‘An old, mange-eaten cat, driven away from its home, no doubt by its
owner, for its age and infirmities, had established itself in the
street on the doorstep of our house, where a little warmth from a
November sun came to comfort it. It is a habit of certain people who
call their selfishness sensibility to send out to be purposely lost,
the creatures which they will not take care of any longer, and do not
desire to see suffer. All the day he had sat there, piteously huddled
in a corner of a window, looking so unhappy and so humble! An object
of disgust to all the passers-by, threatened by children, by dogs, by
continual dangers, every hour more ill and feeble, eating Heaven knows
what rubbish, got with difficulty out of the gutter, he dragged out
his existence, prolonging it as best he might, trying to retard the
moment of his death. His poor head was covered with scabs and sores,
and had scarcely any fur left on it, but his eyes remained pretty, and
seemed full of thought. He had certainly felt, in all the frightful
bitterness of his lot, that last degradation of all, the inability to
make his toilette, to polish his coat, to wash and comb himself as all
cats love to do so carefully. It hurt me so to see this poor lost
animal that, after having sent him food into the street, I approached
him and spoke to him gently. (Animals soon understand kind words, and
are consoled by them.) Having been so often hunted and driven away, he
was at first frightened at seeing me near him; his first look was
timid, suspicious, at once a reproach and a prayer! Then soon
comprehending that I was there from sympathy, and astonished at so
much happiness, he addressed me in his own way: ‘Trr! Trr! Trr!’
getting up out of politeness, trying, despite his mangy state, to arch
his back in the hope that I should stroke him. But the pity I felt for
him, though great, could not go as far as that. The joy of being
caressed he was never to know again. But in compensation it occurred
to me that it would be kind to end his life of pain by giving him a
gentle, dreamful death. An hour later, Sylvester, my servant, who had
bought some chloroform, drew him gently into our stable, and induced
him to lie down on some warm hay in an osier basket which was destined
to be his mortuary chamber. Our preparations did not disturb him: we
had rolled a card into a cone-shaped form, as we had seen the
ambulance surgeon do; he had looked at us with a contented look,
thinking he had at last found a lodging and people who had pity on
him, new owners who would shelter him.
‘Despite the horror of his disease, I stooped over him and stroked
him, and, always caressing him, I induced him to lie still, and to
bury his little nose in the cone of cardboard; he, a little surprised
at first, and sniffing the strange, potent odour with alarm, ended
however in doing what I wished with such docility that I hesitated to
continue my work. The annihilation of a thinking creature is, equally
with annihilation of man, a cruel and responsible thing, and contains
the same revolting mystery. And death, besides, carries in itself so
much majesty that it is capable of giving grandeur in an instant to
the most tiny and finite creatures, as soon as its shadow descends on
them. Once he raised his poor head to look at me fixedly; our eyes
met, his with an expressive interrogation, an intense anxiety, asked
me, “What is it that you do? You whom I know so little, but to whom I
trusted—what is it that you do to me?” And I still hesitated; but his
throat inclined downwards, and his face rested on my hand, which I did
not withdraw; stupefaction had begun to steal over him, and I hoped
that he would not look at me again.
‘And yet, yes, once again! Cats, as the village people here say, have
their lives united to their bodies. In one last struggle for life his
eyes met mine; across his mortal semi-sleep he seemed now to perceive
and understand: “Ah! it was to kill me, then? Well, I let you do it!
It is too late—I sleep!”
‘In truth, I feared I had done ill. In this world, where we know
nothing surely of anything, it is not even allowed us to let pity take
this shape. His last look, infinitely sad, even whilst glazing in
death, continued to pursue me with reproach. “Why,” it said, “why
interfere with my fate? Without you I should have dragged my life on a
little longer, had a few more little thoughts. I had still strength to
jump up on a window-sill, where the dogs could not reach me; where I
was not too cold in the morning, especially if the sun shone there. I
still passed some bearable hours watching the movement in the street,
seeing other cats come and go, having consciousness of what was doing
round me, whilst now there is nothing for me but to rot away for ever
into something which will have no memory. _Now I am no more!_” Truly,
I should have recollected that the feeblest and poorest things prefer
to linger on under the most miserable conditions, prefer no matter
what suffering to the terror of being nothing, of _being no more_.’
