STRICT VEGETARIAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 September 1939, Page 5

STRICT VEGETARIAN

SHELLEY INFLUENCES SHAW. Eighty-two-year-old Mr George Bernard Shaw, whose plays are enjoying a boom in London, revealed why he had j been a vegetarian for 60 years. “When I I am dead,” he said, “my funeral will I be followed by herds of oxen, sheep, I swine, flocks of poultry, and a small I travelling menagerie of live fish, all ■ wearing white scarves, in honour of I the man who perished ‘rather than eat I his fellow-creatures. "I became a vegetarian when I first i discovered the writings of Shelley, i whose works I read from end to end,” i declared Mr Shaw. “Shelley wrote: Never again may blood of bird or beast Stain with its venomous stream a human feast. “I agree with Shelley. Many people i are convinced that they could not. pos sibly keep well without meat. That is

just nonsense. The Tipperary peasant-, with his potatoes and buttermilk,, Caesar's soldiers with their rations of. grain, the Russian moujik with his black bread and cabbage soup are only three examples of excellent health on meatless diets out of dozens I could give you. “I have lived and worked without flesh, fish or fowl, and all statements to the contrary are entered in the books of the Recording Angel as aggravated and outrageous falsehoods. “During illnesses, doctors and family have tried in vain to make me drink meat extracts. Death is better than cannibalism. “All edible animals owe their exis-| tence to their edibility. But their existence involves an immense slavery of! men and women to animals. Nobody' ever seems to consider whether they i might not be better employed.”