Part 3

And if there be anything at all which can in any way justify the high-sounding title of “the noble science,” we may look for it now. For the man who can ride straight to hounds and hold his own over a stiff country must possess some qualities which are not to be despised. He must not only be a fine horseman--and fine horsemen are few and far between--but he must know how to combine courage with judgment, prompt decision with sound discretion. Here for the good rider, whose heart is in the right place, are the true pleasures of the chase.

But let us now look at the other side of the picture. It has been a splendid run, but the end approaches. The fox has been viewed dead-beat, painfully crawling into a hedgerow, with coat muddy and staring, tongue hanging out of his mouth, brush trailing on the ground. What sight more piteous can be conceived? A few minutes more and his merciless pursuers are upon him; and, to use the words of Whyte Melville, the Laureate of the chase,

“’Twas a stout hill-fox when we found him, but now ’Tis a thousand tatters of brown!”

This, then, is the end, and aim, and object of our sport--“the kill”! It is our pride to be “in at the death.” I confess I have often felt no little ashamed of my brother-man--man, that “paragon of animals,” “in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!”--as I have listened to those wild shrieks and yells of “Who-whoop” that proclaim--what? That a little animal has been hunted to its death. And it is this thought from which the thinking man can never escape, and which is to his enjoyment as the canker to the bud--the thought that it is necessary for his pleasure that a poor little animal, in all the agony of terror and exhaustion, should be running for its life before him! And since this is the inevitable concomitant of the sport--even the great and glorious sport of fox-hunting--the thinking man must ask himself, “Am I justified--morally justified--in purchasing my pleasure at such a price?” Can we for a moment doubt what the answer of the thinking man must be? I do not say that all fox-hunters are cruel men; it would be absurd, indeed, to bring such a charge. Many good and humane men--men who would shrink from and abhor anything that they recognised as cruel--are, nevertheless, habitual followers of the hounds. They have persuaded themselves--it is so easy to persuade oneself in accordance with one’s inclination, especially when the object to which one is inclined has all the sanction of custom and long usage--they have persuaded themselves that the sport is justifiable in spite of the suffering which is its necessary accompaniment and result. Or, perhaps, especially if they are young men, they have not thought about it at all. But I cannot help the belief that, as thought and true civilisation advance, it will be recognised that to seek pleasure in the hunting of any animal to its death is unworthy of a thinking and humane man. If the humane man can do these things, it must be because he has not yet become a thinking man. If the thinking man can do them, it must be because he is not a humane man.

And this conclusion will, I think, be fortified if we consider, very briefly, some of the arguments by which it is sought to justify sport of this kind. We are frequently told that the fox is a thief and a marauder--a robber of hen-roosts--and that, therefore, he must be destroyed. The simple answer to this is that the fox is carefully preserved; that when foxes are scarce in a hunting country they are imported from elsewhere; and that the man who shoots a fox is held up to odium and scorn as guilty of the heinous crime of “vulpicide.”

But we have no sooner answered this flimsy argument than we are met by another of a quite different character. We are told that if foxes were not preserved to be hunted they would be exterminated; and that a fox, if given his choice, would much prefer to take his chance of escaping the hounds to the alternative of extermination. This is certainly a quaint specimen of the sportsman’s logic. We are asked, in the first place, to assume an impossibility--namely, that a fox should be endowed with reason to enable him to consider and come to a decision upon the suggested question; secondly, we have to assume what his answer would be; thirdly, that that answer would be a wise one for the foxes; and, fourthly, that man ought to be bound by it. To this puerile argument it is sufficient to say that the question before us is not what a fox might, in an imaginary and impossible contingency, conceivably think best for himself, but what is right for man to do. If, therefore, the alternative be between the extermination of foxes, by methods as painless as may be, and their preservation to be hunted by man, I cannot doubt in what direction the true interests of humanity will be found to lie.

To this conclusion, then, I think our reason must inevitably lead us, even with regard to the best and most popular of blood-sports as practised in this country. I do not hesitate to confess that I was brought to it with reluctance, knowing full well the pleasures of riding over a country with hounds in front and a good horse under me. But, in truth, the case seems too clear for argument. On one side are inclination and pleasure, and prescription, and the false glamour of “sport”; on the other side are “that incomparable pair”--humanity and reason.[2]

THE WILD STAG HUNT.