And he cannot forgive himself an act which was meant out of kindness,
but in which the regard of the dying animal makes him see almost a
crime. This tenderness for every breathing thing, this sentiment of the
infinite, intense pity and mystery which accompany all forms of death is
ever present with him, and nothing in its hour of dissolution is too
small or too fragile, or too mean or too miserable, in his sight not to
arouse this in him.
Read only the story of the _Sorrow of an Old Galley Slave_.
This old man, who has been in prison many times, is at last being sent
out to New Caledonia. ‘Old as I am, could they not have let me die in
France?’ he says to our friend Yves (Mon Frére Yves), who is gone with
his gunboat to take a band of these prisoners from the shore to the ship
in which they are to make their voyage. Encouraged by the sympathy of
Yves in his impending exile, the old felon shows him his one treasure;
it is a little cage with a sparrow in it.
‘It is a tame bird, that knows his voice, and has learnt to sit on his
shoulder. It was a year with him in his cell, and with great
difficulty he has obtained permission to carry it with him to
Caledonia, and, the permission once obtained, with what trouble he has
made a little cage for it to travel in, to get the bits of wood and
wire necessary, and a little green paint to brighten it and make it
look pretty!
‘“Poor sparrow!” says Yves to me afterwards when he tells me this
tale. “It had only a few crumbs of prison bread such as they give to
convicts, but he seems quite happy all the same. He jumps about gaily
like any other bird.”
‘Later still, as the train reaches the transport ship, he, who has
forgotten for the moment the old man and the sparrow, passes by the
former, who holds out to him the little cage. “Take it,” says the old
prisoner, in a changed voice. “I give it to you; perhaps you may like
to use it.”
‘“No, no,” says Yves, astonished. “You know you are going to take it
with you. The bird will be your little comrade there.”
‘“Ah,” answers the old man, “he is no longer in it. Did you not know?
He is no longer here.”
‘And two tears of unspeakable grief rolled down his withered cheeks.
‘During a rough moment of the crossing the door of the cage had blown
open, the sparrow had fluttered, frightened, and in a second of time
had fallen into the sea, his wings, which had been clipped, not being
able to sustain him.
‘Oh, that moment of horrible pain! To see the little thing struggle
and sink, borne away on the tearing tide, and to be unable to do
anything to save him! At first, in a natural movement of appeal, he
was on the point of crying for help, of begging them to stop the boat,
of entreating for pity, for aid; but his impulse is checked by the
consciousness of his own personal degradation. Who would have pity on
a miserable old man like him? Who would care for his little drowning
bird? Who would hearken to his prayer?
‘So he keeps silence, and is motionless in his place while the little
grey body floats away on the frothing waves, quivering and struggling
always against its fate. And he feels now all alone—frightfully alone
for evermore, and his tears dull his sight, the slow salt tears of
lonely despair, of a hopeless old age.
‘And a young prisoner, chained to his side, laughs aloud to see an old
man weep.’
Was anything more beautiful than this ever written in any tongue?
Loti stretches to a nobler and a truer scope the _nihil humani a me
alienum puto_. To him nothing which has in it the capacity of attachment
and of suffering is alien; and it is this sentiment, this sympathy which
breathe through all his written pages like the fragrance of some pressed
and perfumed blossom. It is these which make his influence so admirable,
so precious, in an age which is choked to the throat in suffocating
egotisms and vanities, and bound hand and foot in the ligaments of a
preposterous and purblind formalism of exclusive self-adoration. Can any
reader arise from reading the page which follows without henceforth
giving at least a thought of pity to the brave beasts of the pasture who
perish that the human crowds may feed?
‘In the midst of the Indian Ocean one sad evening when the wind began
to rise.
‘Two poor bullocks remained of a dozen which we had taken on board at
Singapore, to be eaten on the voyage. These last two has been saved
for the greatest need, because the voyage was protracted and the ship
blown backward by the wicked monsoon.
