rabbit-coursing, I took train on Sunday morning to Worcester
Park Station, whence a walk of about a mile leads to the field
where the entertainment is provided. Here was soon gathered
together an assembly of about three hundred ‘sportsmen,’ mostly
lads and larrikins. There was a large number of dogs, chiefly
of the ‘whippet’ breed, and many of them carefully clothed
after the manner of greyhounds. The ear was assailed by the
noise of continual barking, and the nose by whiffs from a
neighbouring sewage farm. After we had waited some little time
a van was drawn on the ground heavily laden with large shallow
hampers packed with live rabbits. Three or four of these
hampers were brought forward to the starting-point; a stout
gentleman who carried a revolver and appeared to ‘boss the
show,’ gave the order ‘to get behind the ropes,’ some juvenile
and promising bookmakers mounted stools, and the fun commenced.
“Two dogs are led to the starting-point amidst shouts of ‘I’ll
lay three to one,’ ‘I’ll lay seven to four,’ etc., quite in
the approved sporting style. A man opens a sort of trap-door
in the lid of one of the hampers, seizes one of the cowering
rabbits by the skin of the back, presents it to each dog
alternately, in order, I presume, to excite him to the utmost,
runs with it, still held in one hand by the skin of the back,
some thirty-five yards, and then flings it down, whereupon a
shot is fired from the revolver, the dogs are released and rush
madly for the prey. What follows requires some explanation.
Let it be remembered that these are, or were, wild rabbits,
among the most timorous of wild creatures; that they have
probably undergone the horrible experience of being driven from
their burrows by the ferret some days (and who shall say how
many days?) before; that they have been sent by rail to town;
that they are carted to the scene of action closely packed in
hampers; that they are, for a long time previously to being
‘coursed,’ surrounded by shouting men and barking dogs, and
that after all this, weak, dazed, and half paralysed with fear,
the victim is ‘dumped down’ in the middle of a strange field.
“The result is what might be expected. He can hardly run, and
knows not where to run. Some come straight back into the mouths
of the dogs, others make a feeble attempt to seek shelter in
the distant hedge. But the result is always the same. In a few
seconds the dogs are upon him. The first seizes him by the back
or hind-quarters; the second, overtaking the first, and not to
be balked of his share of the prey, grabs the victim by the
head and shoulders. Then ensues a tug of war, during which the
miserable rabbit is frequently more than half disembowelled
before he is taken, still alive, or half alive, from the jaws
of the dogs. Not one escapes; he is not given a chance. One
that was put down a few yards in front of two very young dogs,
who were evidently new to the business, might have got away,
but when this was seen a large dog was at once sent after the
fugitive. I am told that at North Country meetings when a
puppy is entered a rabbit is frequently mutilated by having
a leg broken or an eye put out; but I saw nothing of this at
Worcester Park.
“I should mention that I was joined by a friend from New
Malden, well known in the neighbourhood for humanitarian
efforts, and that we were at once ‘spotted’ as alien
interlopers, and looked at askance in consequence. Possibly
the result was greater caution in the management of the
proceedings. But we saw quite enough. Fifteen wretched
creatures were done to death in forty-five minutes, and the
‘sport’ goes on all day and every Sunday. I counted the steps
taken by the man who ran forward with each rabbit, and never
did they exceed thirty-five. A really wild rabbit in his own
familiar haunts might have some chance at that. But these
poor cowering things, tortured to make a hooligans’ holiday!
The mere monotony of it was sickening. And yet when a Bill is
brought into Parliament to make such abominations illegal, a
noble lord, one of the pillars of the Jockey Club, opposes
it because it ‘would affect the poorer classes far more than
themselves,’ and because it is ‘a piece of class legislation’
(Lord Durham in the House of Lords, _The Times_, March 4,
1902). Why not go back to cock-fighting and bull-baiting at
once?”[5]
Such are the sports that make England great, that strengthen the
muscles and sinews of a conquering Imperial race! Let us rejoice,
then, that we have an Hereditary Chamber, where faddists and fanatics
are unknown, to throw the ægis of its protection over the pleasures
of rich and poor alike, and where the high-souled, high-bred scions
of a time-honoured aristocracy magnanimously defend the cherished
institutions of our forefathers against the attacks both of blatant
democrats and sickly sentimentalists!
