What we are immediately concerned with here is his feeling in regard to slaughter. The Utopians condemn--
“Hunters also and hawkers (falconers), for what delight can there be, and not rather displeasure, in hearing the barking and howling of dogs? Or what greater pleasure is there to be felt when a dog follows a hare than when a dog follows a dog? For one thing is done by both--that is to say, running, if you have pleasure in that. But if the hope of slaughter and the expectation of tearing the victim in pieces pleases you, you should rather be moved with pity to see an innocent hare murdered by a dog--the weak by the strong, the fearful by the fierce, the innocent by the cruel and pitiless.[106] Therefore this exercise of hunting, as a thing unworthy to be used of free men, the Utopians have rejected to their butchers, to the which craft (as we said before) they appoint their bondsmen. For they count hunting the lowest, the vilest, and most abject part of butchery; and the other parts of it more profitable and more honest as bringing much more commodity, in that they (the butchers) kill their victims from necessity, whereas the hunter seeks nothing but pleasure of the seely [simple, innocent] and woful animal’s slaughter and murder. The which pleasure in beholding death, they say, doth rise in wild beasts, either of a cruel affection of mind or else by being changed, in continuance of time, into cruelty by long use of so cruel a pleasure. These, therefore, and all such like, which be innumerable, though the common sort of people do take them for pleasures, yet they, seeing that there is no natural pleasantness in them, plainly determine them to have no affinity with true and right feeling.”
In telling us that his model people “permit not their free citizens to accustom themselves to the killing of ‘beasts’ through the use whereof they think clemency, gentlest affection of our nature, by little and little to decay and perish,”[107] More for ever condemns the immorality of the Slaughter-House, whether he intended to do so _in toto_ or no. In relegating the business of slaughter to their bondsmen (criminals who had been degraded from the rights of citizenship), the Utopians, we may observe, exhibit less of justice than of refinement. To devolve the trade of slaughter upon a pariah-class is not the least immoral of the necessary concomitants of the shambles. That the author of _Utopia_ should feel an instinctive aversion from the coarseness and cruelty of the shambles is not surprising; that he should have failed to banish it entirely from his ideal commonwealth is less to be wondered at than to be lamented. That he had at least a _latent_ consciousness of the indefensibility of slaughter for food appears sufficiently clear from his remark upon the Utopian religion that “they kill no living animal in sacrifice, nor do they think that God has delight in blood and slaughter, _Who has given life to animals to the intent they should live_.”