George Bernard Shaw Poem, “We Are The Living Graves of Murdered Beasts”

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1856, and went on to become one of the world’s greatest playwrights. He produced over 60 plays mainly addressing the pressing social issues of the day in England including class privilege, education, marriage, religion, government, and health care, but he was most concerned about the exploitation of working class people. He was also the co-founder of the London School of Economics.

Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, and later won an Oscar in 1938 for the screen adaptation of his play Pygmalion. Shaw was the only person to be awarded both a Nobel Prize for Literature and an Oscar.

Shaw was a strict vegetarian beginning in 1881 at the age of 25, and remained one for 60 years until his death in 1950. In his diaries, he writes about the relative ease of finding vegetarian food in London in the later 1800s and 1900s, and reported there are “dozens of vegetarian restaurants,” which he visited frequently.

Shaw was an ardent animal rights activist, and was strongly opposed to any sport that was cruel to animals in any way. He also opposed using animals in laboratory and medical research. Shaw was so concerned about man’s treatment of animals and the slaughter of animals for meat, that he said about his funeral in his will, “My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small travelling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honour of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures.”

This poem has been attributed to playwright George Bernard Shaw:

Living Graves
, A Poem

We are the living graves of murdered beasts,
Slaughtered to satisfy our appetites.
We never pause to wonder at our feasts,
If animals, like men, can possibly have rights.
We pray on Sundays that we may have light,
To guide our footsteps on the path we tread.
We’re sick of War, we do not want to fight –
The thought of it now fills our hearts with dread,
And yet – we gorge ourselves upon the dead.
Like carrion crows, we live and feed on meat,
Regardless of the suffering and pain
We cause by doing so, if thus we treat
Defenseless animals for sport or gain,
How can we hope in this world to attain
The PEACE we say we are so anxious for.
We pray for it, o’er hecatombs of slain,
To God, while outraging the moral law.
Thus cruelty begets its offspring – WAR

Here are some notable quotes by George Bernard Shaw about animal rights:

“Animals are my friends … and I don’t eat my friends.”

“I choose not to make a graveyard of my body with the rotting corpses of dead animals.”

“A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.”

“While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?”

“The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.”

“Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.”