The letters of your correspondents “T.F.R.” and “M.B.” have come not a moment too soon, for it was quite some time that vegetarians should disavow any connection with so-called vegetarian ethics, and should show that their system is not based, as its earlier exponents imaged upon any comprehensive principle of sympathy, but on a practical consideration of human interests alone. “An animal should come second,” as “M.B.” remarks, that is to say, the lower races, even if exempt from the knife of the butcher, may rightly be operated on by the knife of the sportsman or the vivisector. I feel sure that if the vegetarian movement could thus be put on thoroughly logical footing, it would go forward by leaps and bounds, and might even become popular in fashionable and scientific circles; and I would therefore suggest the formation of a Vegetarian League for the Advocacy of Blood Sports and Vivisection, as a means of redeeming the vegetarian character from the least suspicion of sentiment. Let “man first, animal second,” be our watchword. Having minutely discussed human health in all its aspects—as in the study of piles and toe-nails—we may perhaps have the leisure, when these weightier questions are settled, to turn to such less urgent matters as the rights of animals and the kinship of all sentient life.The letters of your correspondents “T.F.R.” and “M.B.” have come not a moment too soon, for it was quite some time that vegetarians should disavow any connection with so-called vegetarian ethics, and should show that their system is not based, as its earlier exponents imaged upon any comprehensive principle of sympathy, but on a practical consideration of human interests alone. “An animal should come second,” as “M.B.” remarks, that is to say, the lower races, even if exempt from the knife of the butcher, may rightly be operated on by the knife of the sportsman or the vivisector. I feel sure that if the vegetarian movement could thus be put on thoroughly logical footing, it would go forward by leaps and bounds, and might even become popular in fashionable and scientific circles; and I would therefore suggest the formation of a Vegetarian League for the Advocacy of Blood Sports and Vivisection, as a means of redeeming the vegetarian character from the least suspicion of sentiment. Let “man first, animal second,” be our watchword. Having minutely discussed human health in all its aspects—as in the study of piles and toe-nails—we may perhaps have the leisure, when these weightier questions are settled, to turn to such less urgent matters as the rights of animals and the kinship of all sentient life.
The Vegetarian Messenger and Health Review, Vol. V No. 11, November 1908 , pp. 322-323