KILLING FOR SPORT
_This volume is published by_
MESSRS. G. BELL & SONS
_for the Humanitarian League_.
KILLING FOR SPORT
ESSAYS BY VARIOUS WRITERS
WITH A PREFACE BY
BERNARD SHAW
EDITED BY HENRY S. SALT
LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET
1915
NOTE
During the past twenty-five years, chiefly owing to the action of the
Humanitarian League in giving continuity to what had previously been
only an occasional protest, the subject of certain cruel pastimes,
called by the name of “sports,” has attracted a large share of public
attention. The position of the League as regards the whole question
of “sport”--_i.e._, the diversions and amusements of the people--is
this, that while heartily approving all such fair and manly recreations
as cricket, rowing, football, cycling, the drag-hunt, etc., it
would place in an altogether different category what may be called
“blood-sports”--_i.e._, those amusements which involve the death or
torture of sentient beings.
But as it is recognised that humane reform can only come by
instalment, and that legislation cannot outrun a ripe public opinion,
the League has asked for _legislative_ action only in the case of the
worst and most demoralising forms of “blood-sports”--viz., those which
make use of a tame or captured animal, and not one that is really
wild and free. For the same reason the League pressed, and pressed
successfully, for the abolition of the Royal Buckhounds, not because
that particular hunt was in itself more cruel than others, but because
it stood as the recognised and State-supported type of a very degraded
pastime. “Your efforts have gained their reward,” wrote George Meredith
to the League on the occasion of the Buckhounds’ fall, “and it will
encourage you to pursue them in all fields where the good cause of
Sport, or any good cause, has to be cleansed of blood and cruelty. So
you make steps in our civilisation.”
But these steps in civilisation have not been easily made. It is
not as widely known as it ought to be that since the prohibition of
bull and bear baiting, more than half a century ago, there has been
practically no further mitigation of those so-called sports which in
this country absorb a great part of the thoughts and energies of the
wealthier classes. The Acts of 1849 and 1854, which prohibited the
ill-usage of domestic animals, gave no protection to animals _feræ
naturæ_, except from being “fought,” or baited; and the Cruelty to Wild
Animals in Captivity Act, of 1900, applies only to those animals that
are actually in confinement, or are released in a maimed condition to
be hunted or shot. Thus, while humane feeling has steadily progressed,
legislative action has obstinately stood still; and while we shake our
heads at the cruel sports of our great-grandfathers, we are ourselves
powerless to stop present brutalities which are as intolerable to
humane thinkers _now_ as were bull and bear baiting _then_.
In a civilised community, where the services of the hunter are no
longer required, blood-sports are simply an anachronism, a relic of
savagery which time will gradually remove; and the appeal against them
is not to the interested parties whose practices are arraigned--not
to the belated Nimrods who find a pleasure in killing--but to that
force of public opinion which put down bear-baiting, and which will in
like manner put down the kindred sports (for all these barbarities are
essentially akin) which are defended by similar sophistries.
At a time when widespread attention is being drawn to questions
concerning the land, it is especially fitting that the part played by
the sportsman should not be overlooked, and that not only the cruelty,
but the wastefulness of the practice of breeding and killing animals
for mere amusement, should be made clear.
By including in this volume a number of recent essays, the work
of several writers (each of whom is responsible only for the views
expressed by himself), it has been possible to present the subject of
sport as regarded from various standpoints, and in a fuller light than
has ever been done before. The book, in fact, is the first one in which
the humanitarian and economic objections to blood-sports have been
adequately set forth.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE. BY BERNARD SHAW xi
THE CRUELTY OF SPORT. BY GEORGE GREENWOOD, M.P. 1
SPORT AND AGRICULTURE. BY EDWARD CARPENTER 34
THE COST OF SPORT. BY MAURICE ADAMS 45
THE ECONOMICS OF HUNTING. BY W. H. S. MONCK 60
FACTS ABOUT THE GAME LAWS. BY J. CONNELL 69
THE DESTRUCTION OF WILD LIFE. BY E. B. LLOYD 85
THE CALLOUSNESS OF FOX-HUNTING. BY H. B. MARRIOTT WATSON 95
BIG GAME HUNTING. BY ERNEST BELL 101
BLOOD-SPORTS AT SCHOOLS. BY AN OLD ETONIAN 116
FALLACIES OF SPORTSMEN. BY HENRY S. SALT 130
APPENDIX BY THE EDITOR
I. SPORT AS A TRAINING FOR WAR 149
II. “BLOODING” 155
III. THE HUNTING OF GRAVID ANIMALS 158
IV. DRAG-HUNT _VERSUS_ STAG-HUNT 162
V. CLAY PIGEON _VERSUS_ LIVE PIGEON. BY THE REV. J. STRATTON 166
VI. COURSING 170
VII. THE GENTLE CRAFT 174
VIII. SPOILING OTHER PEOPLE’S PLEASURE 179
INDEX 183
PREFACE[1]
BY BERNARD SHAW
Sport is a difficult subject to deal with honestly. It is easy for
the humanitarian to moralize against it; and any fool on its side can
gush about its glorious breezy pleasures and the virtues it nourishes.