‘They were two poor creatures, weak, thin, piteous to see, their skin
already broken about their starting bones by the rude shaking of the
waves. They had journeyed thus many days, turning their backs to their
native pastures, whither no one would ever lead them again; tied up
shortly by the horns, side by side, lowering their heads meekly every
time that a wave broke over them and drenched their bodies in its
chilly wash; their eyes dull and sad, they munched together at bad
hay, soaked and salted; condemned beasts, already struck off the roll
of the living, but fated to suffer long before they would be killed—to
suffer from cold, from blows, from sickness, from wet, from want of
movement, from fear.
‘The evening of which I speak was especially melancholy. At sea there
are many such evenings, when ugly, livid clouds drag along on the
horizon as the light fades, when the wind arises and the night
threatens to be bad. Then when one feels oneself isolated in the midst
of these infinite waters, one is seized with a vague terror that
twilight on shore would never bring with it even in the dreariest
places. And these two poor bullocks, creatures of the meadow and its
fresh herbage, more out of their element than men on this heaving and
rolling desert, and not having like us any hope to sustain them, were
forced, despite their limited intelligence, to endure in their manner
all this suffering, and must have seen confusedly the image of their
approaching death. They chewed the cud with the slowness of sickness,
their big, joyless eyes fixed on the sinister distances of the sea.
One by one their companions had been struck down on these boards by
their side; during two weeks they had lived alone, drawn together by
their loneliness, leaning one against another in the rolling of the
ship, rubbing their horns against each other in friendship.
‘The person charged with provisioning the ship came to me on the
bridge, and said to me in the usual formula: “Captain, they are about
to kill a bullock.”
‘I received him ill, though it was not his fault that he came on such
an errand. The slaughter of animals took place just underneath the
bridge, and in vain one turned away one’s eyes or tried to think of
other things, or gazed over the waste of waters. One could not avoid
hearing the blow of the mallet struck between the horns in the centre
of the poor forehead held down so low to the floor by an iron buckle;
then the crash of the falling animal, who drops on the bridge with a
clashing of bone upon wood. And immediately after it is bled, skinned,
cut in pieces; an atrocious, nauseous odour comes from its opened
belly, and all around the planks of the vessel, so clean at other
times, are soiled and inundated with blood and filth.
‘Well, the moment had come to slay one of the bullocks. A circle of
sailors was formed round the iron ring to which it was to be fastened
for execution. Of the pair they choose the weaker, one which was
almost dying and which allowed itself to be led away without
resistance.
‘Then the other one turned its head to follow its companion with its
melancholy eyes, and seeing that its friend was led to the fatal
corner where all the others had fallen, _it understood_; a gleam of
comprehension came into the poor bowed head, and it lowed loudly in
its sore distress. Oh, that moan of this poor, solitary creature! It
was one of the most grievous sounds that I have ever heard, and at the
same time one of the most mysterious. There were in it such deep
reproach to us, to men, and yet a sort of heart-broken resignation, I
know not what, of restrained and stifled grief, as if he, mourning,
knew that his lament was useless and that his appeal would be heard by
none. “Ah, yes,” it said, “the inevitable hour has come for him who
was my last remaining brother, who came with me from our home far
away, there where we used to run together through the grass. And my
turn will come soon, and not a living thing in the world will have any
pity either for him or me.”
‘But I who heard had pity.
‘I was even beside myself with pity, and a mad impulse came over me to
go and take his big, sickly, mangy head to rest it on my heart, since
that is our instinctive caress by which to offer the illusion of
protection to those who suffer or who perish. But truly indeed he
could look for no succour from anyone, for even I, whose soul had
thrilled with pain at the intense anguish of his cry, even I remained
motionless and impassive in my place, only turning away my eyes. For
the despair of a mere animal should one change the direction of a
vessel and prevent three hundred men from eating their share of fresh
meat? One would be considered a lunatic if one only thought of such a
thing for a moment.
‘However, a little cabin boy, who, perhaps, was also himself alone in
the world, and had found none to pity him, had heard the cry—had heard
it and been moved by it like myself to the depths of his soul. He went
up to the bullock and very softly stroked its muzzle. He might have
said to it, had he thought to do so,—
‘“They will all die too, those who are waiting to eat your flesh
to-morrow. Yes, all of them, even the youngest and strongest, and
maybe their last hour will be more terrible than yours, and with
longer pain. Perhaps it would be better for them if they too had a
blow of the pole-axe on their foreheads.”
