Part 4

What are the animals employed for this form of fashionable amusement? They are park-bred deer, kept in paddocks or stables, and carefully fed and exercised. It is said on behalf of the “stag-hunters” (so called) that to do the deer any injury is the last thing they wish for; on the contrary, their desire is to recapture the animal alive and well, in order that he or she may afford sport another day. This, doubtless, is true enough; but, unfortunately, the deer is terrified by the chase, and becomes exhausted in the course of it. Unfortunately, too, there are such things as spiked iron railings and barbed-wire fences, to say nothing of walls and other obstacles with which the hunted deer is confronted in his cross-country flight. The result is inevitable, and such as all reasoning men know to be inevitable--namely, that from time to time terrible “accidents,” as they are euphemistically called, take place, some of which, but by no means all, find their way into the columns of our newspapers. Thus, to give an example, it twice happened within a period of eight months that a miserable hunted deer impaled itself upon a spiked iron fence at Reading, which in its terror it essayed to jump, but which in its exhaustion it failed to clear. I could give case after case in which a hunted deer has lacerated itself in the attempt to leap a barbed-wire fence; broken a leg, or perhaps (more mercifully) its neck, in trying to clear a gate or wall; cut and wounded itself by jumping on a greenhouse or glass frames; fallen exhausted before the hounds, and been bitten and torn by them; sought refuge in a river, canal, or pond, and been drowned by the pursuing pack. Ten such cases are known to have occurred in six months with one pack only, hunting in the Home Counties, and six tame deer were done to death by that same pack within that period.

These cases formed the subject of questions put by me to the late Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in the House of Commons. I should like to quote his answer given to one of such questions on March 14, 1907: “If such cruelties are perpetrated, and we can do anything to stop them, I shall be very glad. I am against cruelty of any sort, whether under the name of sport or otherwise. I like it rather less under the cloak of sport than otherwise.” Nay, this cruel and contemptible travesty of sport was once, in a lucid interval, condemned, even by that well-known and recognised organ of sport, _The Field_, “the country gentleman’s newspaper.” For in _The Field_ of September 3, 1892, we read as follows:

“If we look at this fiction of chase from an unprejudiced standpoint, we must admit that it is only prescription and usage which enable us to retain it in our sporting schedule and to tolerate it as legitimate. Strictly speaking, it stands on the same footing as bull and bear baiting, both of which have had to go to the wall under the influence of what is called the march of civilization.”[4]

Need I say more? Surely the case is too clear for argument--except, indeed, for certain peers in the Gilded Chamber, whose hidebound prejudice seems to be impervious to reason!

So much for the hunting of carted deer, the spurious sport of the rich. What shall we say of rabbit-coursing, which has been described as the sport of the poor, but which would, I think, be better called “the spurious sport of the spurious poor”? Here, too, I can speak as an eye-witness, and I will repeat the description of what I saw, as it appeared in a London newspaper:

“Wishing to see for myself what goes on at the ‘sport’ of rabbit-coursing, I took train on Sunday morning to Worcester Park Station, whence a walk of about a mile leads to the field where the entertainment is provided. Here was soon gathered together an assembly of about three hundred ‘sportsmen,’ mostly lads and larrikins. There was a large number of dogs, chiefly of the ‘whippet’ breed, and many of them carefully clothed after the manner of greyhounds. The ear was assailed by the noise of continual barking, and the nose by whiffs from a neighbouring sewage farm. After we had waited some little time a van was drawn on the ground heavily laden with large shallow hampers packed with live rabbits. Three or four of these hampers were brought forward to the starting-point; a stout gentleman who carried a revolver and appeared to ‘boss the show,’ gave the order ‘to get behind the ropes,’ some juvenile and promising bookmakers mounted stools, and the fun commenced.

“Two dogs are led to the starting-point amidst shouts of ‘I’ll lay three to one,’ ‘I’ll lay seven to four,’ etc., quite in the approved sporting style. A man opens a sort of trap-door in the lid of one of the hampers, seizes one of the cowering rabbits by the skin of the back, presents it to each dog alternately, in order, I presume, to excite him to the utmost, runs with it, still held in one hand by the skin of the back, some thirty-five yards, and then flings it down, whereupon a shot is fired from the revolver, the dogs are released and rush madly for the prey. What follows requires some explanation. Let it be remembered that these are, or were, wild rabbits, among the most timorous of wild creatures; that they have probably undergone the horrible experience of being driven from their burrows by the ferret some days (and who shall say how many days?) before; that they have been sent by rail to town; that they are carted to the scene of action closely packed in hampers; that they are, for a long time previously to being ‘coursed,’ surrounded by shouting men and barking dogs, and that after all this, weak, dazed, and half paralysed with fear, the victim is ‘dumped down’ in the middle of a strange field.

