Temporary Remorse.
Of the actual cruelty involved in this kind of amusement—for it professes to be nothing more—we may give a few specimens:
“My victim, which I see only through a curtain of raindrops, visibly suffers, her flank swelling out abnormally and then subsiding; she is shot in the lungs. We pass round her in such a way that she shall not see us approach, but she seems more taken up with her sufferings than with us, and at the moment I am going to fire she falls down on the grass, still breathing. I draw near and give her the coup de grâce behind the ear. Around her is a large pool of blood, which the rain carries in a red stream towards the bottom of the little valley.
“It is the male at which I fired first of all. As I afterwards found, his shoulder was broken. Maddened by pain and his feeble efforts, the animal roars with rage, and, blowing furiously with his trunk, tears at everything within reach.… His cries and groans become so terrible that they must be heard a mile away.
“Poor beast!… Never have I been able to contemplate so near the death of an elephant in all its details. She is lying eight yards from us in the full sunlight at the edge of the water, which is tinged with red, and we look on in silence while life leaves the enormous body; her flank heaves, blood flows from breast and shoulder, her mouth opens and shuts, her lip trembles, tears flow from her eyes, her limbs quiver; with her trunk hanging down, her head low, she sways to right and left, then falls heavily on one side, shaking the ground and spattering blood in every direction.… All is over!
“Such a spectacle is enough to make the most hardened hunter feel remorse. It seemed to me that I had done a bad action. Several times have I said to myself, upon seeing those splendid animals suffer, that I ought to place my rifle in the gun-rack for ever.”
That a man who has spent several years in little else but the destruction of animals for his own pleasure should feel even a temporary remorse is evidence of the brutality of this particular scene, but we do not know how to characterise the combination of easy sentiment, costing nothing, with the cruel selfishness which immediately turns to the account of fresh slaughter.