‘The animal returned affectionately the boy’s caress, gazing at him
with grateful, kind eyes, and licking his hand.’
The cynic will demur that this compassion for cattle will not prevent
the human eater from consuming his _bœuf à la mode_, or his slice from
the sirloin, with appetite. But even if cattle must be slaughtered, how
much might their torture be alleviated were men not wholly indifferent
to it. The frightful infamies of the cattle trade on sea would be ended
were none bought after a voyage. The hideous deaths by drought and by
cold, all over the plains of South America, would be no more. No longer
would a single living bullock endure thirty agonising operations on his
quivering body, when fastened down to the demonstrating or experimenting
table of veterinary students. It is not so much death itself, when
swift, sure, almost painless, which is terrible, as it is the agony,
protracted, infinite, frightful, incalculable, which is inflicted for
the passions, the pleasure, or the profit of men.
Were such sympathy as breathes through the _Book of Pity and of Death_
largely felt, all the needless cruelty inflicted by the human race, that
mere carelessness and indifference of which the world is so full, would
gradually be reduced until it might in time cease entirely. The cruelty
of the rich to horses from mere want of thought alone is appalling. Few
know or care how their stables are managed, what is the maximum of work
which should be demanded of a horse, and what the torture inflicted by
certain methods of breaking-in and harnessing and driving. Frequently
are to be seen the advertisements by carriage-makers of ‘one-horse
broughams, warranted for hill work and to carry four persons, with, if
desired, a basket on roof for railway luggage.’ That these abominable
loads are given to one horse continually there can be no doubt, as these
announcements are frequent in all the newspapers, and never seem to
elicit any wonder or censure. A shabby and vicious economy constantly
gives, in this extravagant and spendthrift generation, a load to one
poor horse which would certainly, in a generation earlier, and
undoubtedly in a century ago, only have been given to a pair of horses
or even to two pairs with postillions. Speed, also, being insisted on,
no matter what load is dragged, the race of carriage-horses grows weaker
and weaker in build and stamina. What woman, either, in any capital of
the world, thinks for a moment of keeping her horses out in rain and
snow, motionless for hours, whilst she is chattering in some warm and
fragrant drawing-room, or dancing and flirting in some cotillon? No
attention is ever given to the preferences, tastes and affections of
animals, which yet are undoubtedly of great strength and tenacity in
them, not only towards their owners, but often, also, towards their own
kind. I am, at the present moment, driving a mare who was always driven
with her sister, who died eighteen months ago. She does not forget her
sister, and the stable companion given her instead she hates, and
endeavours, with all her might, to kick and bite across the pole and in
the stalls. I owned also a pony so attached to his comrade that they
could live in the same loose-box together, and when the companion died,
this pony was miserable, whinnied and neighed perpetually, lost health,
and in a few months died also. In life he was the humble and devoted
slave of his brother, would fondle him, clean him, follow him about in
all directions, and show to him every testimony of affection possible in
one creature to another. Yet such feelings as these, although very
common in animals, are never remembered or considered for an instant,
and animals of all kinds are sold from owner to owner, and hustled from
place to place, with no more regard than if they were chairs and tables.
What they suffer from strange voices, new homes, and unfamiliar
treatment no one inquires, for no one cares. Convenience and profit are
all which are considered. There is little or no remembrance of the
idiosyncrasy of each creature. The ecstatic, ardent, nervous temperament
of the dog; the timid, imaginative, impulsive mind of the horse; the
shrinking shyness of the sheep, the attachment to place and people of
the wildest or silliest creature when once kindly treated and long
domesticated—all these things are never recollected or considered in
dealing with them. Hard and fast rules are laid down for them, by which
they, in their various ways, are forced to abide. Their natural
instincts and desires are treated as crimes, and their longings and
preferences are unnoticed or thwarted. Who ever thinks of or cares for
the injustice and cruelty concentrated in that single phrase, ‘_The
hounds were whipped off_,’ or its pendant, ‘_The fox was broken up_,’
etc., etc.? They are sentences so common, and so often used, that the
horrible cruelty involved in them has altogether passed out of notice.
Men and women grow up amidst cruelty, and are so accustomed to it, that
they no more perceive it than they do the living organisms in the air
they breathe or in the water they drink. Were it otherwise they could
not walk down Ludgate Hill or up Montmartre without unbearable pain.