“The result is what might be expected. He can hardly run, and knows not where to run. Some come straight back into the mouths of the dogs, others make a feeble attempt to seek shelter in the distant hedge. But the result is always the same. In a few seconds the dogs are upon him. The first seizes him by the back or hind-quarters; the second, overtaking the first, and not to be balked of his share of the prey, grabs the victim by the head and shoulders. Then ensues a tug of war, during which the miserable rabbit is frequently more than half disembowelled before he is taken, still alive, or half alive, from the jaws of the dogs. Not one escapes; he is not given a chance. One that was put down a few yards in front of two very young dogs, who were evidently new to the business, might have got away, but when this was seen a large dog was at once sent after the fugitive. I am told that at North Country meetings when a puppy is entered a rabbit is frequently mutilated by having a leg broken or an eye put out; but I saw nothing of this at Worcester Park.

“I should mention that I was joined by a friend from New Malden, well known in the neighbourhood for humanitarian efforts, and that we were at once ‘spotted’ as alien interlopers, and looked at askance in consequence. Possibly the result was greater caution in the management of the proceedings. But we saw quite enough. Fifteen wretched creatures were done to death in forty-five minutes, and the ‘sport’ goes on all day and every Sunday. I counted the steps taken by the man who ran forward with each rabbit, and never did they exceed thirty-five. A really wild rabbit in his own familiar haunts might have some chance at that. But these poor cowering things, tortured to make a hooligans’ holiday! The mere monotony of it was sickening. And yet when a Bill is brought into Parliament to make such abominations illegal, a noble lord, one of the pillars of the Jockey Club, opposes it because it ‘would affect the poorer classes far more than themselves,’ and because it is ‘a piece of class legislation’ (Lord Durham in the House of Lords, _The Times_, March 4, 1902). Why not go back to cock-fighting and bull-baiting at once?”[5]

Such are the sports that make England great, that strengthen the muscles and sinews of a conquering Imperial race! Let us rejoice, then, that we have an Hereditary Chamber, where faddists and fanatics are unknown, to throw the ægis of its protection over the pleasures of rich and poor alike, and where the high-souled, high-bred scions of a time-honoured aristocracy magnanimously defend the cherished institutions of our forefathers against the attacks both of blatant democrats and sickly sentimentalists!

THE ETHICS OF SPORT.

It was said by a noble lord in the Upper House not long ago that “Physical courage and love of sport have been for centuries the distinguishing characteristics of the British race.” Is there any necessary relation between these two things? I take leave to doubt it--indeed, I entirely deny it--if by “sport” these “blood-sports” are intended. But let us set beside this wonderful pronouncement the statement of a cultivated and enlightened Englishman who was for many years resident in Burmah. In that charming book, “The Soul of a People,” Mr. H. Fielding writes as follows:

“It has been inculcated in us from childhood that it is a manly thing to be indifferent to pain--not to our own pain only, but to that of all others. To be sorry for a hunted hare, to compassionate the wounded deer, to shrink from torturing the brute creation, has been accounted by us a namby-pamby sentimentalism, not fit for man, fit only for a squeamish woman. To the Burman it is one of the highest of all virtues. He believes that all that is beautiful in life is founded on compassion, and kindness, and sympathy--that nothing of great value can exist without them.”

May not our much-vaunted Christianity learn something from this despised religion of the Buddha, first taught by Gautama on the banks of the Ganges some six hundred years before Christ? For what is it that Buddhism teaches us? It teaches as a first principle to do no harm to any living thing; it teaches mercy without limit, and compassion without stint. Of the Burmese Buddhists we read: “They learn how it is the noblest duty of man, who is strong, to be kind and loving to his weaker brothers, the animals.”

Contrast with that the following, taken at random from among my newspaper cuttings (it is a paragraph from the _Morning Post_):

_June 14, 1904._

“The Carlisle Otter Hounds met at Longtown yesterday, and had the best hunt that has taken place in the Esk for fifty years. A splendid otter was put up at Red Scaur, and for four hours he kept men, hounds, and terriers at bay. He left the river several times for the woods and rocks, and ran the woods as cunningly as a fox. Eventually, when climbing a steep rock for a hole, he fell back exhausted into the water, and the hounds despatched him. His body was presented to Sir Richard Graham.”

No thought of pity here for the poor wild creature, hunted, harried, and remorselessly pursued by men and hounds for four mortal hours--in water, through woods, over rocks, ever flying in all the agony of fear, till the last dregs of strength are exhausted, and, on the very threshold of the longed-for refuge, he falls, hopeless and helpless, in the stream, where “the hounds despatched him.” Such is a “grand otter hunt,” the best that had taken place in the Esk for fifty years! Truly we may smile at those holy men of the Buddhists who carried bells on their shoes in order to give warning as they walked to the little creatures in the long grass; but for my part I own that, upon the whole, I would far sooner be classed with these poor sentimentalists, who have seen in their hearts the coming of that “milder day” for which the great poet who sang of “Hartleap Well” so devoutly longed, than with that flower of muscular Christianity, the stalwart Britisher, so distinguished for his love of sport and his contempt for pain--his own generally excepted!

