SPORT, OR AMATEUR BUTCHERY.
That particular form of recreation which is euphemistically known
as “sport” has a close historical connection with the practice of
flesh-eating, inasmuch as the hunter was in old times what the butcher
is now,--the “purveyor” on whom the family was dependent for its daily
supply of victuals. Modern sport, however, as usually carried on in
civilized European countries, has degenerated into what has been well
described as “amateur butchery,” a system under which the slaughter of
certain kinds of animals is practised less as a necessity than as a
means of amusement and diversion. Just as the youthful nobles, during
the savage scenes and reprisals of the Huguenot wars, used to seize
the opportunity of exercising their swordsmanship, and perfecting
themselves in the art of dealing graceful death-blows, so the modern
sportsman converts the killing of animals from a prosaic and perhaps
distasteful business into an agreeable and gentlemanly pastime.
Now, on the very face of it, this amateur butchery is, in one sense,
the most wanton and indefensible of all possible violations of the
principle of animals’ rights. If animals--or men, for that matter--have
of necessity to be killed, let them be killed accordingly; but to seek
one’s own _amusement_ out of the death-pangs of other beings, this is
saddening stupidity indeed! Wisely did Wordsworth inculcate as the
moral of his “Hartleap Well,”
“Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.”
But the sporting instinct is due to sheer callousness and
insensibility; the sportsman, by force of habit, or by force of
hereditary influence, cannot understand or sympathize with the
sufferings he causes, and being, in the great majority of instances, a
man of slow perception, he naturally finds it much easier to follow the
hounds than to follow an argument. And here, in his chief blame, lies
also his chief excuse; for it may be said of him, as it cannot be said
of certain other tormentors, that he really does not comprehend the
import of what he is doing. Whether this ultimately makes his position
better or worse, is a point for the casuist to decide.
That “it would have to be killed anyhow” is a truly deplorable reason
for torturing any animal whatsoever; it is an argument which would
equally have justified the worst barbarities of the Roman amphitheatre.
To exterminate wolves, and other dangerous species, may indeed, at
certain places and times, be necessary and justifiable enough. But the
sportsman nowadays will not even perform this practical service of
exterminating such animals--the fox, for example--as are noxious to the
general interests of the community; on the contrary, he “preserves”
them (note the unintended humour of the term!), and then, by a happy
afterthought, claims the gratitude of the animals themselves for his
humane and benevolent interposition.[31] In plain words, he first
undertakes to rid the country of a pest, and then, finding the process
an enjoyable one to himself, he contrives that it shall never be
brought to a conclusion. Prometheus had precisely as much reason to be
grateful to the vulture for eternally gnawing at his liver, as have
the hunted animals to thank the predaceous sportsmen who “preserve”
them. Let me once more enter a protest against the canting Pharisaism
which is afraid to take the just responsibility of its own selfish
pleasure-seeking.
“What name should we bestow,” said a humane essayist of the
eighteenth century,[32] “on a superior being who, without provocation
or advantage, should continue from day to day, void of all pity
and remorse, to torment mankind for diversion, and at the same
time endeavour with the utmost care to preserve their lives and to
promulgate their species, in order to increase the number of victims
devoted to his malevolence, and be delighted in proportion to the
miseries which he occasioned? I say, what name detestable enough
could we find for such a being? Yet, if we impartially consider the
case, and our intermediate situation, we must acknowledge that, with
regard to the inferior animals, just such a being is the sportsman.”
The excuses alleged in favour of English blood-sports in general, and
of hunting in particular, are for the most part as irrelevant as they
are unreasonable. It is often said that the manliness of our national
character would be injuriously affected by the discontinuance of these
sports--a strange argument, when one considers the very unequal, and
therefore unmanly, conditions of the strife. But, apart from this
consideration, what right can we possess to cultivate these personal
qualities at the expense of unspeakable suffering to the lower races?
Such actions may be pardonable in a savage, or in a schoolboy in whom
the savage nature still largely predominates, but they are wholly
unworthy of a civilized and rational man.
As for the nonsense sometimes talked about the beneficial effects of
those field-sports which bring men into contact with the sublimities
of nature, the dynamiters who used to cross the ocean to blow up an
English town might on this principle have justified the object of their
journey by the assertion that the sea-voyage brought them in contact
with the exalting and ennobling influence of the Atlantic.[33]
As the case stands between the sportsman and his victims, there cannot
be much doubt as to whence the benefits proceed, and from which party
the gratitude is due.
“Woe to the ungrateful!” says Michelet. “By this phrase I mean the
sporting crowd, who, unmindful of the numerous benefits we owe to the
animals, exterminate innocent life. A terrible sentence weighs on the
tribes of sportsmen--they can create nothing. They originate no art,
no industry.... It is a shocking and hideous thing to see a child
partial to sport; to see woman enjoying and admiring murder, and
encouraging her child. That delicate and sensitive woman would not
give him a knife, but she gives him a gun.”