But neither the moralizings nor the gushings are supported by facts:
indeed they are mostly violently contradicted by them. Sportsmen are
not crueller than other people. Humanitarians are not more humane
than other people. The pleasures of sport are fatigues and hardships:
nobody gets out of bed before sunrise on a drizzling wintry morning
and rides off into darkness, cold, and rain, either for luxury or
thirst for the blood of a fox cub. The humanitarian and the sportsman
are often the self-same person drawing altogether unaccountable lines
between pheasants and pigeons, between hares and foxes, between tame
stags from the cart and wild ones from the heather, between lobsters
or _paté de foie gras_ and beefsteaks: above all, between man and the
lower animals; for people who are sickened by the figures of a _battue_
do not turn a hair over the infantile deathrate in Lisson Grove or the
slums of Dundee.
Clearly the world of sport is a crystal palace in which we had
better not throw stones unless we are prepared to have our own
faces cut by the falling glass. My own pursuits as a critic and as
a castigator of morals by ridicule (otherwise a writer of comedies)
are so cruel that in point of giving pain to many worthy people I can
hold my own with most dentists, and beat a skilful sportsman hollow.
I know many sportsmen; and none of them are ferocious. I know several
humanitarians; and they are all ferocious. No book of sport breathes
such a wrathful spirit as this book of humanity. No sportsman wants to
kill the fox or the pheasant as I want to kill him when I see him doing
it. Callousness is not cruel. Stupidity is not cruel. Love of exercise
and of feats of skill is not cruel. They may and do produce more
destruction and suffering than all the neuroses of all the Neros. But
they are characteristic of quite amiable and cheerful people, mostly
lovers of pet animals. On the other hand, humane sensitiveness is
impatient, angry, ruthless, and murderous. Marat was a supersensitive
humanitarian, by profession a doctor who had practised successfully in
genteel circles in England. What Marat felt towards marquesses most
humanitarians feel more or less towards sportsmen. Therefore let no
sportsman who reads these pages accuse me of hypocrisy, or of claiming
to be a more amiable person than he. And let him excuse me, if he will
be so good, for beginning with an attempt to describe how I feel about
sport.
To begin with, sport soon bores me when it does not involve killing;
and when it does, it affects me much as the murder of a human being
would affect me, rather more than less; for just as the murder of a
child is more shocking than the murder of an adult (because, I suppose,
the child is so helpless and the breach of social faith therefore so
unconscionable), the murder of an animal is an abuse of man’s advantage
over animals: the proof being that when the animal is powerful and
dangerous, and the man unarmed, the repulsion vanishes and is replaced
by congratulation. But quite humane and cultivated people seem unable
to understand why I should bother about the feelings of animals. I have
seen the most horrible pictures published in good faith as attractive
in illustrated magazines. One of them, which I wish I could forget,
was a photograph taken on a polar expedition, shewing a murdered bear
with its living cub trying to make it attend to its maternal duties. I
have seen a photograph of a criminal being cut into a thousand pieces
by a Chinese executioner, which was by comparison amusing. I have also
seen thrown on a screen for the entertainment of a large audience a
photograph of an Arctic explorer taking away a sledge dog to shoot it
for food, the dog jumping about joyously without the least suspicion
of its human friend’s intentions. If the doomed dog had been a man or
a woman, I believe I should have had less sense of treachery. I do not
say that this is reasonable: I simply state it as a fact. It was quite
evident that the lecturer had no suspicion of the effect the picture
was producing on me; and as far as I could see, his audience was just
as callous; for if they had all felt as I felt there would have been
at least a very perceptible shudder, if not an articulate protest. Now
this was not a case of sport. It was necessary to shoot the dog: I
should have shot it myself under the same circumstances. But I should
have regarded the necessity as a horrible one; and I should have
presented it to the audience as a painful episode, like cannibalism
in a crew of castaways, and not as a joke. For I must add that a good
many people present regarded it as a bit of fun. I absolve the lecturer
from this extremity of insensibility. The shooting of a dog was a
trifle to what he had endured; and I did not blame him for thinking it
by comparison a trivial matter. But to us, who had endured nothing,
it might have seemed a little hard on the dog, and calling for some
apology from the man.
I am driven to the conclusion that my sense of kinship with animals
is greater than most people feel. It amuses me to talk to animals in
a sort of jargon I have invented for them; and it seems to me that it
amuses them to be talked to, and that they respond to the tone of the
conversation, though its intellectual content may to some extent escape
them. I am quite sure, having made the experiment several times on
dogs left in my care as part of the furniture of hired houses, that an
animal who has been treated as a brute, and is consequently undeveloped
socially (as human beings remain socially undeveloped under the same
circumstances) will, on being talked to as a fellow-creature, become
friendly and companionable in a very short time. This process has been
described by some reproachful dog owners as spoiling the dog, and
sincerely deplored by them, because I am glad to say it is easier to
do than to undo except by brutalities of which few people are capable.
