18 THE MEAT FETISH.
comfort—such as rats and potato-beetles and rabbits—and deliberately to breed animals to be slaughtered and eaten—in others words, to raise corpses. And when we are forced reluctantly to kill animals who interfere with us, we are not obliged to eat them. We do not eat the rats (except in China). Why, then, eat the rabbits?
But, our interlocutor exclaims, "What will you do for boots and shoes?" and he thinks that is unanswerable. Now, the fact is that if there is one thing in our civilisation more odious than butchery, it is our footwear. It is an additional crime of flesh-eating that it condemns us to the use of its by-products to cripple, deform, befoul, and enfeeble our feet. What would our hands be like if we carried them about in leather boxes? The foot should be as presentable as the hand, as healthy, sun-burned, and almost as pliable. It needs the purifying access of the air and the stimulating effects of the outdoor cold and heat. Instead of allowing it this freedom, we shut it up in a stiff, foul, unventilated prison, where its clammy pallor suggests vegetables that sprout in a dark cellar. We bind the toes together, and doom them to atrophy, until a foot is a thing to weep over. Happy the day when there will be no more leather for boots! We shudder at the Chinese lady's foot, while our own art not so very different from hers after all. As for such covering of the feat as the extreme cold of winter and the hardness of roads may actually necessitate, there are plenty of substitutes for leather. The Chinaman prefers his shoes to ours, and he gets on well enough without cowhide.
"But would you exterminate our domestic animals?" our critics continues; and there are tears in his voice for these dear animals whom he eats. Yes, I most assuredly would, in the case of all those which we raise solely for the table. And what are these precious animals that we should lament their disappearance? There is the cow first of all, an animal which we raise
