Shelley's interest in vegetarianism was awakened while he was studying at Oxford. He and his wife Harriet adopted him shortly after their marriage. In a letter dated March 14, 1812, his wife wrote to a friend: “We gave up meat to adopt Pythagorean thinking”. Shelley describes, in her poem “Queen Mab”, a utopian world where humans do not kill animals for food.

“Never more henceforth

Will he kill the lamb that looks at him

To monstrously devour his tattered flesh,

Who, avenging yet the broken law of nature,

Ignited all putrid moods in his body,

And all the disastrous passions, all vain beliefs,

Hatred, despair and disgust in his mind,

The seeds of misery, crime, disease and death”.

Eat animal flesh is to feed on corpses

The playwright George Bernard Shaw strove to adopt vegetarianism from the age of twenty-five. He specifies in his autobiography: “Shelley was the first to make me realize the barbarity of my diet”.

His doctors warned him that his vegetarian diet would kill him. He was asked when he was old why he did not return to see them to show them the benefits he had received. He replied: “I would like, but they have all been dead for years”.

Someone once asked him: “How is it how young you look?”.

“On the contrary, he retorted, I look my age. These are the others who appear older than their age. What can we expect from people who eat only corpses?”.

To emphasize the connection between the consumption of animal flesh and the violence that reigns in human society, Shaw writes:

“We pray on Sundays that a light

Come to illuminate our path;

We are tired of fighting, disgusted by the war,

But we savor murdered beings”.