But I find it impossible to associate with animals on any other terms.
Further, it gives me extraordinary gratification to find a wild bird
treating me with confidence, as robins sometimes do. It pleases me to
conciliate an animal who is hostile to me. What is more, an animal who
will not be conciliated offends me. There is at the Zoo a morose maned
lion who will tear you to pieces if he gets half a chance. There is
also a very handsome maneless lion with whom you may play more safely
than with most St. Bernard dogs, as he seems to need nothing but plenty
of attention and admiration to put him into the best of humors. I
do not feel towards these two lions as a carpenter does towards two
pieces of wood, one hard and knotty, and the other easy to work; nor
as I do towards two motor bicycles, one troublesome and dangerous, and
the other in perfect order. I feel towards the two lions as I should
towards two men similarly diverse. I like one and dislike the other.
If they got loose and were shot, I should be distressed in the one
case whilst in the other I should say “Serve the brute right!” This
is clearly fellow-feeling. And it seems to me that the plea of the
humanitarian is a plea for widening the range of fellow-feeling.
The limits of fellow-feeling are puzzling. People who have it in a high
degree for animals often seem utterly devoid of it for human beings of
a different class. They will literally kill their dogs with kindness
whilst behaving to their servants with such utter inconsideration that
they have to change their domestic staff once a month or oftener.
Or they hate horses and like snakes. One could fill pages with such
inconsistencies. The lesson of these apparent contradictions is that
fellow-feeling is a matter of dislikes as well as of likes. No man
wants to destroy the engine which catches him in its cog-wheels and
tears a limb from him. But many a man has tried to kill another man for
a very trifling slight. The machine, not being our fellow, cannot be
loved or hated. The man, being our fellow, can.
Let us try to get down to the bottom of this matter. There is no
use in saying that our fellow-creatures must not be killed. That is
simply untrue; and the converse proposal that they must be killed is
simply true. We see the Buddhist having his path swept before him
lest he should tread on an insect and kill it; but we do not see what
that Buddhist does when he catches a flea that has kept him awake for
an hour; and we know that he has to except certain poisonous snakes
from his forbearance. If mice get into your house and you do not kill
them, they will end by killing you. If rabbits breed on your farm and
you do not exterminate them, you will end by having no farm. If you
keep deer in your park and do not thin them, your neighbors or the
authorities will finally have to save you the trouble. If you hold the
life of a mosquito sacred, malaria and yellow fever will not return
the compliment. I have had an interview with an adder, in the course
of which it struck repeatedly and furiously at my stick; and I let it
go unharmed; but if I were the mother of a family of young children,
and I found a cobra in the garden, I would vote for “_La mort sans
phrase_,” as many humane and honorable persons voted in the case, not
of a serpent, but of an anointed king.
I see no logical nor spiritual escape from the theory that evolution
(not, please observe, Natural Selection) involves a deliberate
intentional destruction by the higher forms of life of the lower. It
is a dangerous and difficult business; for in the course of natural
selection the lower forms may have become necessary to the existence
of the higher; and the gamekeeper shooting everything that could
hurt his pheasants or their chicks may be behaving as foolishly as
an Arab lunatic shooting horses and camels. But where Man comes, the
megatherium must go as surely as where the poultry farmer comes the fox
must go unless the hunt will pay for the fox’s depredations. To plead
for the tiger, the wolf, and the poisonous snake, is as useless as to
plead for the spirochete or the tetanus bacillus: we must frankly class
these as early and disastrous experiments in creation, and accept it
as part of the mission of the later and more successful experiments
to recognize them as superseded, and to destroy them purposely. We
should, no doubt, be very careful how we jump from the indisputable
general law that the higher forms of life must exterminate or limit
the lower, to the justification of any particular instance of the
slaughter of non-human animals by men, or the slaughter of a low type
of man by a high type of man. Still, when all due reservations are
made, the fact remains that a war of extermination is being waged daily
and necessarily by man against his rivals for possession of the earth,
and that though an urban humanitarian and vegetarian who never has
occasion to kill anything but a microbe may shudder at the callousness
with which a farmer kills rats and rabbits and sparrows and moles and
caterpillars and ladybirds and many more charming creatures, yet if he
were in the farmer’s place he would have to do exactly the same, or
perish.
In that case why not make a pleasure of necessity, and a virtue of
pleasure, as the sportsmen do? I think we must own that there is no
objection from the point of view of the animals. On the contrary, it is
quite easy to shew that there is a positive advantage to them in the
organization of killing as sport. Fox hunting has saved the existing
foxes from extermination; and if it were not for the civilization that
makes fox hunting possible, the fox would still be hunted and killed by
packs of wolves. I am so conscious of this that I have in another place
suggested that children should be hunted or shot during certain months
of the year, as they would then be fed and preserved by the sportsmen
of the counties as generously and carefully as pheasants now are; and
the survivors would make a much better nation than our present slum
products. And I go further. I maintain that the abolition of public
executions was a very bad thing for the murderers. Before that time,
we did exactly as our sportsmen now do. We made a pleasure of the
necessity for exterminating murderers, and a virtue of the pleasure.
