Children are often born vegetarians. They are in love with other animals. They talk to them, and understand them.How tragic it is to take their pet, their friend, their animal-comrade and kill it for food, as it is often done! The anecdote about the child and its pet chicken is not a joke: Overhearing arrangements for tomorrow’s dinner, “Oh, mummy, not Jane! I’ve known her since she was an egg.”
Many children would never eat meat if not forced. They feel a fraternity between themselves and the animals. When you call an unspoiled child a “pig,” he is happy. He would like to be a pig.
It is just as irrational to give a child war-toys, as it is to put into his hands butchers’ blocks with imitation slaughtering tools, as I have seen it done. Of course, it depends on the spirit in which it is done. Even playing with live rabbit pets or fish in a bowl, which may seem innocent, can be encouraged in the wrong way and changed into atrocity.
When we are taught to hate or despise animals, we libel them, especially if we compare them to man and lend them our qualities or defects. All the fables in which animals are villains, are stupid and grotesque misrepresentations and calumnies.
In many families children are vegetarians of their own accord and in spite of the great opposition of their parents and their entire environment, in spite of ridicule and even corporal punishment or enlisting their doctors to scare them---and they fare well.
"Shall We Eat Flesh?" Rational Living Library, B. Liber 1934
Benzion Liber, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at New York. Born in 1875, Liber was a Romanian Jewish Socialist, nicknamed "The People's Doctor" who worked at the Polyclinic Hospital and was a practicing physician in New York since 1904.
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