The grief of the ox driven from his pastures, of the cow divided from
her calf, of the dog sent away from his master, of the lion torn from
his desert or jungle, of the ape brought to die of nostalgia in cold
climes, of the eagle chained down in inaction and gloom, of all the
innumerable creatures taken from their natural life or their early
associations, because the whim, the appetite, the caprice, the pleasure
or the avarice of men is gratified or tempted by their pain, never moves
anyone to pity. They are ‘subject-creatures’ in the human code, and what
they may suffer, or may not suffer, is of no import; of less import even
than the dying out of the Maoris, or the dwindling away of the Red
Indian tribes, or the death of African porters on the caravan routes.
It is said that there is less cruelty now than in earlier times, because
some public spectacles of cruelty have been put down in many countries.
But since this age is the most exacting in small things, the most
egotistic, the most silly, and the most nervous which the world has
seen, it is probable that its increased interference with animal
liberty, and its increased fear of them (not to mention its many
increased means of animal destruction and torture, whether for sport or
experiment) have diminished their freedom and multiplied their
sacrifice. Freedom of choice and act is the first condition of animal as
of human happiness. How many animals in a million have even relative
freedom in any moment of their lives? No choice is ever permitted to
them; and all their most natural instincts are denied or made subject to
authority.
If old pictures and old drawings and etchings are any criterion of the
modes of life of their own day, there can be no doubt that animals were
much freer and much more intimately associated with men in earlier times
than they are now. In their representations we see no banqueting scene
without the handsome dogs stretched upon the rushes or before the daïs;
no village fair without its merry mongrels running in and out between
the rustics’ legs: no triumph of emperor or ceremonial of cardinal or
pope without the splendid retriever and the jewel-collared hound: in the
pictures of the Nativity the animals are always represented as friendly
and interested spectators; in scenes from the lives of saints the
introduction of animals wild and tame are constant; therefore, as we
know that all these old painters and etchers depicted invariably what
they saw around them, it is certain that they were accustomed to see in
their daily haunts animals made part and parcel of men’s common life.
Those animals were roughly treated, may be, as men themselves then were,
but they were regarded as comrades and companions, not as alien
creatures to be despised and unremembered except for use and profit.
When the knight offered up his falcon his heart was rent, as in parting
from a brother most beloved.
It is a fearful thought that were not animals considered to contribute
to the convenience, the profit and the amusement of men, they would not
be allowed to live for a half-century longer. They would be destroyed as
ruthlessly as the buffalo of the United States of America has already
been, and all birds would be exterminated as well without remorse. There
is no honour, no decency shown in the treatment of animals and birds by
men. When Menelek sent, as a gift to Carnot, his two tame young lions,
who had been free in his rude African palace, and were only eighteen
months old, the receiver of the gift could give them nothing better than
a narrow cage in the Jardin des Plantes.
Even the lovely plumage and the great agricultural utility of the
thistle-seed-eating goldfinch does not save him from being trapped,
shot, poisoned, caged, as the ignorance, greed, or pleasure of his human
foes may choose. Nothing is too large or too small, too noble or too
innocent, to escape the rapacity, the brutality, and the egotism of men;
and in the schools all the world over there is never a syllable said
which could by suggestion or influence awaken the minds of the attendant
pupils to a wider, gentler, and truer sense of the relations of animals
and birds to the human race. Indeed, it would be almost ridiculous to
attempt to do so when no princeling makes a royal visit or an Eastern
tour without slaughtering, by hundreds and by thousands, tame birds and
untamed beasts; when in every market and every shambles the most
atrocious suffering is inflicted openly and often needlessly; when the
imperial and royal persons find their chief diversion and distraction in
rending the tender flesh of hares and pheasants, of elk and chamois with
shot and bullet; and when the new scientific lexicons opened to them
teach children how to make a white rabbit ‘blush’ by the severance of
certain sensitive nerves, and bid them realise that in the pursuit of
‘knowledge,’ or even of fantastic conjecture, it is worthy and wise to
inflict the most hellish tortures on the most helpless and harmless of
sentient creatures. To sacrifice for experiment, or pleasure, or gain,
all the other races of creation, is the doctrine taught by precept and
example from the thrones the lecture-desks, the gunrooms, and the
laboratory-tables of the world. It is not a doctrine which can make
either a generous or a just generation. Youth is callous and selfish of
itself, and by its natural instincts; and all the example and tuition
given from palace, pulpit and professorial chair are such as to harden
its callousness and confirm its selfishness.