Hanging was a popular sport, like racing. Huge crowds assembled to
see it and paid large prices for seats. There would have been betting
on the result if it had been at all uncertain. The criminal had what
all criminals love: a large audience. He had a procession to Tyburn:
he had a drink: he was allowed to make a speech if he could; and if
he could not, the speech was made for him and published and sold in
great numbers. Above all, such fair play as an execution admits of
was guaranteed to him by the presence of the public, whereas now he
perishes in a horrible secrecy which lends itself to all the abuses of
secrecy. Whether the creature slain be man or what we very invidiously
call brute, there is no case to be made against sport on its behalf.
Even cruelty can justify itself, as far as the victim is concerned, on
the ground that it makes sport attractive to cruel people, and that
sport is good for the quarry.
The true objection to sport is the one taken by that wise and justly
famous Puritan who objected to bear baiting not because it gave pain
to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. He rightly
saw that it was not important that we should be men of pleasure, and
that it was enormously important that we should be men of honor. What
the bear would have said if it had had any say in the matter can only
be conjectured. Its captors might have argued that if they could not
have made money by keeping it alive whilst taking it to England to be
baited, they would have killed it at sight in the Pyrenees; so that
it owed several months of life, with free board and lodging, to the
institution of bear baiting. The bear might have replied that if it
had not been for the bear pit in England they would never have come
to hunt for it in the Pyrenees, where it could have ended its days in
a free and natural manner. Let us admit for the sake of a quiet life
that the point is disputable. What is not disputable by any person who
has ever seen sport of this character is that the man who enjoys it is
degraded by it. We do not bait bears now (I do not quite know why);
but we course rabbits in the manner described in one of the essays in
this book. I lived for a time on the south slope of the Hog’s Back; and
every Sunday morning rabbits were coursed within earshot of me. And I
noticed that it was quite impossible to distinguish the cries of the
excited terriers from the cries of the sportsmen, although ordinarily
the voice of a man is no more like the voice of a dog than like the
voice of a nightingale. Sport reduced them all, men and terriers alike,
to a common denominator of bestiality. The sound did not make me more
humane: on the contrary, I felt that if I were an irresponsible despot
with a park of artillery at my disposal, I should, (especially after
seeing the sportsmen on their way to and from their sport) have said:
“These people have become subhuman, and will be better dead. Be kind
enough to mow them down for me.”
As a matter of fact there is always a revulsion against these
dehumanizing sports in which the killing can be seen, and the actual
visible chase shared, by human beings: in short, the sports in which
men revert to the excitements of beasts of prey. Several have been
abolished by law: among them bear baiting and cock fighting: both
of them sports in which the spectators shared at close quarters the
excitement of the animals engaged. In the sports firmly established
among us there is much less of this abomination. In fox hunting and
shooting, predatory excitement is not a necessary part of the sport,
and is indeed abhorred by many who practise it. Inveterate fox-hunters
have been distressed and put off their hunting for days by happening
to see a fox in the last despairing stage of its run from the hounds:
a sight which can be avoided, and often is, by the hunters, but which
they may happen upon some day when they are not hunting. Such people
hunt because they delight in meets and in gallops across country as
social and healthy incidents of country life. They are proud of their
horsemanship and their craftiness in taking a line. They like horses
and dogs and exercise and wind and weather, and are unconscious of the
fact that their expensive and well equipped hunting stables and kennels
are horse prisons and dog prisons. It is useless to pretend that these
ladies and gentlemen are fiends in human form: they clearly are not.
By avoiding being in at the death they get all the good out of hunting
without incurring the worst of the evil, and so come out with a balance
in their favor.
Shooting is subtler: it is a matter of skill with one’s weapons. The
expert at it is called, not a good chicken butcher, but a good shot.
When I want, as I often do, to pick him off, I do so not because I
feel that he is cruel or degraded but because he is a nuisance to me
with the very disagreeable noise of his explosions, and because there
is an unbearable stupidity in converting an interesting, amusing,
prettily colored live wonder like a pheasant into a slovenly unhandsome
corpse. But at least he does not yap like a terrier, and shake with
a detestable excitement, and scream out frantic bets to bookmakers.
His expression is that of a man performing a skilled operation with
an instrument of precision: an eminently human expression, quite
incompatible with the flush of blood to the eyes and the uncovering
of the dog-tooth that makes a man like a beast of prey. And this is
why it is impossible to feel that skilled shooting or fox-hunting
are as abominable as rabbit coursing, hare-hunting with beagles, or
otter-hunting.