How, then, stands this question of sport considered as a question of ethics? A great German thinker, as we all know, believed that he had found the very basis of morality in the sacred instinct of compassion. I will not argue whether Schopenhauer was right or wrong in that contention, but this, at any rate, we must all admit--namely, that without compassion all our boasted morality would be but as sounding brass and as a tinkling cymbal. Nay, whether it be or be not the basis of morality, this at least is true that, without compassion, no morality worth having could exist at all.

Let us listen for a moment to Rousseau on this matter:

“Mandeville was right in thinking that, with all their systems of morality, men would never have been anything but monsters if Nature had not given them _compassion_ to support their reason; but he failed to see that _from this one quality spring all the social virtues_ which he was unwilling to credit mankind with. In reality, what is generosity, clemency, humanity, if not _compassion_, applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human race as a whole? Even benevolence and friendship, if we look at the matter rightly, are seen to result from a constant compassion, directed upon a particular object; for to desire that someone should not suffer is nothing else than to desire that he should be happy.… The more closely the living spectator identifies himself with the living sufferer, the more active does pity become.”

And again:

“How is it that we let ourselves be moved to pity if not by getting out of our own consciousness, and becoming identified with the living sufferer; by leaving, so to say, our own being and entering into his? We do not suffer except as we suppose he suffers; _it is not in us, it is in him_, that we suffer.… Offer a young man objects on which the expansive force of his heart can act--objects such as may enlarge his nature, and incline it to go out to other beings, in whom he may everywhere find himself again. Keep carefully away those things which narrow his view, and make him self-centred, and tighten the strings of the _human ego_.”

It is upon this theme that Schopenhauer becomes so eloquent, and with larger view even than that of Rousseau, as it seems, he brings the lower animals within the protection of his moral system.

“There is nothing that revolts our moral sense so much as cruelty. Every other offence we can pardon, but not cruelty. The reason is found in the fact that cruelty is the exact opposite of _compassion_--viz., the direct participation, independent of all ulterior considerations, in the sufferings of another, leading to sympathetic assistance in the effort to prevent or remove them; whereon, in the last resort, all satisfaction and all well-being and happiness depend. It is this compassion alone which is the real basis of all _voluntary_ justice and all _genuine_ loving-kindness.… There is another proof that the moral incentive disclosed by me is the true one. I mean the fact that _animals_ also are included under its protecting ægis. In the other European systems of ethics no place is found for them, strange and inexcusable as this may appear. It is asserted that beasts have no rights; the illusion is harboured that our conduct, so far as they are concerned, has no moral significance; or, as it is put in the language of these codes, that there are no duties to be fulfilled towards animals. Such a view is one of revolting coarseness--a barbarism of the West.… Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to living creatures cannot be a good man.”[6]

So wrote a young German philosopher some seventy years ago; and all that has since happened in the world of thought has but served to strengthen his teaching as to our duty towards the lower animals. For since he wrote science and thought have become profoundly modified by one of those epoch-making inductions which, at very rare intervals, some great thinker is inspired to make. We have seen the establishment and the almost universal acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, involving as one of its corollaries the unity of life and the “universal kinship” of man with his humbler brethren--or cousins, if you will--of the animal world.

I venture, then, to offer this teaching for my readers’ consideration. In its light I would ask them to view these questions, and if they shall think that that light is the light of reason and truth, then to follow it wheresoever it may lead. I do not think it will lead them to offer fresh hecatombs upon the blood-stained altar of Sport.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] One of the strongest objections to fox-hunting consists in this, that each season must necessarily be preceded (so at least we are told) by the barbarities of “cub-hunting.” The slaughter of these poor little cubs is cruel and pitiful work. Sometimes, too, a vixen falls a victim to the hounds while her cubs are still dependent on her for their food. No doubt an early ride on a fine September or October morning is a pleasant thing, and the “sportsman” need not know much about what goes on in the coverts, or trouble himself to think about it! But the fact remains that this is a miserable and cruel form of “sport.” And what shall we say of the practice of “digging out” a wretched fox when, perhaps after a long run, he has sought refuge by “going to ground”? Can anything be conceived more callous or more cowardly? Yet educated, and, presumably, thinking men, and women too--Heaven save the mark!--stand by and enjoy the fun! Such is the debasing effect of “sport” upon the human mind and character!