Even the marvellous sagacity, docility and kindness of the elephant do
not protect him from being slain in tens of thousands, either for the
mere value of his tusks, or for the mere pleasure and pride taken by men
in his slaughter. Even so inoffensive a creature as the wild sheep of
the hills of Asia is mercilessly hunted down and shot by European
sportsmen, although his carcass is absolutely of no use or value
whatever when found, and it is usually lost by the shot creature falling
down a precipice or into some inaccessible nullah. Nearer at home the
chamois and ibex have been so treated that they will ere long be extinct
on the European continent. To wild creatures there is no kind of
compassion or of justice ever shown. I have known an officer relate
without shame how, when he was once sleeping in a tent on the plains of
India, a leopard entered between the folds of the canvas, and as he
awoke stood still and looked at him, then quietly turned round and went
out again; he stretched out his arm for his revolver, and shot, as it
passed out into the air, the creature which had spared him. There is no
decency, no common ordinary feeling or conscientiousness, in men in
their dealings with animals. They publish their advertisements without
compunction of ‘geldings’ and ‘bullocks,’ and inflict castration
wholesale whenever they deem it to their profit or convenience to do so,
whether their prey be a bull or a cock, a colt or a puppy. When the
gourmand feels his ‘belly with fat capon lined,’ the atrocious suffering
by which the capon has been swollen to unnatural obesity never troubles
him for a moment, nor when he eats his pâté de Strasbourg has he any
feelings or remembrance for the geese with their webbed feet nailed down
to the boards before the sweltering fires.
England has lately lamented the loss of a young man of royal birth, and
of gentle and kindly disposition, who died under circumstances which
touched the national sentiment. Yet the Duke of Clarence, of whom it was
said that he would not have willingly wronged a living being, passed his
last days on earth, the days in which he already felt the chills and
languor of impending sickness, in the slaughter of tame birds. There is
something shocking in the thought that, during the last hours in which
an amiable youth enjoyed the gladness of the air and the freedom of the
woods, he should have been solely occupied in taking the life of
innocent and happy creatures, reared merely to offer this miserable
diversion to him and his. This degraded sport, the curse, the shame and
the peril of England, has never had passed on it a commentary more
severe, a sarcasm more scathing than the words, ‘_There will be no
shooting until after the royal funeral_,’ which were announced at, and
of, innumerable country-house parties; the sacrifice of the idolised
amusement being emphasised as the most complete expression of woe and
regret possible to the nation. It would be ridiculous, were it not
sickening, that in a land where men prate from morning till night of
public duty, and make boast of their many virtues, public and private,
no shame is attached to the shameful fact that all its gentlemen of high
degree, all its males who have leisure and large means, find no other
pursuit or pleasure possible in autumn and winter than the innocent
slaughter or maiming of winged creatures, reared merely to furnish them
with such diversion.
It is inconceivable that reasonable beings, who claim to exercise
preponderance in the influence and direction of public affairs, should
not perceive how injurious and debasing as an example is this foolish
and cruel pursuit which they have allowed to obtain over them all the
force of habit, and all the sanctity of a religion. Common rights are
sacrificed, harmless privileges abolished, old paths blocked, pleasant
time-consecrated rights of way are forbidden through copse and furze and
covert, all wild natural woodland life is destroyed by the traps,
poisons and guns of the keepers and their myrmidons, and incessant
torture of woodland animals, and incessant irritation of rural
populations go on without pause or check, in order that princes,
gentlemen and _rastaquouères_ may pass week after week, month after
month, year after year, in this kind of carnage which is delightful to
them, and at which their women unashamed are encouraged to assist.
‘Walking with the guns’ has now become a favourite and fashionable
feminine amusement. In the middle of the day both sexes indulge in those
rich dishes and stimulating drinks, which are their daily fare, and
carry typhoid fever into their veins; and after luncheon, replete and
content, they all return to the organised slaughter in the leafless
woodlands, or the heather-covered moors, or the ‘happy autumn fields.’