And yet shooting depends for its toleration on custom as much as on
the coolness with which it has to be performed. It may be illogical to
forgive a man for shooting a pheasant and to loathe him for shooting
a seagull; but as a matter of plain fact one feels that a man who
shoots seagulls is a cad, and soon makes him feel it if he attempts
to do it on board a public ship, whereas the snipe shooter excites no
such repulsion. And “fair game” must be skilfully shot if the maximum
of toleration is to be enjoyed. Even then it is not easy for some of
us to forget that many a bird must have been miserably maimed before
the shooter perfected his skill. The late King Edward the Seventh,
immediately after his recovery from a serious operation which stirred
the whole nation to anxious sympathy with him, shot a stag, which got
away to die of just such internal inflammation as its royal murderer
had happily escaped. Many people read the account without the least
emotion. Others thought it natural that the King should be ashamed,
as a marksman, of his failure to kill, but rejected as sentimental
nonsense the notion that he should feel any remorse on the stag’s
behalf. Had he deliberately shot a cow instead, everyone would have
been astounded and horrified. Custom will reconcile people to any
atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom. The
English princess who sits on the throne of Spain goes to bullfights
because it is the Spanish fashion. At first she averted her face,
and probably gave offence by doing so. Now, no doubt, she is a
_connoisseuse_ of the sport. Yet neither she nor the late King Edward
can be classed as cruel monsters. On the contrary, they are conspicuous
examples of the power of cruel institutions to compel the support and
finally win the tolerance and even the enjoyment of persons of full
normal benevolence.
But this is not why I call shooting subtle. It fascinates even humane
persons not only because it is a game of skill in the use of the most
ingenious instrument in general use, but because killing by craft from
a distance is a power that makes a man divine rather than human.
“Oft have I struck
Those that I never saw, and struck them dead”
said the statesman to Jack Cade (who promptly hanged him); and
something of the sense of power in that boast stimulates every boy with
a catapult and every man with a gun. That is why there is an interest
in weapons fathoms deeper than the interest in cricket bats and golf
clubs. It is not a question of skill or risk. The men who go to Africa
with cameras and obtain photographs and even cinematographs of the most
dangerous animals at close quarters, shew much more skill and nerve
than the gentlemen who disgust us with pictures of themselves sitting
on the body of the huge creatures they have just killed with explosive
bullets. Shooting “big game,” like serving as a soldier in the field,
is glorified conventionally as a proof of character and courage, though
everyone knows that men can be found by the hundred thousand to face
such ordeals, including several who would be afraid to walk down Bond
Street in an unfashionable hat. The real point of the business is
neither character nor courage, but ability to kill. And the greater
cowards and the feebler weaklings we are, the more important this power
is to us. It is a matter of life and death to us to be able to kill
our enemies without coming to handgrips with them; and the consequence
is that our chief form of play is to pretend that something is our
enemy and kill it. Even to pretend to kill it is some satisfaction:
nay, the spectacle of other people pretending to do it is a substitute
worth paying for. Nothing more supremely ridiculous as a subject of
reasonable contemplation could be imagined than a sham fight in Earls
Court between a tribe of North American Indians and a troop of cowboys,
both imported by Buffalo Bill as a theatrical speculation. To see
these grown-up men behaving like children, galloping about and firing
blank cartridges at one another, and pretending to fall down dead, was
absurd and incredible enough from any rational point of view; but that
thousands of respectable middle-aged and elderly citizens and their
wives, all perfectly sober, should pay to be allowed to look on, seems
flat madness. Yet the thing not only occurred in London, but occurs now
daily in the cinema theatres and yearly at the Military Tournaments.
And what honest man dare pretend that he gets no fun out of these
spectacles? Certainly not I. They revived enough of my boyish delight
in stage fights and in the stories of Captain Mayne Reid to induce me
to sit them out, conscious as I was of their silliness.
Please do not revile me for telling you what I felt instead of what
I ought to have felt. What prevents the sport question and every
other question from getting squarely put before us is our habit of
saying that the things we think should disgust us and fill us with
abhorrence actually do disgust us and fill us with abhorrence, and
that the persons who, against all reason and decency, find some sort
of delight in them, are vile wretches quite unlike ourselves, though,
as everyone can see, we and they are as like as potatoes. You may not
agree with Mr. Rudyard Kipling about war, or with Colonel Roosevelt
about sport; but beware how you pretend that war does not interest and
excite you more than printing, or that the thought of bringing down a
springing tiger with a well-aimed shot does not interest you more than
the thought of cleaning your teeth. Men may be as the poles asunder
in their speculative views. In their actual nervous and emotional
reactions they are “members one of another” to a much greater extent
than they choose to confess. The reason I have no patience with Colonel
Roosevelt’s tedious string of rhinoceros murders in South Africa is not
that I am not interested in weapons, in marksmanship, and in killing,
but because my interest in life and creation is still greater than
my interest in death and destruction, and because I have sufficient
fellow-feeling with a rhinoceros to think it a frightful thing that it
should be killed for fun.