But if the inexorable laws of reason and of ethics compel us to cast our vote against “the noble science” of fox-hunting, what shall we say of such sport as the hunting of the red deer in the West of England? Its votaries would fain cast over it the glamour of poetry. They dilate on the glorious country--the woods of Porlock, the bright heaths of Exmoor, the exhilaration and excitement of a wild gallop over a wild country in pursuit of this magnificent wild creature--“the antlered monarch of the waste.” But we have only to turn to the acknowledged textbooks on the subject (such as Collyns’s “Chase of the Wild Red Deer,” for example) to learn of the horrible cruelties which are the inevitable concomitants of this much-extolled sport--to learn how the hunted animal, in its terror and despair, will dash over cliffs into the sea, or vainly seek refuge in the waves from its merciless pursuers upon the land. I will not waste time and words over it. I regard it as a cruel form of pleasure which every humane man should shun and shrink from. A relative of mine, who for many years acted as secretary to a fox-hunt in the West of England, and who had a great reputation as a rider to hounds, told me that he had once gone to see the sport on Exmoor, and that nothing would induce him to repeat that experience, so terrible and so disgusting were some of the things which he witnessed there. Alas! that woman should be a participator in such cruel deeds--ay, and pride herself on her rivalry with brutal man! But we know the type. Their eyes are blinded lest they should see, and their ears closed lest they should hear. They know no better. They have never learned to think![3]

Here again we are told there is only one alternative: either these deer must be preserved to be hunted or they must be exterminated. But again, also, there can be no doubt as to what our choice should be. We should lament the loss of these wild denizens of the forest and the moor; but better, far better, would it be that their lives should be ended, as painlessly as may be, by the rifle, than that they should be preserved for a sport which is an outrage upon humanity.

SHOOTING.

I have touched upon hunting; let us now consider the twin-sport of shooting, and let us first consider it in its most favourable aspect. How well do I remember those bright September evenings, long ago, when the rays of the westering sun, striking obliquely on the ruddy clover-heads, bathed them in the rosy light of a summer that still lingered on “the happy autumn fields”! Youth, health, and hope were ours then--youth, health, and hope, and friends! Life lay all before us; and, what was more to the purpose for the present moment, before us, too, were the partridges--a covey scattered among those smiling clover-heads. We go forward to beat them up with all the joy and excitement of that golden time when life has not yet been saddened by the pale cast of thought. The birds rise before us, singly, or in twos. The last shots are fired. The old retriever picks up the fallen game. Then we turn homewards, just as the glorious sun sinks at last behind the high Hampshire hills, and “barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day.” Were we then guilty of cruelty? I answer “No,” because the moral qualities of an act exist only in the mind of the agent,

“For there is nothing either good or bad But thinking makes it so;”

and it had never occurred to us to question the morality of a sport which gave us such days of happiness, such nights of unbroken repose.

And truly, if we admit, for the sake of argument, at any rate, and making no assumption as against the vegetarian, that it is legitimate for man to use birds and beasts for his food, I see not much that can be justly said in condemnation of shooting such as this. If birds may be used for food, how better can they be killed than by the gun? And thus it appears that it is that much-maligned and much-ridiculed individual the “pot-hunter” who is the best justified of all the shooting confraternity!

Again, if rabbits must be kept under for the sake of agriculture (a proposition which few will be found to dispute), it is certainly far better that they should be shot than be taken by that hideous instrument of torture, the steel trap, or the hardly less cruel contrivance known as “the wire.”

But when we come to the shooting of artificially reared and carefully preserved pheasants, and especially to what is known as “battue shooting,” very different considerations arise. Let us take an instance.

The short December day has drawn to a close. There has been warm work in the coverts. A thousand head of game--pheasants, hares, and rabbits--have been brought to bag. In fact, we have had, not indeed a tremendous battue, as these things are reckoned nowadays, but simply “a jolly day’s covert-shooting.” But now darkness--thick, gloomy, winter darkness--has settled down like a pall upon the woods. There is some snow upon the ground, and with the night has come a sharper frost and a bitter, piercing wind. But what is that to us as we gather together in the warm dining-room, where the lamps are so bright, where the logs burn so keenly, and where thick curtains ward off the draughts of that nipping, eager air, and deaden the sound of the gusts moaning fitfully without? How delightful a festive dinner like this after our day of woodland sport! And yet, as I have raised the first glass of champagne to my lips, a thought has sometimes come to me which has gone nigh to spoil my pleasure. It is the thought of that cover where the fun was so fast and furious, and which literally seemed to swarm with game. I picture it as it is _now_ under the darkness of night. There, within sight of the bright lights around which we are so joyously gathered, _there_ are scores--hundreds may be--of miserable creatures with mangled limbs and bleeding wounds; some with hind-legs broken, dragging themselves piteously over the frosty ground; some writhing in agony which death comes all too slowly to relieve. Ah, if that wounded hare could speak, as she looks at the line of light streaming from our dining-room windows, what a curse might she not breathe against the cruel savages within! What a contrast! _Here_, light, warmth, and pleasure; _there_, darkness, cold, and pain unspeakable! Are not _these_ considerations which should give us pause?