[3] In the _Westminster Gazette_ of August 15, 1908, a woman wrote on “The Enchantments of the New Forest,” and this is what she says: “Anyone with a drop of sport-love in them, given a nag of some kind, will not be a day in the forest before he finds himself chasing some animal, alive or dead.” The sentiment is surely even more deplorable than the grammar.

[4] It must in fairness be added that the article from which the above extract is made was subsequently repudiated by the editor as being “quite opposed to the line which _The Field_ has always taken.” It seems that “by an oversight the article was inserted during the absence of the departmental editor.” I quote it, nevertheless, as showing that over twenty years ago the truth as to this matter had dawned upon the mind of at least one of the leader-writers of a great sporting paper.

[5] Moreover, there is a sport which, as the Rev. J. Stratton has pointed out, might well supersede rabbit-coursing--viz., whippet-racing. “It cannot be pleaded,” he says, “that if we were to stop the coursing of captured rabbits we should be unduly depriving workmen of recreation, for ‘whippets’ could be employed just as well in races as in chasing rabbits. Of the first of these sports I can speak as an eye-witness. In whippet-racing a course is formed, which is kept free for the dogs by ropes on either side. At one end, men have in hand the whippets that are about to compete, and here stands the starter, holding his pistol. ‘Runners-up’ now come on to the course, carrying in their hands a towel or scarf, and starting from the front of the dogs, and frantically waving the article they hold, and whistling, and calling to the animals, they begin to run towards the far end of the course, where the winning-line is marked out and the judge has taken up his post. When the right moment has arrived, the pistol is fired, and the whippets are liberated, and commence to travel the course with the speed of the wind, the ‘runners-up’ always getting well beyond the winning-point before the dogs overtake them, in order that the latter may pass it at their utmost pace. It is altogether a remarkable sight, and had I never seen the thing, I could not have believed that the little dogs would enter into the contest with the ardour they do.”

[6] My quotations are from Mr. A. B. Bullock’s translation of “The Basis of Morality,” see pp. 170, 208, 218.

SPORT AND AGRICULTURE

BY EDWARD CARPENTER

It has frequently been pointed out that the enthusiasm for “sport” is the relic of a very primitive instinct in man. In that sense it is quite natural. In early days the sheer necessity of pursuing and killing animals for food, or of hunting down and destroying beasts of prey, must have become very deeply ingrained; and the satisfaction of that need became an instinctive pleasure, so much so that oftentimes nowadays the pleasure remains, though the need has long disappeared.

In the village where I live there is a countryman of a very primitive type, who goes almost mad with excitement when the hunt is out. Though over forty years of age, he has been known more than once to leave his horses with the plough in the field and career wildly after the hounds for two or three hours on end, careless of what might happen to his deserted team. At the public-house afterwards in the evening he recounts in a shrill voice every detail of the “find” or the “kill.” “Talk about your oratorios and concerts,” he shouts, “_there’s no music, I say, like the ’ounds_!” On one occasion when the hunt was baffled by the fox getting into a narrow cleft in some rocks, and with the fall of evening the hounds had to be drawn off, this man positively remained on the spot, watching, all night; and when the huntsmen returned in the morning with a terrier, he followed the terrier as far as ever he could--head and shoulders--into the hole, helped the dog to clutch the fox, and all three--dog, fox, and man--suddenly freed, rolled together down the steep cliff-side into a stream below! Such is the force of the old instinct, and the story helps one to realise the strange conditions of sheer necessity under which primitive man lived, though in the light of actual life and the present day it is ludicrous enough, even if not revolting in its ferocity.

So far from there being any necessity in this case to rid the country-side from a beast of prey, it is quite probable that the fox in question had been imported from Germany--as a certain number undoubtedly are--simply in order to provide a country squire’s holiday! A French lady, herself very fond of riding, told me lately that in her native Burgundy foxes are still very numerous, and have to be hunted down in consequence of the damage they do; but when I informed her that our foxes are largely “made in Germany,” and brought over in order to do artificial damage and so be artificially hunted, she laughed almost hysterically--as surely she was entitled to do.

There is this futile artificiality about almost all our “sport.” It is one thing to sit all night in the lower branches of a spreading tree just outside some little Indian village, in order to get a chance of shooting the dangerous man-eating tiger as he comes forth from the jungle, and quite another to pot tame pheasants at the corner of a wood, or half-tame grouse as they fly over the “battery” in which you (and a gamekeeper) are safely ensconced. The pheasants have been reared under a barnyard hen and fed by hand till they are as tame as fowls, and the grouse can only be persuaded to fly to the guns by a quarter-mile-long line of “drivers,” who with much shouting and waving of flags compel them to rise from the heather. The gamekeeper gets his guinea tip, and you in return get the credit of a large bag secured by his kind assistance! The force of humbug could no further go. The truth is, all this modern “sport” is a simple playing at hunting and shooting.