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Animal Rights History Timeline » [1785-1837] Romantic Age » Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

A Vindication of A Natural Diet

[1812] Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Vindication of a Natural Diet: Being One of a Series of Notes to Queen Mab, A Philosophical Poem (London, 1884; Google Books: Online Library of Free eBooks); [Privately published in 1813 as Notes to Queen Mab, First Separate Edition of Vindication published later that same year. Reprinted as an appendix to the American medical work, the 'Manual on Health' by Dr. Turnbull, (New York, 1835; Google Books: Online Library of Free eBooks) see Prefatory Notice]; However, David Lee Clark in 1939 dates the publication to October / November 1812. David Lee Clark, "The Date and Source of Shelley's A Vindication of Natural Diet Studies in Philology 36:1 (1939-Jan) 70-76; Online at Jstor: http://www.jstor.org/pss/4172429

Comparative anatomy teaches us that man resembles frugivorous animals in everything, and carnivorous in nothing; he had neither claws wherewith to seize his prey, nor distinct and pointed teeth to tear the living fibre.…After every subterfuge of gluttony, the bull must be degraded into the ox, and the ram into the wether, by an unnatural and inhuman operation, that the flaccid fibre may offer a fainter resistance to rebellious nature. It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication of digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust. Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the steaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror, let him revert to the irresistible instinct of nature that would rise in judgment against it, and say, Nature formed me for such work as this. Then, and only, would he be consistent. (12-3)

I address myself not only to the young enthusiast, the ardent devotee of truth and virtue, the pure and passionate moralist, yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. He will embrace a pure system, from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-extended benefit: unless custom has turned poison into food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct; it will be a contemplation full of horror and disappointment to his mind, that beings capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies, should take delight in the death-pangs and last convulsions of dying animals. (25)