THE ETHICS OF SPORT.
It was said by a noble lord in the Upper House not long ago that
“Physical courage and love of sport have been for centuries the
distinguishing characteristics of the British race.” Is there any
necessary relation between these two things? I take leave to doubt
it--indeed, I entirely deny it--if by “sport” these “blood-sports”
are intended. But let us set beside this wonderful pronouncement the
statement of a cultivated and enlightened Englishman who was for
many years resident in Burmah. In that charming book, “The Soul of a
People,” Mr. H. Fielding writes as follows:
“It has been inculcated in us from childhood that it is a manly
thing to be indifferent to pain--not to our own pain only,
but to that of all others. To be sorry for a hunted hare,
to compassionate the wounded deer, to shrink from torturing
the brute creation, has been accounted by us a namby-pamby
sentimentalism, not fit for man, fit only for a squeamish
woman. To the Burman it is one of the highest of all virtues.
He believes that all that is beautiful in life is founded on
compassion, and kindness, and sympathy--that nothing of great
value can exist without them.”
May not our much-vaunted Christianity learn something from this
despised religion of the Buddha, first taught by Gautama on the banks
of the Ganges some six hundred years before Christ? For what is it that
Buddhism teaches us? It teaches as a first principle to do no harm
to any living thing; it teaches mercy without limit, and compassion
without stint. Of the Burmese Buddhists we read: “They learn how it is
the noblest duty of man, who is strong, to be kind and loving to his
weaker brothers, the animals.”
Contrast with that the following, taken at random from among my
newspaper cuttings (it is a paragraph from the _Morning Post_):
_June 14, 1904._
“The Carlisle Otter Hounds met at Longtown yesterday, and had
the best hunt that has taken place in the Esk for fifty years.
A splendid otter was put up at Red Scaur, and for four hours
he kept men, hounds, and terriers at bay. He left the river
several times for the woods and rocks, and ran the woods as
cunningly as a fox. Eventually, when climbing a steep rock for
a hole, he fell back exhausted into the water, and the hounds
despatched him. His body was presented to Sir Richard Graham.”
No thought of pity here for the poor wild creature, hunted, harried,
and remorselessly pursued by men and hounds for four mortal hours--in
water, through woods, over rocks, ever flying in all the agony of
fear, till the last dregs of strength are exhausted, and, on the very
threshold of the longed-for refuge, he falls, hopeless and helpless,
in the stream, where “the hounds despatched him.” Such is a “grand
otter hunt,” the best that had taken place in the Esk for fifty years!
Truly we may smile at those holy men of the Buddhists who carried bells
on their shoes in order to give warning as they walked to the little
creatures in the long grass; but for my part I own that, upon the
whole, I would far sooner be classed with these poor sentimentalists,
who have seen in their hearts the coming of that “milder day” for which
the great poet who sang of “Hartleap Well” so devoutly longed, than
with that flower of muscular Christianity, the stalwart Britisher, so
distinguished for his love of sport and his contempt for pain--his own
generally excepted!
How, then, stands this question of sport considered as a question of
ethics? A great German thinker, as we all know, believed that he had
found the very basis of morality in the sacred instinct of compassion.
I will not argue whether Schopenhauer was right or wrong in that
contention, but this, at any rate, we must all admit--namely, that
without compassion all our boasted morality would be but as sounding
brass and as a tinkling cymbal. Nay, whether it be or be not the
basis of morality, this at least is true that, without compassion, no
morality worth having could exist at all.
