Immodest Proposal « Straight from the Horse's Heart

Immodest Proposal « Straight from the Horse's Heart

Swift wrote the Modest Proposal as a political satire. His goal in suggesting that the solution to poverty was eating the children of the poor was to point out that the problems of poverty were a consequence of the political and economic system of his time. In writing the proposal, Swift intentionally utilized agricultural terms to describe the poor of Ireland in order to make a political statement about the current political system that created the poverty than found its victims deplorable. In contrast the pro-horse slaughter activists utilize non-agricultural terms in an attempt to create a positive connotation of horse slaughter. Slaughter becomes the humane processing of horses. If we substitute the word horses for children then the analogy between Swift’s proposal and horse slaughter becomes all too apparent.