ABOUT KILLING ANIMALS
A correspondent asks:
Will you kindly explain why, if you think it wrong to kill
a water bug, that you should consider it right to slay larger
animals for food?
I do not remember having said it was wrong to kill
a water bug: hence there is no conclusion to be made from that
to the question of feeding on animals, so far as I am concerned.
The questions of right and wrong are somewhat mixed on this
subject. If one says it is morally wrong to kill a water bug,
then it follows that it is wrong to live at all, inasmuch as
in the air we breathe and the water imbibed there are many millions
of animals in structure more complicated than bugs. Though these
are called infusoria and animalculae, yet they
are living, moving beings as much as are bugs. We draw them in
and at once they are destroyed, slain to the last one. Shall
we therefore stop living? The whole of life is a battle, a destruction
and a compromise as long as we are on the material plane. As
human beings we have to keep on living, while in our destructive
path millions of beings are hourly put to death. Even by living
and earning a living each one of us is preventing some one else
from doing the same, who, if we were dead, might step into our
shoes. But if we abandoned the fight - were we, indeed, able
to so do - then the ends of evolution could not be attained.
Hence we have to stay and endure what Karma falls from the necessary
deaths we occasion.
So the true position seems to me to be this, that in certain
environments, at certain stages of evolution, we have to do an
amount of injury to others that we cannot avoid. So while we
thus live we must eat, some of flesh and others of the vegetable.
Neither class is wholly right or wrong. It becomes a wrong when
we deliberately without actual need destroy the lives of animals
or insects. So the man who was born in a family and generation
of meat-eaters and eats the meat of slaughtered animals does
less wrong than the woman who, though a vegetarian, wears the
feathers of slaughtered birds in her hats, since it was not necessary
to her life that such decoration should be indulged in. So the
epicure who tickles his palate with many dishes of meats not
necessary for sustentation is in the same case as the woman who
wears bird's feathers. Again as to shoes, saddles, bridles, pocketbooks,
and what not, of leather. These are all procured from the skins
of slain animals. Shall they be abolished? Are the users of them
in the wrong? Any one can answer. Or did we live near the north
pole we would be compelled to live on bears' and wolves' meat
and fat. Man, like all material beings, lives at the expense
of some others. Even our death is brought about by the defeat
of one party of microbes who are devoured by the others, who
then themselves turn round and devour each other.
But the real man is a spirit-mind, not destructible nor destroying;
and the kingdom of heaven is not of meat nor of drink: it cometh
not from eating nor refraining- it cometh of itself. - ED
Path, March, 1892
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