Consider a moment how one used to feel when an Irish peasant shot
his landlord, or when a grand duke was blown to pieces in Russia, or
when one read of how Charlotte Corday killed Marat. On the one hand
we applauded the courage, the skill, the resolution of the assassin;
we exulted in the lesson taught to tyrants and in the overthrow of
the strong oppressor by the weak victim; but we were horrified by
the breach of law, by the killing of the accused at the decree of an
irresponsible Ribbon Lodge under no proper public control, by the
execution of the grand duke without trial and opportunity of defence,
by the suspicion that Charlotte Corday was too like Marat in her lust
for the blood of oppressors to have the right to kill him. Such cases
are extremely complicated, except for those simple victims of political
or class prejudice who think Charlotte Corday a saint because she
killed a Radical, and the Ribbonmen demons because they were common
fellows who dared to kill country gentlemen. But however the cases
catch us, there is always that peculiar interest in individual killing,
and consequently in the means and weapons by which individuals can kill
their enemies, which is at the root of the sport of shooting.
It all comes back to fellow-feeling and appetite for fruitful activity
and a high quality of life: there is nothing else to appeal to. No
commandment can meet the case. It is no use saying “Thou shalt not
kill” in one breath, and, in the next “Thou shalt not suffer a witch
to live.” Men must be killed and animals must be killed: nay, whole
species of animals and types of men must be exterminated before the
earth can become a tolerable place of habitation for decent folk. But
among the men who will have to be wiped out stands the sportsman: the
man without fellow-feeling, the man so primitive and uncritical in his
tastes that the destruction of life is an amusement to him, the man
whose outlook is as narrow as that of his dog. He is not even cruel:
sport is partly a habit to which he has been brought up, and partly
stupidity, which can always be measured by wastefulness and by lack
of sense of the importance and glory of life. The horrible murk and
grime of the Pottery towns is caused by indifference to a stupid waste
of sunlight, natural beauty, cleanliness, and pleasant air, combined
with a brutish appetite for money. A _battue_ is caused by indifference
to the beauty and interest of bird life and song, and callousness to
glazed eyes and blood-bedabbled corpses, combined with a boyish love
of shooting. All the people who waste beauty and life in this way are
characterized by deficiency in fellow-feeling: not only have they none
of St. Francis’s feeling that the birds are of our kin, but they would
be extremely indignant if a loader or a gamekeeper asserted any claim
to belong to their species. Sport is a sign either of limitation or of
timid conventionality.
And this disposes of the notion that sport is the training of a
conquering race. Even if such things as conquering races existed,
or would be tolerable if they did exist, they would not be races of
sportsmen. The red scalp-hunting braves of North America were the
sportingest race imaginable; and they were conquered as easily as the
bisons they hunted. The French can boast more military glory to the
square inch of history than any other nation; but until lately they
were the standing butt of English humorists for their deficiencies
as sportsmen. In the middle ages, when they fought as sportsmen and
gentlemen, they were annihilated by small bodies of starving Englishmen
who carefully avoided sportsmanlike methods and made a laborious
business (learnt at the village target) of killing them. As to becoming
accustomed to risks, there are plenty of ways of doing that without
killing anything except occasionally yourself. The motor-cyclist
takes more trying risks than the fox-hunter; and motor-cycling seems
safety itself compared to aviation. A dive from a high springboard
will daunt a man as effectually as a stone wall in the hunting field.
The notion that if you have no sportsmen you will have no soldiers
(as if more than the tiniest fraction of the armies of the world had
ever been sportsmen) is as absurd as the notion that burglars and
garrotters should be encouraged because they might make hardier and
more venturesome soldiers than honest men; but since people foolishly
do set up such arguments they may as well be mentioned in passing for
what they are worth.
The question then comes to this: which is the superior man? the man
whose pastime is slaughter, or the man whose pastime is creative or
contemplative? I have no doubt about the matter myself, being on the
creative and contemplative side by nature. Slaughter is necessary work,
like scavenging; but the man who not only does it unnecessarily for
love of it but actually makes as much of it as possible by breeding
live things to slaughter, seems to me to be little more respectable
than one who befouls the streets for the pleasure of sweeping them. I
believe that the line of evolution leads to the prevention of the birth
of creatures whose lives are not useful and enjoyable, and that the
time will come when a gentleman found amusing himself with a gun will
feel as compromised as he does now when found amusing himself with a
whip at the expense of a child or an old lame horse covered with sores.
Sport, like murder, is a bloody business; and the sportsmen will not
always be able to outface that fact as they do at present.
But there is something else. Killing, if it is to give us heroic
emotions, must not be done for pleasure. Interesting though the
slaying of one man by another may be, it is abhorrent when it is done
merely for the fun of doing it (the sportsman’s way) or to satisfy the
envious spite of the worse man towards the better (Cain’s way). When
Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat, and when Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh
shot the Regent Murray, they were stung by intolerable social wrongs
for which the law offered them no redress. When Brutus and his
fellow-conspirators killed Cæsar, they had persuaded themselves that
they were saving Rome. When Samson slew the lion, he had every reason
to feel convinced that if he did not, the lion would slay him. Conceive
Charlotte Corday stabbing Marat as an exercise of manual and anatomical
skill, or Hamilton bringing down the Regent as a feat of marksmanship!