The gladiatorial shows of Rome might be more brutal, but were at least
more manly than this ‘sport,’ which is the only active religion of the
so-called ‘God-serving classes.’ It is hereditary, like scrofula; the
devouring ambition of the baby-heir of a great house is to be old enough
to go out with the keepers; and instinct against such slaughter, if it
existed in his childish soul, would be killed by ridicule; example,
precept and education are all bent to one end, to render him a slayer of
creatures wild and tame. If he make later on the tour of the world, his
path over its continents will be littered by dead game, large and small,
from the noble elephant to the simple wild sheep, from the peaceful and
graminivorous elk to the hand-fed pheasant. There is no escape for him;
even if he have little natural taste for it, he will affect to have such
taste, knowing that he will otherwise be despised by his comrades, and
be esteemed a _lusus naturæ_ in his generation. He will not dare to be
‘odd’; the gun is the weapon of the gentleman, as in other days was the
rapier or the sword; the gunroom is his _Academe_; he is learned in the
choice of explosive bullets, and can explain precisely to any fair
companion the manner in which they rend and tear the tender flesh of the
forest animals.
Read this exploit of sport, printed by a Mr Guillemard, apparently
without the slightest sense of shame. He is in the pursuit of ‘bighorn’
(_ovis nivicola_), animals, perfectly innocent and harmless, living in
the wilds of Kamschatka.
‘One, which appeared to carry the best horns, was more or less hidden
by some rocks, but the other stood broadside on upon a little knoll,
throwing up his head from time to time.... Resting my rifle on the
ground, I took the easier shot. There was no excuse for missing, and
as the bullet _made the well-known sound dear to the heart of the
sportsman, I saw that it had broken the shoulder_, and the animal,
staggering a yard or two, fell over seawards and was lost to view.’
It is lost irrevocably. The joy of having slaughtered him is not,
however, the less.
A little farther on the sportsman suddenly comes upon ‘a very much
astonished bighorn; a fine old ram of the fifth or sixth year.’
‘I fired almost before I was conscious of it, but not a moment too
soon, for the beast was in the act of turning as I touched the
trigger. It was his last voluntary movement, and the next instant he
was rolling down the precipice.... _The fun was not yet over_, for,
perched upon a bare pinnacle, stood another of our quarry. The animal
had been driven into a corner by some of our party on the cliff above.
The next instant, after a vain but desperate effort to save himself,
he was whirling through four hundred feet of space.... On going up to
him I found one of the massive horns broken short off, and the whole
of the hind quarters shattered into a mass of bleeding pulp.... Our
decks were like a butcher’s shop on Boxing Day.’
And the scene seems so beautiful to him that he photographs it.
This is the tone which is general and which is considered becoming when
speaking or writing of the brutal slaughter of harmless creatures. No
perception of its disgusting callousness, its foul unseemliness, ever
visits writer or reader, speaker or hearer.
When men kill in self-defence it is natural; when they kill for food it
is excusable; but to kill for pleasure and for paltry pride is vile. How
long will such pleasure and such pride be the rule of the world? They
give the strongest justification that Anarchists can claim. If the heart
of Tourguenieff could be put into every human breast, the quail would be
a dear little feathered friend to all; but as the world is now made, the
story of Tourguenieff’s quail would be read in vain to deaf ears, or, if
heard, would be drowned in peals of inane laughter. Could that sense of
solidarity of community between animals and ourselves, which is so
strongly realised by Pierre Loti, be communicated to the multitude of
men, cruelty would not entirely cease, because men and women are
frequently horribly cruel to each other, and to dependents, and to
children, and to inferior and subject human races, but cruelty to
animals would then be placed on the same plane as cruelty to human
beings, would be regarded by society with loathing, and punished by the
severity of law, as cruelty in many forms to human creatures is now
punished. Whereas, now not only are all punishments of cruelty, other
than to man, so slight as to mean hardly anything at all, in fact,
totally inefficient and wholly inadequate,[J] but the vast mass of
cruelty to animals, the daily continual brutal offences against them of
their owners and employers, is placed, perforce, entirely out of reach
of any punishment whatsoever.
