Leo Tolstoy, Man Violates His Highest Spiritual Capacity by Slaughtering and Eating Animals
"This is dreadful! Not only the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity--that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself--and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel."
Leo Tolstoy was one of Russia’s greatest novelists, but he was also a revered moral philosopher, humanitarian and mystic. He became a vegetarian for the last 23 years of his life. He was passionate about being a vegetarian and strongly believed that slaughtering and eating animals was immoral, unethical and inhumane. He said, “there would be no limit for their cruelty,” if man continued to raise, slaughter and eat animals. He was a devout Christian and believed that all living sentient beings had spirits, souls, felt emotions and suffered, whether human or non-human animals, and that because of this, humans did not have the right to kill or harm animal beings. He shunned eating the flesh of another being, and said eating flesh is “simply immoral as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to any moral feeling – killing; and is called forth only by greed and the desire for tasty food.” He felt man violated his highest spiritual capacity by slaughtering and eating animals.
Tolstoy describes his horror at the inhumane and brutal ways animals are slaughtered after visiting a slaughterhouse. He felt that in order for man to participate in the inhumane and dispassionate killing of animals, “man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity—that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself. And by violating his own feelings, he becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!”
After becoming a vegetarian, Tolstoy wrote an article called The Vegetarian (London, 1889) about non-violence and passive resistance. He often included writings about vegetarianism in his works and was known to have been a strong influence on Russian society in influencing a vegetarian diet and lifestyle. He advocated vegetarianism as “one of the first steps toward a good and decent life,” with self-restraint, which should be the moral aspiration of all humans.
More quotes by Leo Tolstoy
Credits:
Photo courtesy of Hannah Gregus/Sympathy at Slaughter, www.sympathyatslaughter.com
Love this! I wanted to reblog this but I don’t see that option? I will link to this page and share with others. Also I am partners with Hannah at Sympathy at Slaughter and currently working on some designs for flyers to help promote her efforts of bearing witness.
Hi Stacey, thanks for sharing and for the support! I will see about adding a blog sharing plugin. I really like Hannah’s work and hope to integrate her photos into more blogs. They are really powerful.
This is great. I have recently been discouraged by the way people respond so angrily to people who have sympathy and do not believe animals deserve to be killed for food or fashion. I can’t imagine the opposition Leo Tolstoy faced in his time . I I believe there will be a time in the future where no animals are stuck in factory farms or killed and we will be looked at as barbaric for having done so .
Thanks Marcy, I agree with you. This is deeply engrained in Western culture, and people have refrained from questioning it. Plus, the meat, dairy and egg industry including our Dept. of Agriculture, which subsidizes meat, dairy and eggs, have enormous marketing budgets to advertise animal products. Sadly, it’s not only terrible for the animals, but extremely harmful to our own health, and the environment and planet.