On this day in vegan history · September 14, 1793
The Soldier Who Wrote The Cry of Nature
A Scottish veteran who gave up meat after watching Hindu villagers in India spared their oxen wrote one of the first full books against eating animals, then died leading pikemen for revolutionary France.
The facts
- Born
- c. 1760, Edinburgh, Scotland
- Died
- 14 September 1793, Thouars, France, aged about 33
- Book
- The Cry of Nature, or an Appeal to Mercy and to Justice on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals (London: J. Johnson, 1791)
- Turning point
- Adopted vegetarianism after military service in India during the Second Anglo-Mysore War, 1780-1783
John Oswald was a Scottish soldier who served with the British army in India during the Second Anglo-Mysore War, where exposure to Hindu vegetarian practice changed how he saw animals for the rest of his life. Back in London he published The Cry of Nature, or an Appeal to Mercy and to Justice on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals in 1791, arguing that people ate meat only because slaughter was kept out of sight. He then threw himself into the French Revolution, was granted French citizenship, and took command of a battalion of Parisian pikemen. He was killed fighting in the War in the Vendee on 14 September 1793, at Thouars, aged about thirty-three.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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The butcher's knife hath laid low the delight of a fond dam, & the darling of Nature is now stretched in gore upon the ground.
Frontispiece caption, The Cry of Nature (1791)
Source: Wikipedia -
Oswald, you have lived so long without tasting flesh that you have a most ferocious appetite for blood
Thomas Paine, on Oswald's revolutionary zeal, quoted in the Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1900)
Source: Dictionary of National Biography, via Wikisource
Why it still matters
Oswald made the case against eating animals into a full political argument two centuries before the word vegan existed, and he made it by pointing at the gap between the dinner plate and the killing floor, an argument the movement still leans on today.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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