Life, 1908-11-26 · page 17 of 24
Life — November 26, 1908 — page 17: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This *Life* magazine page satirizes hypocrisy around animal cruelty in early 20th-century America. The main article argues that modern civilization masks its brutality behind euphemisms—calling slaughterhouses "antiseptic" and vivisection "science"—while women openly flaunt furs and feathers without pretense, making them more honest. The cartoon (top left) appears to depict figures with animal characteristics, likely criticizing the contradiction between condemning "savage" practices while engaging in them ourselves. "A Scientific Boomerang" sardonically suggests diseases from meat-eating are now being "repaid" through animal testing for cures—nature's ironic revenge. The joke at bottom depicts working-class characters acquiring a child through questionable means (likely orphan trafficking or abandonment), using crude dialect to mock indifference to human welfare. The satire's point: society's selective morality—condemning cruelty in some contexts while permitting it in others, especially when profitable or fashionable.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
“LDPE 587 fined form, designated by the vivisectors as “the ultimate good,’’ are all one and the same. That subtle and intellectual process, known as civilization, may gloss over our cruelties, and give new and more elegant names to old things. But they are still the same, and easily recognized as such when we begin to question them too closely. Our “antiseptic '’ and modern slaughter houses with their “ painless’ processes, our open season for hunting, in which the tired man of affairs may recreate his invaluable energies, or the “personally conducted"? experi- ments in which our doctors (with such admirable self-abnegation) keep their own sentiments under control fot the sake of the “ultimate good’? of hu- manity, are all on Women are far ahead of us in this respect They wear their furs and flaunt their egrets frankly and dispassionately admitting that they are of no earthly use, except as ornaments. Every woman of experience will tell you that the constant wearing of a fur coat is an unhealthy process in itself. It breeds colds, overheats the body and is worse than useless, except for purposes of style. But “style'’ is all that women pretend to “wear their furs and feathers for. MAN went to Hell, and was walking about putting on so many airs that the Devil said to him, “Say! You go about here as if you owned the place."’ “TI do!" reflected the man. “ My wife gave it to me just before I died.’” AN UNPUBLISHED LETTER Pan Decadent N olden times Pan piped his lay, But in these days of triolets, I fear he’s thrown his pipe away And substituted cigarettes. A Scientific Boomerang T would be an interesting discovery, and one fully as likely to be true as many of hose that so often “startle '’ the medical world, if it could be shown that most of the diseases that afflict mankind have come from a meat diet, the result of the wholesale slaughter of animals, and that now, conversely, we are getting even with our own deep seated error, by vivisecting animals in order to discover remedies for these self same diseases. Why not? Metchnikoff, even if he is that doubtful thing, a “ scientist," tells us that the impurities introduced into the human system (apparently the result of a meat diet) and which produce premature decay, may be largely obviated by lactic acid, thus preventing disease. The truth is, that man’s innate cruelty, whether it take the “ WHERE DID YOUSE GET DE KID??? crude form of killing innocent birds and animals for mere “OUR DOCTOR JONES, HE BROUGHT WIM.” sport, or whether it masquerade in tat other and more re- “THAT'S NOTHIN’, WE TAKE OFFEN 11M.’? comicbooks.com