Let us listen for a moment to Rousseau on this matter:
“Mandeville was right in thinking that, with all their systems
of morality, men would never have been anything but monsters if
Nature had not given them _compassion_ to support their reason;
but he failed to see that _from this one quality spring all
the social virtues_ which he was unwilling to credit mankind
with. In reality, what is generosity, clemency, humanity, if
not _compassion_, applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the
human race as a whole? Even benevolence and friendship, if we
look at the matter rightly, are seen to result from a constant
compassion, directed upon a particular object; for to desire
that someone should not suffer is nothing else than to desire
that he should be happy.… The more closely the living spectator
identifies himself with the living sufferer, the more active
does pity become.”
And again:
“How is it that we let ourselves be moved to pity if not by
getting out of our own consciousness, and becoming identified
with the living sufferer; by leaving, so to say, our own being
and entering into his? We do not suffer except as we suppose
he suffers; _it is not in us, it is in him_, that we suffer.…
Offer a young man objects on which the expansive force of his
heart can act--objects such as may enlarge his nature, and
incline it to go out to other beings, in whom he may everywhere
find himself again. Keep carefully away those things which
narrow his view, and make him self-centred, and tighten the
strings of the _human ego_.”
It is upon this theme that Schopenhauer becomes so eloquent, and with
larger view even than that of Rousseau, as it seems, he brings the
lower animals within the protection of his moral system.
“There is nothing that revolts our moral sense so much as
cruelty. Every other offence we can pardon, but not cruelty.
The reason is found in the fact that cruelty is the exact
opposite of _compassion_--viz., the direct participation,
independent of all ulterior considerations, in the sufferings
of another, leading to sympathetic assistance in the effort
to prevent or remove them; whereon, in the last resort,
all satisfaction and all well-being and happiness depend.
It is this compassion alone which is the real basis of all
_voluntary_ justice and all _genuine_ loving-kindness.… There
is another proof that the moral incentive disclosed by me is
the true one. I mean the fact that _animals_ also are included
under its protecting ægis. In the other European systems of
ethics no place is found for them, strange and inexcusable as
this may appear. It is asserted that beasts have no rights;
the illusion is harboured that our conduct, so far as they
are concerned, has no moral significance; or, as it is put in
the language of these codes, that there are no duties to be
fulfilled towards animals. Such a view is one of revolting
coarseness--a barbarism of the West.… Compassion for animals is
intimately connected with goodness of character, and it may be
confidently asserted that he who is cruel to living creatures
cannot be a good man.”[6]
So wrote a young German philosopher some seventy years ago; and all
that has since happened in the world of thought has but served to
strengthen his teaching as to our duty towards the lower animals. For
since he wrote science and thought have become profoundly modified by
one of those epoch-making inductions which, at very rare intervals,
some great thinker is inspired to make. We have seen the establishment
and the almost universal acceptance of the doctrine of evolution,
involving as one of its corollaries the unity of life and the
“universal kinship” of man with his humbler brethren--or cousins, if
you will--of the animal world.
I venture, then, to offer this teaching for my readers’ consideration.
In its light I would ask them to view these questions, and if they
shall think that that light is the light of reason and truth, then to
follow it wheresoever it may lead. I do not think it will lead them to
offer fresh hecatombs upon the blood-stained altar of Sport.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] One of the strongest objections to fox-hunting consists in this,
that each season must necessarily be preceded (so at least we are told)
by the barbarities of “cub-hunting.” The slaughter of these poor little
cubs is cruel and pitiful work. Sometimes, too, a vixen falls a victim
to the hounds while her cubs are still dependent on her for their
food. No doubt an early ride on a fine September or October morning is
a pleasant thing, and the “sportsman” need not know much about what
goes on in the coverts, or trouble himself to think about it! But the
fact remains that this is a miserable and cruel form of “sport.” And
what shall we say of the practice of “digging out” a wretched fox
when, perhaps after a long run, he has sought refuge by “going to
ground”? Can anything be conceived more callous or more cowardly? Yet
educated, and, presumably, thinking men, and women too--Heaven save
the mark!--stand by and enjoy the fun! Such is the debasing effect of
“sport” upon the human mind and character!
[3] In the _Westminster Gazette_ of August 15, 1908, a woman wrote
on “The Enchantments of the New Forest,” and this is what she says:
“Anyone with a drop of sport-love in them, given a nag of some kind,
will not be a day in the forest before he finds himself chasing some
animal, alive or dead.” The sentiment is surely even more deplorable
than the grammar.