Their deeds at once become, not less, but more horrifying than if they
had done them from a love of killing. Jack the Ripper was a madman of
the most appalling sort; but the fascination of murder for him must
have been compounded of dread, of horror, and of a frightful perversion
of an instinct which in its natural condition is a kindly one. He
was a ghastly murderer; but he was a hot-blooded one. The perfection
of callousness is not reached until a life is sacrificed, and often
cruelly sacrificed, solely as a feat of skill. Peter the Great amusing
himself by torturing his son to death was a revolting monster; but
he was not so utterly inhuman in that crime as he was when, on being
interested by a machine for executing criminals which he saw in a
museum on his travels, he proposed to execute one of his retinue to
see how the machine worked, and could with difficulty be brought to
understand that there was a sentimental objection to the proceeding on
the part of his hosts which made the experiment impossible. When he
tortured his son he knew that he was committing an abomination. When
he wanted to try an experiment at the cost of a servant’s life he was
unconscious of doing anything that was not a matter of course for any
nobleman. And in this he was worse than abominable: he was deficient,
imbecile, less than human. Just so is the sportsman, shooting quite
skilfully and coolly without the faintest sense of any murderous
excitement, and with no personal feeling against the birds, really
further from salvation than the man who is humane enough to get some
sense of wickedness out of his sport. To have one’s fellow-feeling
corrupted and perverted into a lust for cruelty and murder is hideous;
but to have no fellow-feeling at all is to be something less than even
a murderer. The man who sees red is more complete than the man who is
blind.
The triviality of sport as compared with the risk and trouble of
its pursuit and the gravity of its results makes it much sillier than
crime. The idler who can find nothing better to do than to kill is past
our patience. If a man takes on himself the heavy responsibility of
killing, he should not do it for pastime. Pastimes are very necessary;
for though a busy man can always find something to do, there comes a
point at which his health, his sanity, his very existence may depend
on his doing nothing of the smallest importance; and yet he cannot sit
still and twiddle his thumbs: besides, he requires bodily exercise.
He needs an idle pastime. Now “Satan finds some mischief still for
idle hands to do” if the idler lets his conscience go to sleep. But
he need not let it go to sleep. There are plenty of innocent idle
pastimes for him. He can read detective stories. He can play tennis.
He can drive a motor-car if he can afford one. He can fly. Satan may
suggest that it would be a little more interesting to kill something;
but surely only an outrageous indifference to the sacredness of life
and the horrors of suffering and terror, combined with a monstrously
selfish greed for sensation, could drive a man to accept the Satanic
suggestion if sport were not organized for him as a social institution.
Even as it is, there are now so many other pastimes available that the
choice of killing is becoming more and more a disgrace to the chooser.
The wantonness of the choice is beyond excuse. To kill as the poacher
does, to sell or eat the victim, is at least to act reasonably. To kill
from hatred or revenge is at least to behave passionately. To kill in
gratification of a lust for death is at least to behave villainously.
Reason, passion, and villainy are all human. But to kill, being all the
time quite a good sort of fellow, merely to pass away the time when
there are a dozen harmless ways of doing it equally available, is to
behave like an idiot or a silly imitative sheep.
Surely the broad outlook and deepened consciousness which admits all
living things to the commonwealth of fellow-feeling, and the appetite
for fruitful activity and generous life which come with it, are better
than this foolish doing of unamiable deeds by people who are not in the
least unamiable.
G. B. S.
_March, 1914._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Copyright, George Bernard Shaw, 1914, U.S.A.
KILLING FOR SPORT
THE CRUELTY OF SPORT
BY GEORGE GREENWOOD
It is a favourite rhetorical device of the vivisectionists to divert
argument from the main question into side issues by instituting a
comparison between vivisection and the various forms of field-sports,
such as pheasant-shooting, for example. It is hardly necessary that I
should point out the futility of such controversial methods; for, as
Horace long ago taught us, there is no use in an illustration which
merely substitutes one dispute for another. Vivisection may be wrong,
though pheasant-shooting be right; while if pheasant-shooting be
wrong, it is obviously absurd to appeal to it in aid of the cause of
vivisection.
But for those who recognise that it is the duty of man to abstain
from all practices which involve cruelty to the lower animals, it is
important to consider the whole question of sport, and to endeavour to
arrive at just and logical conclusions upon the ethical issues which
are raised by its pursuit.
Here, at the outset, I think it is necessary, in order to avoid
confusion, to attempt some definition of the word “cruelty.” By so
doing we shall escape the absurdities of those who tell us that
all sport is cruel, and yet that its pursuit can, nevertheless, be
justified by other considerations. The late Professor Freeman long
ago pointed out that those who speak in this slipshod fashion are
ignorant of the very elements of logical reasoning. “Cruelty” is a
word which carries its own condemnation with it. It denotes something
which is morally unjustifiable, just as the word “lie” denotes a
morally unjustifiable falsehood. Justifiable falsehoods are not lies,
neither can a lie ever be a justifiable falsehood. For the purposes
of this paper, therefore, I am content to define “cruelty” as “the
unjustifiable infliction of pain.” I think that is better than defining
it as “the _unnecessary_ infliction of pain.” For, to take an example,
the shooting of a partridge can hardly, in any ordinary case, be looked
upon as a _necessary_ act. To define cruelty, therefore, as “the
unnecessary infliction of pain” would be to settle the question--or,
rather to beg it--in such a case, by means of a definition. It is true
that the definition which I have preferred leaves the question what is
or is not justifiable, in any given case, open for discussion; but that
is, of course, inevitable, whatever definition we may adopt.
