Part 12

We recall an incident related some years ago at a Humanitarian League meeting, where the craze for “big-game” shooting was being discussed. Everyone knows how the possessors of such “trophies” as the heads and horns of “big game” love to decorate their houses with these treasured mementoes of the chase. It had been the fortune--good or bad--of the narrator of the story to visit a house which was not only beautified in this way, but also contained a _human_ head that had been sent home by a member of a certain African expedition and “preserved” by the skill of the taxidermist. When the owner of the head--the _second_ owner--invited the humanitarian visitor to see the trophy, it was with some trepidation that he acquiesced. But when, after passing up a staircase between walls literally plastered with portions of the carcases of elephant, rhinoceros, antelope, etc., he came to a landing where, under a glass case, stood the head of a pleasant-looking young negro, he felt no special repugnance at the sight. It was simply a part--and, as it seemed, not especially dreadful or loathsome part--of the surrounding dead-house; and he understood how mankind itself is nothing more or less than “big game” to our soldier-sportsmen, when they find themselves in some conveniently remote region where the restrictions of morality are unknown. The absolute difference between human and non-human is a fiction which will not bear the test either of fearless thought in the study or of rough experience in the wilds.

The temper which makes war still possible in the twentieth century is that which is kept alive and fostered in so-called times of peace by the practice, among other practices (for we do not, of course, assert that sport is the _only_ accessory to war), of doing to death thousands upon thousands of helpless animals for purposes of mere recreation. Peace advocates who declaim against the infamies of war, without taking note of the kindred infamies of sport, have, to say the least of it, not looked very deeply into the subject of their propaganda;[31] and precisely the same holds good of those “lovers of animals” who are horrified at the idea of running a fox to death, but are ready to accept the flimsiest of flimsy sophisms as an excuse for going to war. Sport is, in truth, a form of war, and war is a form of sport; and those who defend such institutions as the Eton Beagles, on the ground that the schoolboys who indulge in them are thereby trained to be the future stalwarts of Imperialism, are fully justified in their contention--provided only that they look the facts of war and of Imperialism in the face. The Etonians who, in the eighteenth century, used to beat rams to death with clubs, and who now break up hares as a half-holiday pastime, have always furnished a large contingent of officers to the British Army. Need we wonder that wars flourish without regard to morality or justice?

But when we turn to the assertion that the practice of sport is, actually, the best _training_ for war, we find it to be contradicted by facts. On this point we cannot do better than quote from a letter addressed to the _Humanitarian_ by Mr. R. B. Cunninghame-Graham:

“The rise of Japan and the fighting qualities of the Japanese have shaken sportsmen from their ‘sport-the-image-of-war’ position. It is well known that not only are the majority of Japanese vegetarians, but that such a thing as a sportsman is unknown amongst them. Yet, without wishing to disparage the prowess of European soldiers, how many ‘sportsmen’ would wager much money on the chances of a thousand picked Europeans if opposed to a thousand Japanese soldiers in an open plain with no weapons but swords?

“The Boer War, and the miserable figure cut by our officers in comparison with the Boer officers in both shooting and riding, disposed conclusively of the ‘sport-the-preparation-for-war’ argument, so dear to sportsmen. In fact, ‘sport’ as understood in England cannot prepare men for war, even if they ride to hounds three days a week, shoot the other three, and read the _Pink Un_ on Sunday. English sport and war are different in their essence, and one has no analogy to the other.

“In the one case men rise from a comfortable bed, bathe, and breakfast, and even if they are exposed to weather during the day, return at night to a well-cooked dinner and comfortable bed. The horses they ride are valuable, highly-trained animals, who are expected to put out their full strength for at most two or three hours, and are perhaps not required again for two or three days, or even expected to be required. The shooting is done under the same conditions, and though requiring skill (as does the riding in fox-hunting), is not of a nature to be useful in war.