[4] It must in fairness be added that the article from which the above
extract is made was subsequently repudiated by the editor as being
“quite opposed to the line which _The Field_ has always taken.” It
seems that “by an oversight the article was inserted during the absence
of the departmental editor.” I quote it, nevertheless, as showing that
over twenty years ago the truth as to this matter had dawned upon the
mind of at least one of the leader-writers of a great sporting paper.
[5] Moreover, there is a sport which, as the Rev. J. Stratton
has pointed out, might well supersede rabbit-coursing--viz.,
whippet-racing. “It cannot be pleaded,” he says, “that if we were to
stop the coursing of captured rabbits we should be unduly depriving
workmen of recreation, for ‘whippets’ could be employed just as well in
races as in chasing rabbits. Of the first of these sports I can speak
as an eye-witness. In whippet-racing a course is formed, which is kept
free for the dogs by ropes on either side. At one end, men have in hand
the whippets that are about to compete, and here stands the starter,
holding his pistol. ‘Runners-up’ now come on to the course, carrying
in their hands a towel or scarf, and starting from the front of the
dogs, and frantically waving the article they hold, and whistling, and
calling to the animals, they begin to run towards the far end of the
course, where the winning-line is marked out and the judge has taken
up his post. When the right moment has arrived, the pistol is fired,
and the whippets are liberated, and commence to travel the course with
the speed of the wind, the ‘runners-up’ always getting well beyond the
winning-point before the dogs overtake them, in order that the latter
may pass it at their utmost pace. It is altogether a remarkable sight,
and had I never seen the thing, I could not have believed that the
little dogs would enter into the contest with the ardour they do.”
[6] My quotations are from Mr. A. B. Bullock’s translation of “The
Basis of Morality,” see pp. 170, 208, 218.
SPORT AND AGRICULTURE
BY EDWARD CARPENTER
It has frequently been pointed out that the enthusiasm for “sport”
is the relic of a very primitive instinct in man. In that sense it
is quite natural. In early days the sheer necessity of pursuing and
killing animals for food, or of hunting down and destroying beasts of
prey, must have become very deeply ingrained; and the satisfaction of
that need became an instinctive pleasure, so much so that oftentimes
nowadays the pleasure remains, though the need has long disappeared.
In the village where I live there is a countryman of a very primitive
type, who goes almost mad with excitement when the hunt is out. Though
over forty years of age, he has been known more than once to leave
his horses with the plough in the field and career wildly after the
hounds for two or three hours on end, careless of what might happen to
his deserted team. At the public-house afterwards in the evening he
recounts in a shrill voice every detail of the “find” or the “kill.”
“Talk about your oratorios and concerts,” he shouts, “_there’s no
music, I say, like the ’ounds_!” On one occasion when the hunt was
baffled by the fox getting into a narrow cleft in some rocks, and with
the fall of evening the hounds had to be drawn off, this man positively
remained on the spot, watching, all night; and when the huntsmen
returned in the morning with a terrier, he followed the terrier as far
as ever he could--head and shoulders--into the hole, helped the dog
to clutch the fox, and all three--dog, fox, and man--suddenly freed,
rolled together down the steep cliff-side into a stream below! Such is
the force of the old instinct, and the story helps one to realise the
strange conditions of sheer necessity under which primitive man lived,
though in the light of actual life and the present day it is ludicrous
enough, even if not revolting in its ferocity.
So far from there being any necessity in this case to rid the
country-side from a beast of prey, it is quite probable that the
fox in question had been imported from Germany--as a certain number
undoubtedly are--simply in order to provide a country squire’s holiday!
A French lady, herself very fond of riding, told me lately that in her
native Burgundy foxes are still very numerous, and have to be hunted
down in consequence of the damage they do; but when I informed her that
our foxes are largely “made in Germany,” and brought over in order to
do artificial damage and so be artificially hunted, she laughed almost
hysterically--as surely she was entitled to do.
