, and these ways exist. If you say the same about insects then, while we do not feel a direct pity for them (Lichtenberg says that our pity towards animals is directly proportionate to their size), we nevertheless think that it is possible to feel pity for them (as Silvio Pellico had felt for a spider), and we can find means against them also besides that of killing them.
“But plants are also living things, and you are destroying their lives,” again say the opponents of vegetarianism. But this very argument defines the essence of vegetarianism better than anything and shows the means of satisfying its demands. Ideal vegetarianism is the consumption of fruits, i.e. the outer covering of a seed, which contains life: apples, peaches, watermelons, pumpkins, berries. Hygienists consider such food the healthiest, and by consuming such food a human being does not destroy life. Another thing worth noting is that the delicious taste of fruits, the outer covering of seeds, makes it so that human beings, by plucking and eating them, spread them around the land and multiply them.
As human population grows and becomes more enlightened, humans shift from consuming other humans to consuming animals, from consuming animals to consuming seeds and roots, and from this means of nutrition to the most natural: the consumption of fruits.
The capture of vast swaths of land by big landowners has made fruits a luxury. The more equally land is distributed, the greater the cultivation of fruits.
Reading and writing do not constitute education if they do not help make people kinder to all creatures.
— John Ruskin
The unreasonableness, wrongness and harm of meat eating, both moral and material, has grown so apparent in recent years that the consumption of meat is no longer supported by arguments but only by the influence of tradition and custom. And this is why it is no longer necessary to try to prove to the people the obvious unreasonableness of consuming meat. It is ending by itself.
