For the last 35 years of his life, Isaac Bashevis Singer was a proud and vocal vegetarian, and he often included the themes of vegetarianism and animal suffering in his works. Affected deeply by early memories of an animal market in Poland, where animals were brought to be slaughtered, Singer began to question his own ethics as well as those of a world in which there is so much bloodshed. Like "The Slaughterer," the short story "Blood" is an indictment of religiously sanctioned slaughter. The main characters - aroused by and immersed in the violence of killing - become so desensitized by their acts that they fall deeper and deeper into darkness.