There is this futile artificiality about almost all our “sport.” It
is one thing to sit all night in the lower branches of a spreading
tree just outside some little Indian village, in order to get a chance
of shooting the dangerous man-eating tiger as he comes forth from
the jungle, and quite another to pot tame pheasants at the corner of
a wood, or half-tame grouse as they fly over the “battery” in which
you (and a gamekeeper) are safely ensconced. The pheasants have been
reared under a barnyard hen and fed by hand till they are as tame as
fowls, and the grouse can only be persuaded to fly to the guns by a
quarter-mile-long line of “drivers,” who with much shouting and waving
of flags compel them to rise from the heather. The gamekeeper gets his
guinea tip, and you in return get the credit of a large bag secured by
his kind assistance! The force of humbug could no further go. The truth
is, all this modern “sport” is a simple playing at hunting and shooting.
And if it were merely playing, though it might be somewhat laughable,
there would be no need to protest. But, unfortunately, there are two
serious considerations involved, which are by no means “play” to
those concerned. One (which has been touched on elsewhere) is the
needless cruelty to the animals; the other is the serious ruin of our
agriculture and detriment to our farm populations.
The damage done by fox-hunting to fences and crops is obvious enough
to everyone. But there are other complications. In a hunting district
the tenants far and wide are invited to find homes for the puppies
which are being reared for the replenishment of the pack. It is an
ungrateful task. The puppy is a pest on the farm; it is in everybody’s
way, and it has its muzzle eternally in the milk-buckets. Its board and
lodging are not paid for; but--oh, gracious compensation!--the farmers
who “walk puppies” are given a dinner at the end of the puppy-rearing
season, and get their chance of a prize for the best exhibited. Partly
in consideration of these favours, but more because they do not want
to offend the gentry in general or their own landlords in particular,
the tenants put up with these obnoxious additions to their households.
Furthermore, as foxes must on no account be killed by private hands,
even though they are constantly raiding the farmyards, the owners of
the hunt offer compensation for fowls killed or wounded, as they also,
of course, do for fences and crops damaged.
But what a situation for any self-respecting farmer! To see a tribe
of “gentlemen and ladies” tearing over his land and making havoc of
his new-sown wheat, to find half a dozen fowls some morning with
their heads bitten off, to have his wife at her work tumbling over
an intruding puppy--and then to have to go, cap in hand, to ask for
compensation for all these things! What an unworthy position for him to
be in, and how galling to think that his life-work and the very dignity
of his profession are so lightly regarded, or that the loss of them can
be counted as easily atoned for by a few shillings.
GROWING GROUSE.
As to the grouse moors, the damage done to agriculture and to the
popular interest in connection with them--though it might not appear
obvious at first--is very considerable. A hundred years ago the moors
in my neighbourhood--as in many other parts of the country--were common
lands. The people had rights of pasture over them for their cattle
and sheep, they kept down the rabbits, using the latter largely for
food, and they were able to grow farm crops up to the very edge of
the heather. To-day these same lands--enclosed on the plea of public
benefit!--are given over to grouse. The rabbits have become to a great
extent the gamekeepers’ perquisites, and very valuable “perks” too.
They are allowed to swarm, and consequently they not only destroy what
pasturage there is on the moors, but, penetrating into the farms along
the moor edges, they damage very seriously the cereal and other crops.
I know places where I am credibly informed that a hundred years ago
oats were commonly grown, but which now are quite impossible for such
a purpose. And--such is the sway of the institution--young farmers
desiring to shoot the rabbits on their own tenancies are looked askance
at and discouraged from doing so for fear they might possibly bag a
brace of grouse! When we consider the well-known expense involved in
rearing and shooting these sacred birds, and at the same time the
damage, just described, to ordinary agriculture, we have again a
sad picture of the prevailing futility. On some farms--especially,
I believe, in Devonshire--where grouse are not concerned, but where
rabbit-shooting is a favourite recreation of the landlord class--the
spinneys and copses are allowed to become so infested with bunnies that
general farming is greatly paralyzed in consequence.