And can it be denied that the man who has learnt to stand at “a warm corner” unmoved while wounded beasts and birds are struggling or piteously crawling in agony all around him, who can listen unmoved to the terrible cry of the wounded hare--a cry like that of a child in pain--can it be denied that that man, who has so deadened his susceptibility to the sufferings of his humble and helpless kindred of the animal world, has himself suffered grievous injury to that which is best in human nature--that sacred instinct of compassion, wherein some thinkers of no mean order have thought they discerned the origin and the very basis of morality?

And what a curse to our country is this selfish mania for the preservation of game--preservation for the purpose of destruction! For this are the country-folk warned off from the quiet woodland ways; for this are the children prohibited from entering the copses to gather wild-flowers; for this are enclosures made, barbed-wire fences erected, footpaths and commons filched from the public, and the landless still further excluded from the land; for this must temptation be constantly set before the eyes of the labourer; for this must the offender against the game laws be called up for sentence before a tribunal of game-preservers; for this must the woods and the country-side be denuded of their most delightful inhabitants--the jay and the magpie, with their lustrous plumage and wild cries; the squirrel, embodiment of life and graceful activity, with his curious winning ways; the quaint, harmless, and interesting little hedgehog; the owl, with its long-drawn melancholy note, as it hawks in the summer moonlight--for this must wood-sides be disfigured by impudent notice-boards, telling us, in the arrogant language of the rich Philistine, that “All trespassers will be prosecuted, all dogs destroyed”; for this must millions of innocent creatures be pitilessly condemned to shocking mutilations and atrocious agonies, long drawn out. Such is “Merry England” under the rule of the game-preserver!

“Strange that where Nature loved to trace As if for gods a dwelling-place, There man, enamoured of distress, Should mar it into wilderness.”

I have now briefly considered those blood-sports which are generally spoken of as “legitimate” sports--namely, hunting and shooting. “But,” someone will ask me, “what of hare-hunting, and coursing, and otter-hunting--are not these ‘legitimate’ sports also?”

Well, over these I care not to delay; a few words will suffice for each.

HARE-HUNTING AND OTTER-HUNTING.

Well has it been said that

“Poor is the triumph o’er the timid hare.”

It is to my mind indeed a pitiable form of pleasure that men should go forth to hunt to death this, the most timorous of animals. Even in the days of bluff King Hal, when humanitarians were indeed few and far between, and it was hardly recognised that men had any duties to the lower animals, there was found a great and good and enlightened man to raise his voice in protest against this sport. “What greater pleasure is there to be felt,” wrote Sir Thomas More in his “Utopia,” “when a dog followeth a hare than when a dog followeth a dog? For one thing is done in both--that is to say, running, if thou hast pleasure therein. But if the hope of slaughter and the expectation of tearing in pieces the beast doth please thee, thou shouldest rather be moved with pity to see a silly, innocent hare murdered of a dog, the weak of the stronger, the fearful of the fierce, the innocent of the cruel and unmerciful.”

Ought we not to feel some shame if we have not advanced farther than this old teacher of nearly four hundred years ago? But it seems that the age of King George V. has still something to learn from the age of King Henry VIII.

And but a few years later, in the reign of that famous King’s still more famous daughter, in “the spacious times,” when kindness to poor animals was but little thought of, do we not hear the voice of the great poet who is not of an age, but for all time, in an exquisite description of the miseries of the hunted hare?--

“By this, poor Wat, far off upon a hill, Stands on his hinder legs, with listening ear, To hearken if his foes pursue him still. Anon their loud alarums he doth hear; And now his grief may be compared well To one sore sick that hears the passing-bell.

“Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch Turn and return, indenting with the way; Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch; Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay. For misery is trodden on by many, And, being low, never relieved by any.”

And here let me say that, if some of us have been loud in our protest against hare-hunting by schoolboys (and I refer especially to the case of the Eton beagles), it is because we believe it to be of paramount importance that this duty of kindness to animals should be inculcated upon the young; that this sacred instinct of compassion should be fostered in young minds; and that boys should be restrained from pursuits which tend to deaden this best of all human feelings.

“’Tis education forms the common mind; Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.”

And who shall say what harm may be done to character, if the men who are responsible for education allow it to be supposed by those under their charge that animal suffering is a thing of no account?

