A Plea for Vegetarianism! Anna Kingsford (née Bonus) was one of the first women to become a physician in England; mystic and poet; feminist; and ardent anti-vivisectionist and vegetarian. She was way ahead of his time in her approach to dietetics. She is indeed an interesting turn-of-the-century writer whose ideas have been greatly influential and whose books are still worth reading. Anna Bonus Kingsford believed animals should be free to live their own lives and that humanity has a responsibility to treat them compassionately and justly. Excerpt: 'It would, alas!' require many long pages to cite the innumerable cruelties and sufferings, which the gluttony and luxury of flesh-eating man impose on the innocent herb-feeders, sufferings which, whatever may be said to the contrary, are absolutely inevitable and inseparable from modern European habits of diet. Sufferings by sea and land, in transit from different ports, by rail and by road, sufferings in the live-stock markets, in the pens of the slaughter-houses, while waiting their turn for death, sufferings by thirst, blows, terror, apprehension, exhaustion, neglect, to say nothing of the wanton barbarity to which, they are too often subjected, such, under the present hateful and unnatural system, is the woeful lot of the patient, gentle, laborious creatures who should be ploughing our fields, and yielding us, not their flesh and blood, but milk and wool and the fruits of their willing toil

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