-----
Footnote J:
A footman of Lord Darnley’s was sentenced to pay £2 by the Rochester
magistrates for having killed a dog by heaping burning coals on it!
This in the end of the year 1894.
-----
A man can chain up his dog in filth and misery; the rider may cut his
horse to pieces at his caprice; the woman may starve and beat her cat;
the landowner may have traps set all over his lands for fur and feather;
the slaughterer of cattle may bungle and torture at his pleasure; the
lady may wear the dead bodies of birds on her head and on her gown; the
mother may buy puppies and kittens, squirrels and marmosets, rabbits and
guinea-pigs, to be the trembling plaything of her little children,
tormented by these in ignorance and in maliciousness till death releases
the four-footed slaves; all these and ten thousand other shapes and
kinds of cruelty are most of them not punishable by law. Indeed, no law
could in many instances find them out and reach them, for the cruelty
often goes on behind the closed doors of house and stable, kennel-yard
and cattleshed, nursery of the rich and garret of the poor. No law can
reach it in its aggregate; law is indeed, as it stands, poor and meagre
everywhere, but cruelty could not, by any alteration of it, be really
abolished. To be eradicated, it must become a revolting thing in the
eyes of men; it must offend their conscience and their love of justice.
It would do this in time, could such a sense of unison with animals as
is the inspiring motive of the _Book of Pity and of Death_ become
general in humanity. There is little hope that it ever will, but the
world would be a lovelier dwelling-place if it could be so.
Rome, it is tritely said, had no monument to Pity. Yet it was the Romans
by whom the man was stoned who slew the dove which sought refuge in his
breast. The multitudes of the present day are, all over the world, below
those Romans in sentiment. Their farmers shoot even the swallows which
build confidingly beneath the eaves of their roofs. Their gentry cause
to be trapped and slain all the innocent birds which shelter and nest in
their woods. The down of jays’ breasts flutters on the fans of their
drawing-room beauties, and _lophophores_ and _colibri_ sparkle in death
upon their hair. If in a mob of Londoners, Parisians, New Yorkers,
Berliners, Melbourners, a dove fluttered down to seek a refuge, a
hundred dirty hands would be stretched out to seize it, and wring its
neck; and if any one with the pity of old Rome tried to save and cherish
it, he would be rudely bonneted, and mocked, and hustled amidst the
brutal guffaws of roughs, lower and more hideous in aspect and in nature
than any animal which lives. There is no true compassion in that crowd
of opposed yet mixing races which, for want of a better word, we call
the modern world. There is too great a greed, too common a selfishness,
for the impersonal and pure feeling to be general in it. Yet, as
children are born cruel, but may often be taught, by continual example
and perception, kindness and self-sacrifice, so perchance might the
multitudes be led to it were there any to teach it as Francis of Assisi
taught it in his generation, were there any to cry aloud against its
infamy with the force and the fervour of a Bruno, of a Bernard, of a
Benedict.
St Francis would have walked with Loti hand in hand, through the
olive-trees, with the good wolf between them; and what beautiful things
the trio would have said to each other!
But the Churches have never heeded the teaching of Assisi; they have
never cared for or inculcated tenderness to the other races of creation
in which, whether winged or four-footed, the preacher of Assisi
recognised his brethren. They have been puffed up with the paltry pride
of human self-admiration; and they are now being outbid and outrun in
influence and popularity by the teachers of that still more brutal, more
narrow, and more vainglorious creed which calls itself science, in which
as many crimes are perpetrated as in the name of liberty.
As all religions reign awhile, then pass and perish, so will the reign
of science; but very possibly not before its example and demands will
have destroyed on the face of the planet all races except man, who in
his turn will become nought on the exhausted surface of a dead earth.
Meantime, whilst those whom we call inferior creatures are still with
us, while the birds people the air which would be so empty without them,
and the beasts live around us with their pathetic eyes, their wise
instincts, their long, patient, unrewarded forbearance, we are nearer to
the secret mystery of life when we feel, with Francis and with Loti, the
common soul which binds ourselves and them, than when we stand aloof
from them in a puffed-up and pompous vanity, or regard them as the mere
chattels and chores of a bondslave’s service.