THE MEAT FETISH. 9
than of that of our domestic animals, and yet how many of your friends are there whom on this score alone you would be willing to eat? I am quite sure that if we were cannibals we should insist on eating people whom we had not known. And yet when it is a matter of the less educated and dirtier animals, we are ready to swallow the first-comer without asking any questions! And there is no scientific difference between dead bodies. The body, after death, whether it be that of a man or ox or dog, is a corpse, and nothing but a corpse, and we feel instinctively that a corpse is unclean. And it is a true instinct, for decay sets in at once. Yet so lost to shame are we that epicures refuse to eat certain kinds of dead animals unless their rottenness is perceptible to the nose! And so it is that we invariably shrink from corpses except when we eat them!
And the uncleanliness of meat-eating is not confined to the table. It befouls the kitchen too. Almost all that is perilous to cleanliness in the preparation of food in the household is connected with meat; and, with flesh, fish, and fowl once banished, a vast advance towards neatness and purity would be assured in the externals of life. Then, as we have seen, the butcher's trade is a filthy one, and the raising of certain domestic animals, and especially the pig, is not the most tidy of occupations. And so, from their entry into life to the passing away of their remains in the swill-pail, filthiness is wont to accompany the animals on which men prey.
Secondly, in close connection with the uncleanliness of animal food we may consider its unwholesomeness. These waste products of the tissues to which I have referred are poisonous to us, and they usually take the form of uric acid. We have already our own waste-tissues, our own uric acid, to dispose of, and when we add to this poison of our own production the poisons produced by the animals we eat, we increase enormously the labours of our kidneys and digestive organs. Bright' s disease, gout, rheumatism, and many kinds of dyspepsia, with their resultant organic complaints, are
