Ralph Waldo Emerson About Our Complicity in Violence and Cruelty When We Eat Animals
“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts. After graduating from Harvard University and the Harvard School of Divinity, Emerson became a minister and went on to become a prominent American poet, writer, essayist, philosopher and orator.
Emerson was considered one of leaders of the Transcendentalism literary movement during the early 19th century that inspired such writers and philosophers as Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott and others. The Concord Transcendentalists believed that each person could transcend the physical world of the senses to access the spiritual world using intuition. The movement emphasized the value and importance of the natural world and honoring nature, and promoted a lifestyle of simplicity and non-materialism, nonviolence, and inner contemplation.
In questioning conventional wisdom and thinking, these writers embraced a more compassionate relationship with animals and questioned animals being raised and killed for food. Emerson connected the horrors and cruelty of slaughterhouses and the violence of eating animals, with our complicity and hypocrisy, when he said:
“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson was considered to be a vegetarian for much of his life.