“In neither case does the ‘diversion’ conduce to the self-denying or abstemious habits so essential in war. Of course, I do not mean that sportsmen are of necessity of intemperate habits, but in war the conditions are different from those of sport. In the latter case the soldier rises, perhaps from a night of rain round a camp-fire, gets, without breakfast, on his half-starving horse, and jogs along all day at a footspace, to sleep, supposing there is no fighting and he has not been killed, once more by a camp-fire, perhaps again in rain, or in a driving wind.

“Every condition under which the sportsman plays is different from those under which the soldier works. As in the Roman times regiments of gladiators proved the most useless at the front, so I believe a regiment all composed of sportsmen would make a miserable show before a thousand quite unsporting Japanese.”

To the same effect is the opinion of Sir H. H. Johnston, as expressed in an article in the _Nineteenth Century_ of September, 1913.

“One is told that fox-hunting is a splendid school for riders, the making of our cavalry, etc. Rubbish! Very few of our great cavalry officers have been fox-hunters, or willing fox-hunters, and practically none of the troopers. A large proportion of our mounted soldiers are recruited from townsmen who never learned to ride until they entered the riding-school. The Boers were admittedly the cunningest, most enduring riders recent warfare has known, but they, like their cousins of the Wild West, would probably show themselves duffers in the hunting-field; at any rate, they never practised in this school of steeplechasing. The last thing I desire to do is to undervalue riding as an exercise, an accomplishment, a necessary art in warfare, a school for teaching suppleness, coolness, and courage. But the fox is not a necessary ingredient in the curriculum.”

We conclude, then, that Sport, considered as a school for War, is doubly to be condemned, inasmuch as, while it breeds the aggressive and cruel spirit of militarism, it does _not_ furnish that practical military training which is essential to successful warfare. Sport may make a man a savage; it does not make him a soldier.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Here, for example, is a suggestive heading of an article in a London paper (October 27, 1913) in reference to a meeting of the German Emperor and the Emperor Francis Joseph for the purpose of promoting peace: “PEACE EMPERORS MEET. THE KAISER SHOOTS 1,100 PHEASANTS WITH THE AUSTRIAN ARCHDUKE.” A strange way of inaugurating peace!

II

“BLOODING”

THE BLOODING OF CHILDREN.

Of all practices connected with “sport” none are more loathsome than those known as “blooding,” whether it be the “blooding” of children, which consists in a sort of gruesome parody of the rite of baptism, or the “blooding” of hounds--viz., the turning out of some decrepit animal to be pulled down by the pack, by way of stimulating their blood-lust. Here are a few examples:

On January 4, 1910, the _Daily Mirror_ published an account of the “blooding” of the Marquis of Worcester, the ten-year-old son of the Duke of Beaufort. In a front-page illustration the child was shown with blood-bedaubed cheeks, holding up a dead hare for the hounds, while a number of ladies and gentlemen were smiling approval in the rear.

Here, again, is an extract from the _Cheltenham Examiner_ of March 25, 1909, in reference to the “eviction” and butchery of a fox which had taken refuge in a drain.

“Captain Elwes’s two children being present at the death of a fox on their father’s preserves, the old hunting custom of ‘blooding’ was duly performed by Charlie Beacham, who, after dipping the brush of the fox in his own [_sic_] blood, sprinkled the foreheads of both children, hoping they would be aspirants to the ‘sport of kings.’”

Presumably the blood in which the brush was dipped was that of the fox, not of Mr. Charles Beacham. But what a ceremony in a civilised age! One would have thought that twentieth-century sportsmen, even if they would not spare the fox, might spare their own children!

The following paragraph also appeared in a London paper in 1909:

“A pretty little girl on a chestnut cob, with masses of fair curls falling over her navy-blue habit, was the chief centre of attraction at a meet of the West Norfolk Fox-Hounds at Necton. The pretty little girl was Princess Mary of Wales, and the day will be a memorable one in her life. She motored back to Sandringham carrying her first brush.… Princess Mary was ‘blooded’ by the huntsmen, and was presented with the brush, which was hung on her saddle.”

