“You are what you eat”: what ancient teachings say about meat and violence

“Man is what he eats.” The phrase comes from the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who coined it in 1850 in a review of a book on foodstuffs by the physiologist Jakob Moleschott. The meaning was that what we take in shapes us, physically and mentally. Long before Feuerbach found the wordplay, various spiritual and philosophical traditions asked a more far-reaching question: what does it do to a person when he has animals killed for his food, or kills them himself?

Pythagoras: from calf to human

In the 15th book of his Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid has Pythagoras deliver a long speech against eating meat. Ovid's Pythagoras warns that anyone who cuts a calf's throat and ignores its cries is preparing himself to shed human blood. Here, the killing of non-human animals appears not as a harmless way of obtaining food but as a training in callousness.

The Greek writer Plutarch took up the idea at the end of the first century in his essay “On the Eating of Flesh” (De esu carnium). In the beginning, he writes, wild animals were killed and eaten. Once the lust for killing had tasted blood and practised on them, it moved on to cattle, sheep and cockerels, and finally to war and the killing of human beings.

Ahimsa: non-violence begins at the table

In the traditions of India, one concept lies at the centre: ahimsa, non-harming. In Jainism it is the supreme commandment and extends even to the smallest living being. In Buddhism, refraining from killing is the first of the five precepts. In Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, ahimsa stands first among the ethical principles. Whoever is firmly established in it, says verse 2.35, in their presence hostility ceases.

In verses 17.8 to 17.10, the Bhagavad Gita classifies food according to the three gunas, the fundamental qualities of nature. In doing so, it describes the properties of foods rather than simply a contrast between plant-based and animal food. In many yogic dietary traditions, a vegetarian, sattvic diet is considered conducive to clarity and inner calm, and abstaining from meat is linked to the ideal of non-violence. According to this understanding, food concerns not only the body but also one's mental and ethical conduct of life.

Tolstoy and the 'first step'

In the West, hardly anyone has expressed this idea as forcefully as Leo Tolstoy. In his essay 'The First Step', published in 1892, he describes a visit to the slaughterhouse in Tula. His conclusion: anyone who seriously strives for a moral life takes as the first step the renunciation of feeding on slaughtered animals. Decades later, Albert Schweitzer distilled the same attitude into the formula of 'reverence for life'.

However different these texts and teachings may be, they ask not only about the suffering of animals but also about the responsibility of the humans who cause it. This is not a laboratory finding but an ethical warning that has been voiced again and again for more than two millennia.

What this means for recreational hunting

Anyone who takes this insight seriously cannot get around recreational hunting. For the recreational hunter does not leave the killing to a slaughterhouse; he carries it out himself. Voluntarily, in his leisure time, often over decades. The meat he subsequently promotes as 'natural' and 'honest' does not escape this ethical critique: it comes from an animal whose life he deliberately ended, without depending on it for his own nourishment.

Wild beim Wild has already documented at length that the game-meat marketing of recreational hunters has little to do with reality, for instance in the analysis «Bio Bio Plus» and other legends. The claim that recreational hunting continues an original way of life also fails to withstand closer scrutiny, as our article Indigenous hunting vs. recreational hunting shows.

What research shows about aggression, empathy for animals and violence among recreational hunters, and what it does not, is summarised in the article Is recreational hunting a disease? . We document acts of violence in the context of recreational hunting on an ongoing basis, for example in the article Femicide in Faido, explosion in Leontica. Further texts on the psyche of recreational hunters can be found in the section Psychology & hunting.

Commentary: The choice makes the difference

The wolf kills because it must. It has no choice, no shop and no alternative. Humans do. Therein lies their responsibility, and that is precisely why it weighs so heavily when someone turns killing into a hobby.

The ancient teachings have said it for over two thousand years: we become what we do. Anyone who makes killing a leisure pursuit must be asked what value the lives of other sentient beings hold for them. And a society that tolerates killing as a hobby should ask itself what it is nurturing within itself.

The ethical question stands on its own: why kill an animal when neither one's own life nor one's own nutrition depends on it?