As to otter-hunting, or the “otter-worry,” as it is better called, it is a kind of sport of which I have seen a good deal in bygone days, but which I always found abominable. Let me give one example from my own experience. It is a lovely day and a lovely country. The beautiful River Plym is flowing clear and cool in its lower valley depths, between wood-clad hills. I see before me an old quarry-pool. Precipitous rocks stand over it. One little stream, or adit, alone connects it with the river. At the farther end, away from the entrance of this adit, the hillside slopes more gradually, and is covered with broken fragments of rock and quarried stone. On my left the pool lies open to the woods. We had found an otter in the morning, and it was supposed that the creature had taken refuge in the “clitter of rocks” above the pool. Accordingly, men armed with otter-spears, and aided by terriers, endeavour to dislodge it. Suddenly another otter, much larger than the one we have been hunting, emerges from this retreat and dashes into the water. Instantly the pool is surrounded by excited hunters. A man with a spear stands at the adit-head, blocking that way of escape. The water is alive with swimming hounds, while others stand baying on the banks. Now, an otter can stay long under water, but it must rise at intervals for breath; so, after a pause, we hear the shout of “Hoo, gaze!” and I catch sight of a small dark face and large brown eyes for one moment above the surface of the pool. Again and again, at ever-shortening intervals, I see that face appear and disappear. I can never forget it--that wild, scared face, and the terror of those hunted eyes! There is no possibility of escape. Hounds and “sportsmen”--yes, and “sportswomen” too--surround the pool, and the only exit is carefully and effectually guarded. The otter, wildest and most timid of animals, must either attempt to run the gauntlet or be actually drowned in the pool. Only one thought possesses me--that of sickening compassion for this poor, beautiful, hunted creature. Men--and, good heavens! women too--seem frenzied with the desire to kill. No thought of pity seems to dawn upon their minds. So at length, amid yelling men and baying hounds, the wretched “beast of the chase” is forced for dear life’s sake to try the desperate shift of taking to the land, in the vain hope of finding sanctuary in the friendly waters of the Plym, that are so near and yet so far. Vain hope indeed! Scarce twenty yards of flight, and the hounds roll her over. From the carcass thus barbarously done to death the “pads” are cut off as trophies by the huntsman, and the master goes through the ceremony of “blooding” his little son, who has now seen his first “kill.” The boy’s cheeks and forehead are smeared with blood from one of the dripping “pads,” and the “young barbarian” goes home swelling with pride at this savage decoration. What a lesson for him! Thus is the rising generation taught to be gentle and compassionate, and to love “all things, both great and small”! O Sport, what horrible things are done in thy name! How long shall the nation continue to bow the knee to this false god--this bloody Moloch of Sport?

SPURIOUS SPORTS.

But of all the sports of killing which we have hitherto reviewed, this much at least may be said--namely, that they are concerned with the hunting or shooting of wild animals at liberty, in their native haunts. We now have to consider certain other blood-sports, the differentiating feature of which is that they are concerned with the hunting or shooting of animals liberated from captivity for that purpose. Such are rabbit-coursing, the hunting of carted deer, and the shooting of pigeons from traps, which are very commonly referred to as “spurious sports”--a title which they most justly merit.

On pigeon-shooting I will not waste many words. To shoot a strong “blue rock,” released from one of five traps, at a rise of between twenty and thirty yards, is not, as some people think, an easy thing to do. On the contrary, it is a very difficult thing to do, the result being that, even when good shots are competing, many birds get away wounded, to die a lingering death. Moreover, if a test of skill be all that is required, the clay pigeon answers the purpose quite as well as, if not better than, the living bird. I might dwell, too, on the injuries sometimes done to the birds when closely packed in hampers for transport purposes. But it is, I think, sufficient to say that it is now generally recognised in this country that the practice of shooting captive birds from traps has about it none of the elements of “sport” properly so-called. It is a mere medium for betting and money-making, or money-losing, without any of those healthy, invigorating, and athletic concomitants which do something to redeem genuine “sport” from the reproach of cruelty; and if cruelty be the unjustifiable infliction of pain, then it can, I think, hardly be doubted that pigeon-shooting must be classed among cruel sports. Of this opinion was the House of Commons thirty-one years ago; for in the year 1883 a Bill passed through that House, on second reading, to put down this spurious sport by law. And to show how poorly it is now esteemed, even in fashionable circles, it may be mentioned that the Hurlingham Club, where pigeon-shooting was once regularly carried on, some years ago decided to prohibit this unworthy practice in their grounds.

It remains to consider the two spurious sports of rabbit-coursing and the hunting of carted deer. Let us take the latter first.