In connection with deer-stalking, the practice of “blooding” has been described as “a hunting tradition which goes back to the Middle Ages, and recalls the days when the gentle craft of venery was the most cherished accomplishment of our monarchs.”

THE BLOODING OF HOUNDS.

In the prosecution of Mr. Alexander Ormrod, joint Master of the Ribblesdale Buckhounds, by the R.S.P.C.A. on November 11, 1912, for cruelty to a doe, there was evidence that the unfortunate deer, turned out in private to “blood” a new pack of hounds, was lame and wholly out of condition; and, as _Truth_ remarked, “the mere fact that the animal, although given a good start, only managed to get two or three hundred yards away before being pulled down, ‘screaming like a child,’ was quite sufficient to show that she was incapable of escape.” Take the following:

“Mr. Marmaduke Wright, of Bolton Hall, a member of the Hunt, said he saw Oddie (a hunt servant) the day before the hunt took place. Oddie said they were going to let a lame deer out of the pen to blood the young hounds, and witness said he would not go out, as he did not care about hunting tame calves, much less a lame one.”

The statement of John James Macauley, an eye-witness, was that the deer “scarcely put her hind-leg on the ground.”

“She was followed by the hounds for a distance of about two hundred yards.… When the doe could see she was overtaken, she stopped, and he heard the poor little thing screaming like a child.”

Lord Ribblesdale, called to speak as to the practice of blooding hounds, condemned the method adopted by his colleague.

“If blooding had been the object, his opinion was that there should have been a sudden, sharp, and decisive transaction [_sic_], which would have made the hounds, whenever they saw a deer, go at it. If they intended to blood hounds, the method pursued by Mr. Ormrod was most foolish. It was not an uncommon thing to blood hounds, and with regard to the question of cruelty, if they argued from elemental principles, all sport was cruel. He had hunted carted deer, and there had been no cruelty.”

Asked whether, if a lame, emaciated, and weakened deer were released from a pen, it would be an unreasonable thing to hunt it, Lord Ribblesdale replied--

“With the ‘if,’ yes. This was a weak deer; therefore I should have blooded hounds with it.”

The magistrates decided that “there was not enough evidence to convict,” but the prosecution did great service in showing what horrible practices are still carried on under the name of “sport.”

III

THE HUNTING OF GRAVID ANIMALS

Whatever differences of opinion may exist as to the morality of “blood-sports” in general, there is one recurring feature of such sports which, whether regarded from the humanitarian’s or from the sportsman’s point of view, is almost equally repulsive. We refer to the hunting, in some cases accidental, in others deliberate, of gravid animals. That such hunting--of the hare, of the otter, of the hind--takes place, there is no question whatever, as is proved by the following facts.

It is quite a common practice to continue the hunting of hares with beagles until the middle, or even to the end of March, by which time many of the doe hares are heavy with young. Owing to the remonstrances addressed to the headmaster of Eton by the Humanitarian League, the Eton hunting season has now been curtailed, but it is still prolonged beyond the date which has been suggested by the better class of sportsmen. The experience recorded in the _County Gentleman_ (1906) by the writer of the following letter, Mr. John A. Doyle, of Pendarren, Crickhowell, seems conclusive:

“The question you raise is one in which I feel a good deal of interest. I have not only been for some years master of a pack of harriers (foot), but I am also an Old Etonian, and have always felt much interested in the doings of the school beagles, and sympathy with them. Indeed, before I got your letter I had thought of writing to the headmaster, with whom I am--perhaps I should say was, a long time back--slightly acquainted.

“My own practice has always been to have one meet the first week in March, and then end the season. I was once or twice tempted to go on later, and once killed a doe in kindle. Since then I have kept to my rule. She gave us a sharp run of twenty minutes or half an hour. This, I think, disposes of the theory that a pregnant hare has no scent. Possibly she has less than she would have normally. But _per contra_ she must be handicapped by her condition. Then there is the risk of a chop. And it cannot be good for an animal big with young to be bustled and frightened.

