The killing of creatures for sport seems a necessity nowadays. There
is more than mere bodily vigour to be got by occasional interludes of
outdoor life, early hours, discomfort and absorption in the ways of
birds and beasts; there is actual spiritual renovation. The mere
reading about such things, in Tolstoi's _Cossacks_ and certain
chapters of _Anna Karenina_ makes one realise the poetry attached to
them; and we all of us know that the genuine sportsman, the man of
gun and rod and daybreak and solitude, has often a curious halo of
purity about him; contact with natural things and unfamiliarity with
the sordidness of so much human life and endeavour, amounting to a
kind of consecration. A man of this stamp once told me that no emotion
in his life had ever equalled that of his first woodcock.
You cannot have such open-air life, such clean and poetic emotion
without killing. Men are men; they will not get up at cock-crow for
the sake of a mere walk, or sleep in the woods for the sake of the
wood's noises: they must have an object; and what object is there
except killing beasts or birds or fish? Men have to be sportsmen
because they can't all be either naturalists or poets. Killing animals
(and, some persons would add, killing other men) is necessary to keep
man manly. And where men are no longer manly they become cruel, not
for the sake of sport or war, but for their lusts and for cruelty's
own sake. And that seems to settle the question.