The sports of hunting and coursing are a brutality which could not be
tolerated for a day in a state which possessed anything more than the
mere name of justice, freedom, and enlightenment. Sir Thomas More says
of his model citizens in “Utopia:”
“Nor can they comprehend the pleasure of seeing dogs run after a hare
more than of seeing one dog run after another; for if the seeing them
run is that which gives the pleasure, you have the same entertainment
to the eye on both these occasions, since that is the same in both
cases; but if the pleasure lies in seeing the hare killed and torn by
the dogs, this ought rather to stir pity, that a weak, harmless, and
fearful hare should be devoured by strong, fierce, and cruel dogs.”
To be accurate, the zest of sport lies neither in the running nor the
killing, as such, but in the excitement caused by the fact that a
life (some one else’s life) is at stake, that the pursuer is matched
in a fierce game of hazard against the pursued. The opinion has been
expressed, by one well qualified to speak with authority on the
subject, that “well-laid drags, tracked by experts, would test the
mettle both of hounds and riders to hounds; but then a terrified,
palpitating, fleeing life would not be struggling ahead, and so the
idea is not pleasing to those who find pleasure in blood.”[34]
The case is even worse when the quarry is to all intents and purposes
domesticated, an animal wild by nature, but by force of circumstances
and surroundings tame. Such are the park deer, the victims of the
sportsmen who persist in carrying on the carted stag hunt, in spite of
the abolition of the Royal Buckhounds in 1901. There is urgent need
that the laws which relate to the humane treatment of animals should be
amended, or more wisely interpreted, on this particular point, so as to
afford immediate protection to these domesticated stags, whose torture,
under the name and sanction of “sport,” has been long condemned by
the public conscience. Bear-baiting and cock-fighting have now been
abolished by legal enactment, and it is high time that the equally
demoralizing sport of hunting of tame stags should be relegated to the
same category.[35]
The same must be said of some sports which are practised by the
English working man--rabbit-coursing, in particular, that half-holiday
diversion which is so popular in many villages of the North. An attempt
is often made by the apologists of amateur butchery to play off one
class against another in the discussion of this question. They protest,
on the one hand, against any interference with aristocratic sport,
on the plea that working men are no less addicted to such pastimes;
and, on the other hand, a cry is raised against the unfairness of
restricting the amusements of the poor, while noble lords and ladies
are permitted to hunt the carted stag with impunity.
The obvious answer to these quibbling excuses is that _all_ such
barbarities, whether practised by rich or poor, are alike condemned by
any conceivable principle of justice and humaneness; and, further, that
it is a doubtful compliment to working men to suggest that they have
nothing better to do in their spare hours than to torture defenceless
rabbits. It was long ago remarked by Martin, the author of the famous
Act of 1822, that such an argument indicates at bottom a contempt
rather than regard for the working-classes; it is as much as to say,
“Poor creatures, let them alone--they have few amusements--let them
enjoy them.”
Nothing can be more shocking than the treatment commonly accorded to
rabbits, rats, and other small animals, on the plea that they are
“vermin,” and therefore, it is tacitly assumed, outside the pale of
humanity and justice; we have here another instance of the way in which
the application of a contemptuous name may aggravate and increase
the actual tendency to barbarous ill-usage. How many a demoralizing
spectacle, especially where the young are concerned, is witnessed
when “fun” is made out of the death and torture of “vermin”! How
horrible is the practice, apparently universal throughout all country
districts, of setting steel traps along the ditches and hedgerows, in
which the victims are frequently left to linger, in an agony of pain
and apprehension, for hours, or even days! Yet there are no means of
redressing these barbarities, because the laws, such as they are, which
prohibit cruelty to animals, are not designed to take any cognizance of
“vermin.”
All that has been said of hunting and coursing is applicable also--in
a less degree, perhaps, but on exactly the same principle--to the
sports of shooting and fishing. Let me quote a striking testimony to
the wickedness and injustice of sport, as exhibited in one of its most
refined and fashionable forms, the “cult of the pheasant.”[36]
“For what is it but the deliberate massacre in cold blood every year
of thousands and tens of thousands of tame, hand-reared birds who are
literally driven into the jaws of death and mown down in a peculiarly
brutal manner?... A perfect roar of guns fills the air, louder tap
and yell the beaters, above the din can be heard the heart-rending
cries of wounded hares and rabbits, some of which can be seen
dragging themselves away, with both hind legs broken, or turning
round and round in their agony before they die. And the pheasants!
They are on every side, some rising, some dropping, some lying dead,
but the greater majority fluttering on the ground wounded, some
with both legs broken and a wing, some with both wings broken and a
leg, others merely winged, running to hide, others mortally wounded
gasping out their last breath of life amidst the fiendish sounds
which surround them. And this is called _sport_!... Sport in every
form and kind is horrible, from the rich man’s hare-coursing to the
poor man’s rabbit-coursing. All show the ‘tiger’ that lives in our
natures, and which nothing but a higher civilization will eradicate.”
It does not in the least matter, so far as the question of animals’
rights is concerned, whether you run your victim to death with a pack
of yelping hounds, or shoot him with a gun, or drag him from his native
waters by a hook; the point at issue is simply whether man is justified
in inflicting any form of death or suffering on the lower races for his
mere amusement and caprice. There can be little doubt what answer must
be given to this question.