We fatten and kill and eat some of our cousins!

December 12. 

Wonderful, wonderful is our life and that of our companions! That there should be such a thing as a brute animal, not human! and that it should attain to a sort of society with our race! 

Think of cats, for instance. They are neither Chinese nor Tartars. They do not go to school, nor read the Testament; yet how near they come to doing so! how much they are like us who do so! 

What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats ? 

At length, without having solved any of these problems, we fatten and kill and eat some of our cousins! 

As soon as the snow came, I naturally began to observe that portion of the plants that was left above the snow, not only the weeds but the withered leaves, which before had been confounded with the russet earth. 

Yesterday afternoon, after a misty forenoon, it began to rain by degrees, and in the course of the night more than half the snow has disappeared, revealing the ground here and there; and already the brown weeds and leaves attract me less. 

This morning it is fair again. 

P. M. — To Saw Mill Brook and back by Red Choke-berry Path and Walden. 

Large oaks in thick woods have not so many leaves on them as in pastures, methinks (?). 

At the wall between Saw Mill Brook Falls and Red Choke-berry Path, I see where a great many chestnut burs have been recently chewed up fine by the squirrels, to come at the nuts. The wall for half a dozen rods and the snow are covered with them. You can see where they have dug the burs out of the snow, and then sat on a rock or the wall and gnawed them in pieces. 

I, too, dig many burs out of the snow with my foot, and though many of these nuts are softened and discolored they have a peculiarly sweet and agreeable taste. 

Yesterday morning I noticed that several people were having their pigs killed, not foreseeing the thaw. Such warm weather as this the animal heat will hardly get out before night. 

I saw Peter, the dexterous pig-butcher, busy in two or three places, and in the afternoon I saw him with washed hands and knives in sheath and his leather overalls drawn off, going to his solitary house on the edge of the Great Fields, carrying in the rain a piece of the pork he had slaughtered, with a string put through it. Often he carries home the head, which is less prized, taking his pay thus in kind, and these supplies do not come amiss to his outcast family. 

I saw Lynch's dog stealthily feeding at a half of his master's pig, which lay dressed on a wheelbarrow at the door. A little yellow-brown dog, with fore feet braced on the ice and outstretched neck, he eagerly browsed along the edge of the meat, half a foot to right and left, with incessant short and rapid snatches, which brought it away as readily as if it had been pudding. He evidently knew very well that he was stealing, but made the most of his time. The little brown dog weighed a pound or two more afterward than before. 

Where is the great natural-historian? Is he a butcher, or the patron of butchers? As well look for a great anthropologist among cannibals, New-Zealanders.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 12, 1856

As soon as the snow came, I naturally began to observe that portion of the plants that was left above the snow. . . See November 18, 1855 ("Now first mark the stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow. They have suddenly acquired a new character. “)