Primitive Instincts.
It remains only to say a few words about the morality of this form of amusement. It is often said amongst humane people that hunting is only a relic of more barbarous times, but it seems to us to be something more than this. It may have taken its origin with primitive man, but it has certainly made important developments of its own in recent times. There is little in common between the act of the primitive savage, who, for the sake of his food, pitted his strength and skill against an animal, and the wholesale and reckless slaughter, aided by the appliances of modern science, and carried on merely for the pleasure of killing. Acts otherwise disagreeable and disgusting may sometimes be justified by the motive, but a search through several volumes devoted to this sport has failed to reveal any more exalted motive than the desire for trophies—as they are called—to show to admiring friends, and the love of killing. “At daylight we start on the trail, on which there are spots of blood, followed by spurts and large clots. When we see that, ‘the heart laughs,’ as the natives say, and victory is almost certain.” We learn that “to bring down an animal as big as an omnibus horse with each barrel, to roll it over as though it were a rabbit, is a pleasure which one does not often experience”; and we are also told how the author had “the pleasure of looking at a magnificent maneless lion stretched in a pool of blood.”
Of the real motive there can unfortunately be little doubt, and the excuses that are made by the perpetrators for their murderous work are hardly worthy of serious consideration.
The moral defences for this kind of sport are of the same nature as the famous snakes in Iceland—there are none; and the flounderings of the big-game hunter, when he tries to defend himself, show that his ethics and theology are of the same primitive kind as are his other springs of action, handed down from barbarous ancestors.
One writer quoted above tells us, of course, that he gives place to no one in his “love of all dumb creatures collectively”—whatever that may mean—which he seems to think justifies his putting bullets into them individually whenever he has a chance, and letting them crash through the forests, as he describes, in pain and terror, very likely to die in agonies days afterwards.
Another excuse urged is that the hunting instinct in us has been given us by God, and therefore should be followed. It apparently never occurred to the writer that pity for the unoffending animals “butchered to make a sportsman’s holiday” may also be a God-planted instinct, no less than the love of slaughtering them, though apparently he vastly prefers the latter.
That blood-sports develop and encourage a manly spirit, necessary for the progress of the race and especially of the British nation, is perhaps the most common. But here, surely, at the outset we need a definition of terms. If manliness is synonymous with indifference to the suffering of the weaker, and selfish gratification at the cost of others, if it is manly to blow a piece “as big as the crown of a hat” out of the side of a timid deer, just for amusement, then certainly this sport is eminently manly. If, on the other hand, the qualities which differentiate the civilised man from the barbarian are a greater regard for the rights of the weak and a deeper sympathy with the feelings of others, then without doubt these amateur butchers should be regarded as an anachronism in civilised communities.
The chocolate-coloured native, we read in one book, “would not and could not understand that we had not come to fight elephants and lions like gladiators in the arena, but to overcome them by superior tactics without more risk than was necessary, and by the judicious handling of arms of precision” (italics ours). Certainly we think the naked savage here shows a finer instinct for what may be noble and manly in warfare than his so-called civilised brother. For the gladiator who has the hardihood to meet his enemy in fair single combat, at mortal risk to himself, we can feel some admiration, even though the game is a barbarous one; but for the butcher who skulks behind a tree and slays his innocuous victim by mechanical contrivances with as little risk to himself as possible, we can feel nothing but contempt. “In a short time,” we are told by our hero, “four elephants were lying dead, shot through the head or heart, never having caught sight of us. The remainder of the herd decamped.” A glorious achievement in the estimation of the perpetrators apparently, but one to which we personally should be ashamed to see our name attached.