In fact, the “happy life and merciful death” line is how Jeremy Bentham justified his own meat eating. Yes, the philosophical father of animal rights was himself a carnivore. In a passage seldom quoted by animal rightists Bentham defended meat eating on the grounds that “we are the better for it, and they are never the worse…. The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier and, by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature.”