If, then, we are compelled to say of any sport that it is cruel, we
are compelled also to admit that such sport is morally unjustifiable.
Now, sport, according to the general acceptation of that term, is of
two kinds. There are, first, sports such as cricket, football, golf,
rowing, and many others, which do not involve the taking of animal
life; and, secondly, there are the sports of hunting, coursing, and
shooting, in all their various branches, which are frequently denoted
by the compendious term of “blood-sports”; and it is with the latter
class of sports only that this essay is concerned.
Let us, therefore, examine these blood-sports, and ask ourselves in
each case whether they are cruel, and therefore unjustifiable, or
whether, notwithstanding the pain and suffering which they necessarily
involve, they are, nevertheless, justifiable forms of amusement and
recreation, such as a humane and thinking man need not scruple to
indulge in.
But before proceeding farther with the discussion, I must own that
I am not a little appalled at the audacity of undertaking such an
inquisition. For is it not the boast of our countrymen that England
is the home and the motherland of sport? What appellation does an
Englishman more ardently desire than that of “sportsman”? “A good
sportsman,” “a good all-round sportsman,” “a fine old sportsman”--what
names are more honourable than these? I have frequently heard it
said of a man that “he was always ready for a bit of sport,” and it
was generally recognised that very high praise was implied by such a
description. Fox-hunting, hare-hunting, rabbit-coursing, ferreting,
ratting, badger-baiting--it was all one to him so long as he could get
“a bit of sport”! What higher character could a Briton possibly aspire
to? No wonder the man was so popular with his neighbours, and so highly
esteemed!
And so, if we begin to question the humanity or the propriety of any of
these forms of amusement, the crushing answer invariably is, “But it’s
_sport_!” Surely that is amply sufficient! Surely that is final! What
more do you want? Sport is always excellent. Sport is an end in itself.
Sport is a god worshipped in a thousand temples throughout the length
and breadth of the United Kingdom. Let us burn incense on those altars;
let us reverently bow the knee at those shrines. Great is God Sport of
the Britishers!
Nay, does not our very Empire depend on Sport? Is it not Sport that
knits the fibres and fashions the sinews of an Imperial race? It were
almost as well, then, to speak disrespectfully of religion itself as
to speak slightingly of Sport. And yet, as philosophers, as social
students, as humanitarians, we must nerve ourselves even for this
perilous quest. We must not shrink. We must not be deterred from
pushing our investigation even into the Holy of Holies of this great
god which the people of England have set up.
And let us face our worst dangers at once. First, then, I would say
a few words about the most honoured and the most celebrated of all
our British sports, “the noble science,” as it has been called--the
glorious sport of fox-hunting.
FOX-HUNTING.
Now, fox-hunting seems to most of us almost a part of the British
Constitution. It takes rank among the best-established of our
time-honoured institutions. What would become of the glory of England,
were it not for fox-hunting? And speaking as one who in days gone by
was, so far as time and opportunity and a shallow purse allowed, a
votary of the chase, I can honestly say that the sport has more to
say for itself than some who have never fallen under the sway of its
fascination are able to realise or understand. Let us see what _can_ be
said for it.
Great and undeniable are the pleasures of the meet; great the delights
of the country-side as the hounds are thrown joyfully into cover, with
a burst of melodious chiding. What a picturesque sight! The busy,
eager, indefatigable pack; gallant steeds impatient for the coming
race, and scarlet coats lighting up the wintry woodland scene! Then
the excitement of the “find”; the still greater excitement of the cry,
“Gone away! gone away!” hounds in full cry, and the cheery blasts of
the huntsman’s horn to rally the stragglers in the rear!
And if there be anything at all which can in any way justify the
high-sounding title of “the noble science,” we may look for it now. For
the man who can ride straight to hounds and hold his own over a stiff
country must possess some qualities which are not to be despised. He
must not only be a fine horseman--and fine horsemen are few and far
between--but he must know how to combine courage with judgment, prompt
decision with sound discretion. Here for the good rider, whose heart is
in the right place, are the true pleasures of the chase.
But let us now look at the other side of the picture. It has been
a splendid run, but the end approaches. The fox has been viewed
dead-beat, painfully crawling into a hedgerow, with coat muddy and
staring, tongue hanging out of his mouth, brush trailing on the ground.
What sight more piteous can be conceived? A few minutes more and
his merciless pursuers are upon him; and, to use the words of Whyte
Melville, the Laureate of the chase,
“’Twas a stout hill-fox when we found him, but now
’Tis a thousand tatters of brown!”