The mention in a recent number of the extreme cruelty practised on
calves, has drawn forth the following statement from a correspondent,—a
clergyman in Bedfordshire:—
“A member of my family was witness to the following act of barbarity,
viz., that of plucking the feathers from a duck while yet alive. Upon
being expostulated with, the man replied that it was a common
practice,—‘we _half_ break their necks, then pluck them while they are
warm, and then finish them off.’ This act of cruelty was witnessed in
Brighton Market. If the above will at all assist you in exposing the
atrocities which are practised on the brute creation, I shall be
thankful. The public generally (save a few gross sensualists) have only,
it is to be hoped, to be told what is practised on many articles of
consumption, to make them protest against such wanton insults on God’s
workmanship.”
The only means of accounting for such irrational cruelty, is the
supposition that the offending poulterers imagine ducks to be endowed by
nature with no more feeling than feather-beds.
The savage indifference with which unappreciable agonies are
systematically inflicted upon sentient creatures, strikes us
occasionally with wonder. The police reports have lately revealed a case
which nothing but the best testimony could render credible. A
correspondent of the Times Newspaper was some weeks since walking in the
Walworth Road, when he saw several persons assembled round the shop of a
butcher; half a dozen men were endeavouring to force two bullocks into a
slaughter-house. The butcher’s journeyman struck one of the animals on
the legs with a broom handle, which had a sharp pointed spike. The door
of the slaughter-house was very narrow; the man got a rope and fixed it
tightly round the horns of the bullock, and some of them then pulled
this from the inside of the slaughter-house; the others were beating the
brute behind and pushing it on. He saw one of the butchers twisting the
animal’s tail till he doubled it up, and the bones were dislocated—at
least, he was led to think so by the right angle formed by the two
portions of the tail. The man’s hands were covered with blood which
flowed from the tail; and he rubbed the dislocated parts together, which
caused the poor animal to moan most piteously. Several of the bystanders
expressed their disgust.
The fellows were brought before the Lambeth magistrate by the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; but unfortunately the
principal witness mistook one of the offenders for another person—his
brother. The complaint, therefore, from that legal informality, broke
down.
The defendants appeared to treat the mere pulling a bullock through a
passage too small for its comfortable admission, with ropes tied to its
horns; the pushing it with goads from behind; the agonising twisting of
its tail; as matters of the most perfect indifference. In his exultation
at getting off, one of them facetiously promised the magistrate, in
answer to an expostulation as to the narrowness of the passage, “that,
to oblige his Worship, he would make the place big enough to admit a
full-grown elephant, or a hippopotamus.”
We have in former articles shown that this sort of brutality is of
everyday occurrence, and perpetrated in the regular way of business. Use
begets insensibility. We have no doubt that the poulterer and butchers
concerned in the atrocities we have detailed, are worthy men enough in
their families. They would not tear the hair out of the head of a child,
or goad a wife with a broomstick, for the world. They are most likely
tender fathers and affectionate husbands; but in the way of business, as
poulterers, and butchers, what can exceed, or what censure can be too
sharp for, their cruelty? Exposure is the only cure; and this we will
always do our part in administering.