ON THE EATING OF FLESH (DE ESU CARNIUM) II
INTRODUCTION
[p. 563]
Reason urges us with fresh ideas and fresh zeal
to attack again our yesterday's discourse
1 on the
eating of flesh. It is indeed difficult, as Cato
2 remarked, to talk to bellies which have no ears. And
the potion of familiarity has been drunk, like that of
Circe
3
Commingling pains and pangs, tricks and tears4;
nor is it easy to extract the hook of flesh-eating, entangled as it is and embedded in the love of pleasure.
And, like the Egyptians e who extract the viscera of
the dead and cut them open in view of the sun, then
throw them away as being the cause of every single
sin that the man had committed, it would be well
for us to excise our own gluttony and lust to kill and
become pure for the remainder of our lives, since it
is not so much our belly that drives us to the pollution
[p. 565]
of slaughter ; it is itself polluted by our incontinence.
Yet if, for heaven's sake, it is really impossible for us
to be free from error because we are on such terms
of familiarity with it, let us at least be ashamed of
our ill doing and resort to it only in reason. We shall
eat flesh, but from hunger, not as a luxury. We shall
kill an animal, but in pity and sorrow, not degrading
or torturing it - which is the current practice in many
cases, some thrusting red-hot spits into the throats
of swine so that by the plunging in of the iron the
blood may be emulsified and, as it circulates through
the body, may make the flesh tender and delicate.
Others jump upon the udders of sows
5 about to give
birth and kick them so that, when they have blended
together blood and milk and gore (Zeus the Purifier I)
and the unborn young have at the same time been
destroyed at the moment of birth, they may eat the
most inflamed part of the creature. Still others sew
up the eyes of cranes
6 and swans,
7 shut them up in
darkness and fatten them, making the flesh appetizing
with strange compounds and spicy mixtures.