The pleasure of fighting big cats any brave man can feel. But wherein lies the joy of being what Lord Chesterfield despised, a poulterer? Or of butchering the deer? Why do we not all feel as kind-hearted Plutarch did that, when men are at play, the beasts that help in the fun should have a share of it? Why is there joy in dealing out death? God knows. I have felt it myself; but a man cannot really analyse his feelings. He can only pretend to do that. At times—not always of course, but often enough—our feelings are as mysterious as the stars, which we can watch and photograph, but never explain.
So, when I say God knows, I mean that there doubtless are in Nature, which is another name for the mystery of the Universe, abundant reasons, far beyond my sounding. And I do know a partial explanation, a kind of clue, which our mealy-mouthed manners make me hesitate to mention. Yet, after all, truth needs no fine excuses, and the sentiments of the natural man need no apology. There is a genuine joy in killing. Nobody needs to be ashamed of it, any more than of sneezing. It is born in us all; and to a mind [212] ]undeveloped, unable to imagine itself in the place of another, cruelty is a pure pleasure, the lively sensations of it not being spoiled by pity. That was how the Inquisitors enjoyed themselves, and executions were always popular. A man likes killing as naturally as he likes sugar. “Clear your minds of cant,” as Dr Johnson advised, and it is easy to see in that the true attraction of hunting. How great and genuine a joy it is I never realised till once I watched a lady crunching a praying mantis under a paper-weight, and gloating over its sufferings, just as a cousin of hers, a famous hunter, loved to dwell on his more gory glories. She was sipping a liqueur she liked a minute later, with the same beatific expression of happiness.
The good old salt, Frank Bullen, has lately been lamenting the new and unromantic ways of whaling, when the whales are chased by steamers and the harpoons driven home by gunpowder, and the whales quickly finished by bombs. Indeed, there is no blinking the fact that the fun is out of the business. A man should think himself a fool if he goes on fancying that there is danger or romance, when there is none. The whaler and the hunter, under modern conditions, are as like the old-fashioned whalers and hunters as the saloon [213] ]passengers in an Atlantic greyhound are like the fellow-voyagers of Columbus or Drake.
5. THE USE OF HUNTING
To talk of the use of hunting to-day is generally cant, like talking of the danger of it. At the expense of what is wasted in a few years upon foxes in England, it would be possible to exterminate the lions, tigers, leopards, wolves, foxes, jaguars and every other big kind of dangerous wild beasts on the face of the earth; and fewer lives need be lost in the business than went to the building of the Forth Bridge. The work might be done in a year or two; and in the same time, and still more cheaply—perhaps with a positive profit—the deer and elephants and other wild cattle might all be killed or tamed.
In Great Britain, of course, no planning would be needed. The clearing of the game there shall all be done for fun, “like winking,” as soon as the many-headed king, the multitude, decides, if it ever does decide, to end the Game Laws. It is in the Indian and Burman and American and African forests, and in the plateaux of Central Asia, that a little planning and some expense would be required, and a little brave work need to be done. Of course, [214] ]the present writer is not advocating such a thing. He is fond of cats; and loves wild Nature as well as Nature tamed. But let us have no cant about the business; and recognise what humanity can do in A.D. 1910.
What men go after big cats for is, in general, amusement, just as much as when they go to shoot pigeons; and the one kind of sport is intrinsically, nowadays, no more dangerous than the other. Hunting used to be a school of war; and so was archery. Both arts are equally obsolete for any such purpose. It is only among unwarlike peoples, like the English or the Chinese, that such a thing needs to be mentioned. Officers who go a-hunting are not making themselves better able to lead regiments in battle. It is well if the hunting does not make them worse. There is nothing of military art or science to be learned from sport. Gunpowder and chemicals and machinery have ended that, and made hunting to-day the same kind of thing as golf, or cricket, or any other child’s play.
6. IRRESISTIBLE EVOLUTION
I saw a real hunter a few months ago (1908). He was a Eurasian, in Burma, living from hand to mouth. His clothes were of the roughest, [215] ]poor fellow, and his appearance showed he had to live very barely. The police said that he was kept alive by his patient mother, who “allowed him to sponge upon her.” A passion for hunting had withdrawn him from other occupations. The deer in the woods, along the muddy coast, and the rewards for an occasional leopard or tiger, I was told, enabled him to buy ammunition and a little food. He came before me with his companions, some idle vagabond Burmans of like tastes, because, it was alleged, when other game failed, they had decided to become hunters of men—in plain words, they were robbers. As I unravelled the tangled threads of his history, I saw in it what any man, who has developed healthily, can read in his own consciousness, a summary of human evolution from hunting to stealing. From stealing to working is the next step. The hunters shall soon be all vanished from the earth; but the thieves shall be with us yet awhile.