298
Counsels on Diet and Foods
filthy stables, perhaps fattening on decaying food, the entire body soon
becomes contaminated with foul matter.
Animals are often transported long distances and subjected to great
suffering in reaching a market. Taken from the green pastures and
traveling for weary miles over the hot, dusty roads, or crowded into
filthy cars, feverish and exhausted, often for many hours deprived of
food and water, the poor creatures are driven to their death, that human
beings may feast on the carcasses.—
The Ministry of Healing, 314,
1905
667. Many die of disease caused wholly by meat eating; yet the
world does not seem to be the wiser. Animals are frequently killed that
have been driven quite a distance for the slaughter. Their blood has be-
come heated. They are full of flesh, and have been deprived of healthy
exercise, and when they have to travel far, they become surfeited and
exhausted, and in that condition are killed for market. Their blood is
highly inflamed, and those who eat of their meat, eat poison. Some are
[386]
not immediately affected, while others are attacked with severe pain,
and die from fever, cholera, or some unknown disease.
Very many animals are sold for the city market known to be dis-
eased by those who have sold them, and those who buy them are not
always ignorant of the matter. Especially in larger cities this is prac-
ticed to a great extent, and meat eaters know not that they are eating
diseased animals.
Some animals that are brought to the slaughter seem to realize by
instinct what is to take place, and they become furious, and literally
mad. They are killed while in that state, and their flesh is prepared for
market. Their meat is poison, and has produced, in those who have
eaten it, cramps, convulsions, apoplexy, and sudden death. Yet the
cause of all this suffering is not attributed to the meat.
Some animals are inhumanly treated while being brought to the
slaughter. They are literally tortured, and after they have endured
many hours of extreme suffering, are butchered. Swine have been
prepared for market even while the plague was upon them, and their
poisonous flesh has spread contagious diseases, and great mortality
has followed.—
Spiritual Gifts 4a:147, 148, 1864