A Reasonable Plea for the Animal Creation

A Reasonable Plea for the Animal Creation: Being a Reply to a Late Pamphlet, Intituled, A Dissertation on the Voluntary Eating of Blood, &c. is a 1746 treatise by English writer and architectural theorist Robert Morris. Written in response to a contemporaneous pamphlet defending the consumption of animal flesh, the work offers a sustained philosophical argument against meat-eating, grounded in natural law, moral reasoning, and a belief in the divinely ordained immutability of a vegetarian diet.

Presented as a preface, a letter to General Foliot, and a series of nine letters addressed to a friend, the treatise systematically challenges scriptural and secular justifications for killing animals. It argues that humans have no natural right to destroy living beings and affirms the rational and moral status of animals. Though largely overlooked for more than two centuries, the work has been recognised by modern scholars as part of an eighteenth-century tradition of ethical vegetarian thought. It was republished in 2005 in the journal Organization & Environment with an introductory article by Carol J. Adams.