Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?
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Stir a cesspit and a foul stench arises; stir perfum and a delightful fragrance ascends. But the movement is identical.
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No sensitive person would eat flesh if he or she had to do the skull-breaking, slaughtering, strangling, shooting, blood-letting, skinning and disemboweling, and live in the stench and among the agonised cries of the victims.
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The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath-the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench.
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Everything we need to feed ourselves and to restore and please us is abundantly provided in the inexhaustible store of Nature. … In short our orchards offer all the delights imaginable while the slaughter houses and butchers are full of congealed blood and abominable stench.
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I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air.
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