“There is yet a worse danger. In some forward seasons there may be leverets by the second week in March. The dam might be killed, and the leverets left to die. I would almost sooner never hunt again than run such a risk. Of course, one might hunt through March for several seasons and none of these things happen; but there must be a risk, and I do not myself think that one is justified in running it.”

What is true of the Eton beagles is true of every hare-hunt throughout the country. The sport ought to be brought to a close on the last day of February, as, indeed, used to be the custom. “Coursing still goes on among a few,” wrote the author of the “Sporting Almanack” for March, 1843, “but in our opinion the fair sportsman will _hold hard_ as soon as March sets in.”[32] Much, then, of the hare-hunting of the present time is _not_ fair.

Still worse is the case of otter-hunting, which is carried on from springtime till autumn, with the result that females heavy with young must occasionally be worried, though sportsmen plead that this is never intentional. An instance that has often been quoted is recorded in the Hon. Grantley F. Berkeley’s “Life and Recollections,” where the story is told of a female otter disturbed by the hounds “in the act of making a couch for her young.”

“At her we went for seven hours, with constant views, and during that time, on a stump overhanging the river, she miscarried and gave birth to two cubs, born only a few days before their time. A hound found them, and when I took one in my hand it was scarcely cold. She beat us for want of light, and well she deserved to escape.”

Similar instances are recorded from time to time, as by a correspondent of the _Morning Leader_, who told how in Devonshire, in 1891, a female otter, after being worried for nearly four hours, had given birth to two dead whelps.

But of all such malpractices the chasing of in-calf hinds is the most deliberate and the worst. If it be true, as we are informed, that tenant-farmers in the Devon and Somerset district complain bitterly of the damage done by deer, what possible reason can be given against the _shooting_ (when necessary) of the hinds, in place of the disgusting and barbarous custom of hunting them? A few years ago the Rev. J. Stratton, after personally investigating the matter, described some of the inevitable results of hind-hunting till the end of March, instead of stopping the “sport,” as ought to be done, at the beginning of March at the latest, and gave specific cases in which, when the dead hinds were “broken up” to feed the hounds, calves as large as hares were seen to be taken from the bodies. Since that time there is reason to believe that, owing in part to the Humanitarian League’s protests, there is a growing local feeling against this especially cruel feature of the sport, and it is hoped that those landowners and residents who have humane scruples in the matter will use their influence to bring about the discontinuance of this disgraceful practice. The whole system of hunting these West Country deer is cruel enough--involving, as it does, the death of many of them by leaping from the cliffs on to the rocks, or being drowned in the sea, or being hung up on wire-fences and mangled by the hounds. But the hunting of the hinds, at a time when even savages might compassionate them, is one of the very worst abominations for which even “sport” is responsible.

FOOTNOTES:

[32] Quoted in _Fry’s Magazine_, June, 1911, in an admirable article entitled “Shabby Blood-Sports Worth Ending.”

IV

DRAG-HUNT _VERSUS_ STAG-HUNT

The fact is too often overlooked that a ready substitute for the savage chase of animals may be found in the drag-hunt, a form of sport which preserves all that is valuable in the way of exercise, while getting rid of one thing only--the cruelty to the tortured stag or fox or hare. As has been pointed out in the _Sheffield Daily Telegraph_, a paper favourable to sport:

“There is little doubt that in time the drag-hunt will become the popular hunting pastime. For years it has been supported by the officers of the Guards, and, besides having the merit of disarming criticism on the part of the Humanitarian League, it can be enjoyed by thousands of sightseers, as it defines the tract of country over which the drag leads the hounds.”

