Vegetarianism is an essential part of any true zoophily, and the reason why it is not more generally recognised as such is the same as that which excludes it from the plan of the progressive—that it is so upsetting to the every-day habits of the average man. Few of us, comparatively, care to murder birds in "sport," and still fewer to cut up living animals in the supposed interests of "science," but we have all been taught to regard flesh food as a necessity, and it is a matter, at first, of some effort and self-denial to rid ourselves of complicity in butchering. Herein is at once the strength and the weakness of the case for vegetarianism—the strength as regards its logic, and the weakness as regards its unpopularity—that it makes more direct personal demand on the earnestness of its believers than other forms of zoophily do; for which reason there is a widespread, though perhaps unconscious, tendency among zoophilists to evade it. Yet that such evasion is a blunder may be seen from the outcry raised against it not by vegetarians only, but by the vivisectionists and sportsmen themselves, who are quick to ask the zoophilists why, if they are so eager for the well-being of the animals, they do not desist from eating them—a question which, however insincere in the mouths of some who propound it, must at least be allowed to be logical. For it is simple truth that though vivisection is a more refined and diabolical torture, and sport a more stupidly wanton one, the _sum_ of suffering that results from the practice of flesh-eating is greater and more disastrous than either, and by being so familiarly paraded in our streets is a cause of wider demoralisation. When one thinks of the aimless and stunted life, as well as the barbarous death, of the wretched victims of the slaughter-house, bred as they are for no better purpose than to be unnaturally fattened for the table, it makes one marvel that so many kindly folk, keenly sensitive to the cruelties inflicted elsewhere, should be utterly deaf and blind to the doings of their family butcher. The zoophilist loves to quote the famous lines of Coleridge: He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small. But what kind of "love" is that which eats the object of its affection? There are hidden rocks in that poetical passage which a sense of humour should indicate to the pilot of zoophily.