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Where stronger beasts oppress the weak by might, 
And all in prey, and purple feasts, delight. 
O impious use! to Nature’s laws oppos’d, 
Where bowels are in other bowels clos’d: 
Where fatten’d by their fellows fat, they thrive; 
Maintain’d by murder, and by death they live. 
’Tis then for nought that mother Earth provides 
The stores of all she shows, and all she hides, 
If men with fleshy morsels must be fed, 
And chew with bloody teeth the breathing bread: 
What else is this, but to devour our guests, 
And barb’rously renew Cyclopean feasts! 
We, by destroying life, our life sustain; 
And gorge th’ ungodly maw with meats obscene. 
Not so the golden age, who fed on fruit, 
Nor durst with bloody meals their mouths pollute. 
Then birds in airy space jmight safely move, 
And tim’rous hares on heaths securely rove: 
Nor needed fish the guileful hooks to fear, 
For all was peaceful; and that peace sincere. 
Whoever was the wretch (and curs’d be he) 
That envy’d first our food’s simplicity, 
Th’ essay of bloody feasts on brutes began. 
And after forg’d the sword to murder man. 
Had he the sharpen’d steel alone employ’d 
On beasts of prey, that other beasts destroy’d, 
Or man invaded with their fangs and paws. 
This had been justify’d by nature’s laws, 
And self-defence: but who did feasts begin 
Of flesh, he stretch’d necessity to sin. 
To kill man-killers, man has lawful pow’r, 
But not th’ extended licence, to devour. 
Ill habits gather by unseen degrees, 
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas. 
The sow, with her broad snout, for rooting up 
Th’ intrusted seed, was judg’d to spoil the crop. 
And intercept the sweating farmer’s hope: 
The covetous churl, of unforgiving kind, 
Th’ offender to the bloody priest resign’d: 
Her hunger was no plea: for that she dy’d. 
The goat came next in order to be try’d: 
The goat had cropt the tendrils of the vine: 
In vengeance laity and clergy join, 
Where one had lost his profit, one his wine. 
Here was, at least, some shadow of offence; 
The sheep was sacrific’d on no pretence, 
But meek, and unresisting innocence. 
A patient, useful creature, born to bear 
The warm and woolly fleece that cloth’d her murderer 
And daily to give down the milk she bred, 
A tribute for the grass on which she fed. 
Living, both food and raiment she supplies, 
And is of least advantage, when she dies. 
How did the toiling ox his death deserve, 
A downright simple drudge, and bom to serve? 