The attempts of some sporting writers to belittle the value of the drag have been very infelicitous. If they personally prefer a blood-sport to a bloodless pastime, let them say so--it is a matter on which we will take their word--but when they assert that a drag-hunt is not suitable for pedestrians, or for schoolboys, they only convict themselves of knowing as little about the practical as about the moral side of the controversy. The following statement was made by the late Lady Florence Dixie, who spoke with unquestionable authority:--

“Drags can be fast run or slow run, according to the way they are laid. My husband owned a pack of harriers and a pack of beagles, and I was able to get him often to hunt them on drags, and have often ridden with the harriers and run with the beagles. When a very fast, non-hunting run was wanted with the harriers, the drag was laid straight and continuously, and hounds ran fast, and riding was like a steeplechase, without a pause, except when any of us came a cropper! When a hunting run was required, we laid a catchy drag, twisting here and there, lifting the scent, and copying as near as possible the wily ways of Reynard. With the beagles we imitated the hare, who is a ringing, not straight-running animal, lifting the scent, doubling back, and so on, and, in fact, we brought thus two competitors into the sport--_i.e._, the drag-layer _versus_ the huntsman, and pitted their wiles and their cunning against each other. I may be accepted as an authority, as few have perhaps ridden in harder-fought hunting runs of all kinds than I--fox, stag, harrier, guanaco, ostrich, and suchlike--and I have had considerable experience with beagles as well, on foot.”[33]

In face of this testimony, and of the fact recorded by Brinsley Richards, in his “Seven Years at Eton,” that a drag was successfully used at Eton half a century ago, it is absurd to pretend that it could not be used there again; but if further proof be needed, it is, fortunately, available in the following letter from Mr. A. G. Grenfell, Headmaster of Mostyn House School, Parkgate, Cheshire. It will be seen that the idea, very commonly held, that the drag-hunt is suitable only for those following on horseback, and that it would too severely tax the energies of boys running on foot, is absolutely erroneous.

“_December 16, 1903._

“On the subject of Beagle Drag-Hunting at Schools, I think you will be pleased to know that we have owned and run a pack of beagles at this school for the last ten years on the lines that you suggest, and with the greatest success. The drag affords any amount of healthy and interesting exercise without cruelty. Ours is just an ordinary preparatory school, with ten masters and ninety boys. Our hounds are twenty-three or twenty-four in number. The sport of following them is very popular with all of us, and it would be hard to devise an easier or better form of school variant to the everlasting football. Not only does drag-hunting keep boys from tiring of the regulation game, but it is to the wind and endurance these runs give us that we owe the fact that we seldom, if ever, lose a match against boys of our own size and weight. The beauty of the drag-hunt is that you can pick your course, you can choose your jumps, you can regulate your checks and keep your field all together, and you can insure the maximum of sport and exercise.”

Here, too, is the testimony of another headmaster of a preparatory school, Mr. F. H. Gresson, of The Grange, Crowborough.

“_March 23, 1909._

“I can fully endorse all that Mr. Grenfell says with regard to the pleasure and amusement to be derived from a drag-hunt. I have kept a small pack of beagles and hunted a drag with them for the last five years with very successful results. In my opinion, it is a very suitable form of amusement for boys of the preparatory school age, as you can regulate the distance and the checks, and there is no fear of their getting overdone.

“As one who is very keen upon both fox-hunting and hare-hunting, I cannot pretend to say that a drag compares in any way with either. At the same time, however, I get a great amount of enjoyment out of it myself, in addition to the exercise, and I do not find it at all a dull sport.”

We do not, of course, _compare_ the drag-hunt with the stag-hunt, the hare-hunt, or any other blood-sport, in the sense of saying that it yields equal excitement; it lacks, no doubt, the thrill of the life-and-death struggle that is going on in front of the hounds. But for those who are aware that such excitement is cruel and morbid, the drag-hunt may be made to provide an excellent _substitute_ for blood-sport, with plenty of skill as well as plenty of exercise; and sportsmen who refuse such substitute merely give proof that their addiction to a barbarous practice is very strong.

FOOTNOTES: