regard to the reports that appeared in the _Eton College Chronicle_ of
the “breaking up” of hares and the “blooding” of hounds. “The phrases
in question,” he said, “are among those current in sporting papers,
and I regret that they should have found their way into the pages of
the _Eton College Chronicle_, being objectionable in sound, and liable
to misinterpretation. I understand, however, that these phrases do not
imply anything more than that the dead hare is devoured by the hounds.”
This led to a pertinent inquiry in the press, whether the Eton boys
were in the habit of hunting “a dead hare.” The cruelty of the sport
obviously consists less in the actual killing of the hunted animal
than in the prolonged torture of the hunt that precedes the death--the
“bustling” which, as we have seen in the extracts from the _Eton
College Chronicle_, often renders the panic-stricken little animal
“dead beat,” “absolutely stiff,” “so done that it cannot stand.” And,
really, if the boys are encouraged to _do_ this thing, it is a somewhat
dubious morality which is content with forbidding them to _speak_ of
it! “Objectionable in sound” such practices are, beyond question; but
are they not also somewhat objectionable in fact?
Thus, while on the one side Dr. Warre hardened his heart and would not
lay a sacrilegious finger on the time-honoured institution which had
been forbidden in the Statutes of the Founder, humanitarian feeling,
on the other side, became more and more aroused, and memorial after
memorial was presented to the Eton authorities, suggesting that,
“as there is now an increasing tendency among teachers to inculcate
a more sympathetic regard for animals, it is desirable that Eton
College should no longer stand aloof from this humane spirit.” It is
significant of the growth of public opinion on this subject that,
whereas, some twenty years ago, the very existence of the Eton Hunt
was unknown to many except Etonians, we now find among the signatures
appended from time to time to these memorials such diverse names
as those of Mr. Herbert Spencer, Archbishop Temple, the Bishops of
Durham, Ely, and Newcastle, Dr. Clifford, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. William
Watson, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Sir A. Conan Doyle, Sir John Gorst, Sir
Frederick Treves, and Lord Wolseley, also a number of heads of colleges
at Oxford and Cambridge, the headmasters of numerous grammar schools
and training colleges, officials of the branches of the Royal Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and many distinguished clergy
and laymen, representative of almost every shade of opinion.[23]
When it was known that Mr. Lyttelton was to be Dr. Warre’s successor
in the headmastership of Eton, it was thought probable that his
notorious humanitarian sympathies would lead him to the desired reform;
but these expectations proved to be too sanguine. The immense stability
of an “old institution,” in so conservative a stronghold as Eton, is a
fact that must be reckoned with; for Eton is not like Rugby, where a
reforming headmaster might venture, as Dr. Arnold did, to sweep away at
a stroke an ancient sporting custom which had nothing but its age to
recommend it. We all know the passage in “Tom Brown’s Schooldays”--the
speech of “old Brooke”--where Arnold’s abolition of the Rugby Beagles
is incidentally referred to:
“A lot of you think and say, for I’ve heard you, ‘There’s this
new doctor hasn’t been here so long as some of us, and he’s
changing all the old customs.…’ But come, now, any of you, name
a custom that he has put down.
“‘The hounds,’ calls out a fifth-form boy, clad in a green
cutaway, with brass buttons, and cord trousers, the leader of
the sporting interest.
“Well, we had six or seven mangy harriers and beagles, I’ll
allow, and had had them for years, and the doctor put them
down. But what good ever came of them? Only rows with all the
keepers for ten miles round; and big-side Hare and Hounds is
better fun ten times over.”
If we compare this passage with the report of Mr. Lyttelton’s address
to the Eton boys at the commencement of his headmastership, in which
he frankly avowed his own “strong opinions” on the subject of the
hare-hunt, but added that he did not hold these views in his boyhood,
and did not see why he should force them on the boys, we see the
difference, not so much between an Arnold and a Lyttelton, as between a
Rugby and an Eton. It is doubtful if even an Arnold could have safely
flouted Etonian susceptibilities in this matter of worrying hares with
hounds. The reason given by Mr. Lyttelton for allowing the hare-hunt to
continue is that all legislation which outstrips “public opinion” is
injurious and unwise, by which he presumably means the “public opinion”
of Eton itself--for it is certain enough that public opinion outside
Eton would bear the disappearance of the hare-hunt with equanimity--and
undoubtedly Eton opinion, to those who dwell under the shadow of
the “antique towers,” is a matter of serious consideration, however
medieval it may be. It is a curious fact that the large majority of
Etonians, though nowadays a bit ashamed of the ram-hunt and other
sporting pleasantries of a bygone period, do not in the least suspect
that their beloved hare-hunt belongs in effect to the same category of
amusement. Thus, Sir H. Maxwell Lyte, in his history of the school,
referring to the earlier barbarities, remarks that “it is evident that
in the time of Elizabeth cruelty to animals was not counted among the
sins for which penitents require to be shriven.” But what, it may be
asked, of the time of George V.? It is entertaining to find the _Eton
College Chronicle_ itself referring to the ram-hunt of the eighteenth
century as a “brutal custom,” and remarking that Etonians were “once so
barbarous.” Once!
MORAL INSTRUCTION OF THE YOUNG.
The value of the moral instruction given at Eton, as far as the duties
of mankind towards the lower races are concerned, may be estimated
from the following sentiment of an Eton boy, quoted from a letter of
dignified remonstrance addressed to the interfering humanitarians: “A
hare is a useless animal, you must own, and the only use to be made of
it is for the exercise of human beings.” It will be seen that Etonian
philosophy is still decidedly in the anthropocentric stage. It is not
easy, even for the most progressively minded headmaster, to make any
immediate impression on such dense and colossal prejudice.
But let us at least take courage from the fact that the ram-hunt is
no more, that the college cook no longer hangs up a live crow to be
pelted to death on Shrove Tuesday, and that the Eton boys are not now
invited to indulge in the manly sports of bull-baiting, dog-fighting,
and cat-hunts. These recreations have gone, never to return, and it is
equally certain that, sooner or later, the hare-hunt will also have to
go. It is not to be supposed that Mr. Lyttelton, who is keenly alive
to the best and most humane tendencies of the age, is insensible to
the discredit which Eton incurs by thus prolonging into the twentieth
century a piece of savagery which Rugby, Harrow, and the other great
public schools have long outgrown and abandoned; or that he does not
feel the sting of Mr. W. J. Stillman’s remark that “the permission
given to the boys of Eton to begin their education in brutality,
when they ought to be learning to say their prayers, is the crowning
disgrace of all the educational abuses of a nation which instituted the
Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.”
To those, of course, who regard blood-sports as not only a proper
pastime for men, but a desirable recreation for schoolboys, and
a fit form of training for military service, the whole protest
against the Eton hare-hunts must needs seem ridiculous; but even
these thoroughgoing sportsmen will have to admit that the trend of
public opinion is against them, else why does Eton now stand alone
among public schools in this matter? If the reasoning of the Etonian
apologists be sound, the _absence_ of Beagles at Rugby, Harrow, and the
other great schools, is a glaring defect in their system which ought
speedily to be remedied; yet we have not heard that any enthusiast
has gone so far as to suggest that the schools which have long since
abandoned hare-hunting should now make a return to it, and short of
this complete approval of the sport the excuses put forward on its
behalf are about as feeble as could be imagined.
It cannot, for instance, be seriously argued that boys whose
studies are notoriously endangered by the very numerous athletic
exercises--cricket, rowing, football, fives, racquets, running,
etc.--in which they are able to indulge, are in need of yet another
pastime in the form of hunting hares. Granted that it would be
inadvisable for the school authorities to preach advanced humanitarian
doctrines to boys whose family traditions and prejudices they are bound
to consider, still, it is not necessary to go to the other extreme
of encouraging them in familiarity with sights and scenes which must
tend to deaden the sense of compassion. From the moral standpoint,
blood-sports cannot be regarded in quite the same light as athletic
exercises; and there are many persons nowadays who, without raising
the question of the morality of field sports for adults, think that
the license given to young boys to spend their half-holidays in the
“breaking up” of hares is as great a stain on the English public-school
system as any of the admitted “immoralities” by which that system is
undermined.
There is, in the opinion of humanitarians, a grave inconsistency
between the insistence of preachers and teachers on the duty of
kindness and consideration, and the sanction accorded by the school
authorities to practices the very reverse of these. Unconsciously,
perhaps, but none the less surely, the youthful minds which are trained
under such influences are affected in their turn, and learn to conform
superficially to maxims of piety and honour, while practically in their
own lives they are setting those virtues at defiance.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] It should not be forgotten that hare-hunting is also carried on
by our naval cadets. Here is an extract from the _Naval and Military
Record_ of March 1, 1906, describing a run with the Dartmouth
(“Britannia”) Beagles: “Just outside the covert a hare was moved in the
ploughing by hounds, and gave a most exciting chase around two fields,
and when killed was found to have only three legs.” A fine sport for
our future naval officers!
[23] It is also worthy of note that a memorial against the Dartmouth
Beagles, presented to the First Lord of the Admiralty by the
Humanitarian League in 1907, was signed by no fewer than twenty-five
headmasters of public schools. As a result of the League’s protests,
the grant of public money for the maintenance of this sport was
withdrawn.
SPORTSMEN’S FALLACIES
BY HENRY S. SALT
Everyone knows the old story of the Wildgrave, that spectral huntsman
who, for the wrongs done by him in the past to his suffering
fellow-creatures, was doomed to provide nightly sport for a troop of
ghostly pursuers.
“The Wildgrave flies o’er bush and thorn,
With many a shriek of helpless woe;
Behind him hound, and horse, and horn,
And ‘Hark away!’ and ‘Holla ho!’”
If we may judge by the signs of the times, a similar fate has now
overtaken the modern sportsman, who finds to his dismay that his proud
vocation no longer goes unchallenged, but that he is compelled to
stand on his defence before the force of ethical opinion, and to play
the part less of the pursuer than of the pursued. Nowadays it is the
humanitarians who, in the intellectual discussion of sport, derive keen
enjoyment from the “pleasures of the chase,” and having “broken up” the
Royal Buckhounds after a ten years’ run, are hunting the sportsman from
cover to cover, from argument to argument.
The sportsman, in fact, is now himself standing “at bay”; and it may
be worth while to consider what value, if any, attaches to the excuses
commonly put forward by him in justification of his favourite pastime.
On what moral grounds are we asked to approve, in this twentieth
century, such seemingly barbarous practices as the hunting to death
of stags, foxes, and hares; the worrying of otters and rabbits; or
the shooting of vast numbers of game birds in the battue? The hunted
fox, as we know, has many wily resources for throwing his pursuers off
the scent. What are the corresponding shifts and wiles of the hunted
sportsman?[24]
THE APPEAL TO “NATURE.”
The first, perhaps, that demands notice is the frequent appeal to
“Nature,” and even (when the hunter happens to be a man of marked
piety) to the savage instincts which “the Creator,” it is assumed, has
implanted. “Were not otter hounds created to hunt and kill otters?”
asked a devout correspondent of the _Newcastle Daily Journal_.
“Therefore,” he continued, “let me ask these persons (the opponents of
sport) what right they have to place their own peculiar faddism against
the wisdom of the Creator?” In like manner a distinguished hunter of
big game, Mr. H. W. Seton-Karr, has defended himself as follows in the
_Daily Chronicle_:
“If a person experiences pleasure in the chase, such as in
fox-hunting or deer-stalking, or even in lion-hunting, the
rights and wrongs of that natural instinct are a personal
matter between that man and his God. That, in common with all
carnivorous creatures, we do possess God-planted instincts of
the chase is a fact. Why did Almighty God create lions to prey
nightly on harmless animals? And should we not, even at the
expense of a donkey as a bait, be justified in reducing their
number, sacrificing one for the good of many?”
The answer to all this pious verbiage is, of course, very simple. In
view of the fact that the sportsman of the present day professes to
be _civilised_, and is at any rate nominally a member of a civilised
State, it is quite irrelevant to plead that the propensity to hunt
is natural to the _savage_ man. We are continually striving in other
departments of life to get rid of ferocious instincts, an inheritance
from a savage past, which may or may not be “God-planted,” but are
certainly very much out of place in a society which regards itself
as humane. Why, then, should it be assumed that an exception is to
be made in favour of the hunting instinct? The charge against modern
blood-sports is that they are an anachronism, a survival of a barbarous
habit into a civilised age; nor can it possibly be any justification
of them to show that Nature herself is cruel, for as we do not make
savage Nature our exemplar in other respects, there is no reason why we
should do so in this. And as for the statement that a man’s treatment
of the lower animals is a “personal” affair “between that man and his
God,” it can only provoke a smile. For man is a social being, and not
even the sportsman, belated barbarian though he may be, can be allowed
the privilege of thus evading the responsibility which he owes to his
fellow-citizens in a matter affecting the common conscience of the race.
But the wild animals, it is argued, put themselves outside the pale
of consideration because they prey on one another. One searches in
vain for justice and mercy among the lower animals--such is the
strange reason advanced as an excuse for showing no justice or mercy
to _them_.[25] But, in the first place, it is not a fact that these
qualities are non-existent in the lower races, where co-operation is as
much a law of life as competition; and, secondly, if it were a fact,
it would have no bearing whatever on the morality of sport. For why
should we base human ethics on animal conduct? Still more, why should
we imitate the predatory animals rather than the sociable? And finally,
why, because some animals kill for food, should _we_ kill for pleasure?
The cruelty of Nature can afford no possible justification for the
cruelty of Man, for, as Leigh Hunt wrote in that trenchant couplet
which may be commended to the notice of the sportsman--
“That there is pain and evil is no rule
That I should make it greater, like a fool.”
Next we come to the kindred sophism drawn from “the necessity of
taking life.” To kill, we are reminded, is unavoidable; for wild
animals must be “kept down,” or the balance of Nature would be
deranged. That, of course, is undeniable; but, unfortunately for the
sportsman’s argument, it is a fact that the breed of foxes, rabbits,
pheasants, and other victims of sport, is artificially kept up, not
down, in order that there may be plenty of hunting and shooting for
the idle classes to amuse themselves with. So far from securing the
effective destruction of noxious animals, sport indirectly prevents
it; more than that, it causes the killing to be done not only
ineffectively, but in the most demoralising way, by making a pastime
out of what, if done at all, should be done as a disagreeable duty.
But here we must in justice mention a new and ingenious excuse for
blood-sports which (to add to its zest) was put forward by a clergyman.
It is necessary to take life, he argued, and what is necessary is a
duty, and it is right, as far as possible, to make a pleasure of one’s
duties, and therefore--but the conclusion is plain! Presumably the
reverend gentleman, had he lived a century back, would have found the
same pious justification for the practice of making up pleasure parties
to see felons hanged.
SPORT A BLESSING TO MEN.
Speaking generally, we may class the remaining arguments under two
heads: those which aim at showing that sport is of benefit to mankind,
or at least not a symptom of cruelty in the sportsman; and those which
actually discover it to be a blessing to the animals themselves.[26] In
the former and more prosaic category must be placed the queer assertion
that sport “adds to the food-supply” of the nation. We have all read
how, after some aristocratic “shoot,” a number of pheasants or other
palatable game were presented to the local hospital. Sport, it is seen,
goes hand in hand with the charitable and the philanthropic--truly a
touching picture! But the fact remains that the cost of the animals
thus reared primarily for sport, and secondarily for the table, is
far in excess of their market value as food, and this at once knocks
the bottom out of the sportsman’s patriotic contention. Every stag
that is stalked, every pheasant that is mown down in the battue, and
every hare or rabbit that is knocked over in covert-shooting, has cost
the country much more to produce than it is worth when butchered; and
the game-preserver, far from being helpful to the community in this
respect, is a positive encumbrance to it, as wasting labour in the
production of what is not a food, but a luxury. Game is reared not for
the benefit of the many, but at the cost of the many, to gratify the
idle and cruel instincts of the few.
Not less illusory is the plea so frequently made in sporting journals
as a justification of sport, that hunting and shooting “give
employment” to a large number of people. “Do these hyper-humane
faddists,” asks the _Irish Field_, “ever consider how, by doing away
with many of what they are pleased to call spurious sports, they would
be taking the actual bread-and-butter out of the mouths of thousands
of men and their families? Hunting, shooting, and other sports give
employment to such a vast number of people, directly and indirectly,
that it would be nothing short of a national calamity if they were
discontinued for any cause.” What is really proved by such apologists
is that blood-sports are a terrible drain on the resources of the
nation, and that millions are annually diverted from productive labour
to be employed on the silliest form of luxury--the killing of animals
for the mere amusement of rich people. It is the old fallacy of
supposing that _all_ expenditure of money, without regard to the nature
of the commodities produced, is beneficial to the community at large.
Then there is the much-vaunted “manliness” of sport, so important a
quality, we are told, in an imperial and military nation. Yet what
could be more flagrantly and miserably _un_manly than for a crowd of
men to sally forth, in perfect security themselves, armed or mounted,
with every advantage of power and skill on their side, to do to death
with dogs or guns some poor skulking, terrified little habitant of
woodside or hedgerow? This is what Sir Henry Seton-Karr has to say on
this point:
“Only those who have experienced it can realise the strength
of the hunter’s lust to kill the hunted, though they may find
it difficult to explain. It is certain that no race of men
possess this desire more strongly than the Anglo-Saxons.…
Let us take it that in our case this passion is an inherited
instinct--which civilisation cannot eradicate--of a virile and
dominant race, and that it forms a healthy natural antidote to
the enervating refinements of modern life.”[27]
The obvious answer to this claim is that civilisation _is_ eradicating
the destructive instincts of sport--with extreme slowness, no doubt,
as in the case of all barbarous inherited tendencies, but surely and
certainly nevertheless; and the fact that blood-sports are already
condemned by many thoughtful people is a clear indication of what
verdict the future will pass on the profession of killing for “fun.”
That good physical exercise is provided by field sports none will
deny, but it is just as undeniable that such exercise can be as well
or better provided in other ways--by the equally healthy and far more
manly sports of the gymnasium and the playing-field, which, be it
noted, are capable of being utilised by a much larger number of people
than the privileged pastimes of the crack huntsman and “shot.” There
is no reason why the mass of the population should not, under a juster
social system, have leisure to derive benefit from cricket, football,
boating, hockey, and the other rational sports; but it is very evident
that only a very few can ever find recreation in those blood-sports
which are absurdly called “national.” The rational and humane sports
may be for the many; the “national” and cruel sports must be for the
few: that is not the least of the striking differences that distinguish
them.[28]
To contend that blood-sports have no injurious influence on the minds
of those who practise them seems about as reasonable as to assert that
effect does not follow cause. Yet it is frequently urged, in defence
of sport, that the pleasure is found not in the “kill,” but in the
chase. That may be true in a sense. What humanitarians hold is not
that sportsmen derive pleasure from the _mere_ infliction of pain,
but that they seek excitement without sufficient regard to the pain
inflicted, and that this is apt, in some cases, to breed a positive
love of killing, a real “blood-lust.” Take, for example, the following
remark quoted from the _Eton College Chronicle_: “At the time we are
writing, the Beagles have killed but twice, though by the time the
_Chronicle_ appears they may have increased this number by one.” Here
it will be seen that what the boys’ journal dwells on is precisely the
killing--surely a significant side-light on the influence of the sport.
There is no escaping this question, whether at Eton or elsewhere: Why,
if the painful pursuit of a sentient animal be not an essential part
of the amusement, is the drag-hunt refused as a substitute? And if the
drag be disdained as not sufficiently exciting, how can the inference
be avoided that the zest of the pastime is enhanced by the peril of the
quarry?
SPORT A BLESSING TO THE ANIMALS.
But it is when he is demonstrating that sport comes as a boon and a
blessing to the non-human races which are the victims of it that the
sportsman is most entertaining. “They like it,” he asserts, when any
pity is expressed for the hunted fox.
“Happy the hounds, loud-baying on his track!
Happy the huntsmen with their murderous call!
But the spent fox, dead-beat before the pack--
His are the sweetest, strangest joys of all!”