I am a meat-eater—we are nearly all meat-eaters. Well! We cannot sit down at present to a single meal without complicity in methods that produce a large amount of preventable suffering to creatures for whom the least sensitive among us has at heart a certain friendly feeling. For, to those who say that they do not care for animals, or that animals, even domestic ones, have no rights except such as for our own advantage we accord them, let me at once reply: I do not agree, but for the sake of argument, granted; and then conceive, if you can, a world without cattle, sheep, and pigs, and tell me honestly whether you do not miss something friendly. No! the fact is, we, who are the descendants of countless generations to whom these animals have been literally the breath of life, cannot—even now that we have become such highly civilized townsmen—disclaim all sensibility in their regard. Consider the magnitude of this matter. The calculations of an expert give the following approximate numbers of animals annually killed for food in England and Wales: 1,850,000 beasts, 8,500,000 sheep, and 3,200,000 pigs. These figures are hard to come at, and may be a million or so out, one way or the other, but even if they be, is there any feature of the national life which can touch this for possibilities of preventable physical suffering? And is there any department so neglected by public opinion and the law? Save the eating of bread, have we any practice in our lives so consistent as that of eating meat, or any from which we, perhaps wrongly, consider that we derive more benefit, or any about whose conditions, sanitary or humane, we are so careless? If a donkey is beaten to death, a dog stoned, or a cat killed with a riding-whip, the chances are that a prosecution will ensue or a question be asked in Parliament; for public opinion and the law lay it down that the infliction of unnecessary suffering on animals is an offence punishable by fine or imprisonment. But if in slaughter-houses some 8,000,000 sheep are killed yearly, _without first being stunned_, by a method which, even in the hands of an expert, produces some seconds of acute suffering (Report of the Admiralty Committee on Humane Slaughtering of Animals, 1904); if thousands of cattle require two or more blows of that primitive instrument, the pole-axe (if even only one in a hundred cattle requires a second blow it means 18,000 in a year); if pigs are driven in gangs into a small space and there killed, one by one, with the others squealing in terror round their dead bodies; if all this preventable suffering is inflicted daily in our slaughterhouses, what does public opinion know of it, and what does the law care?