Seventy Years Among Savages

by Henry S. Salt

For ten years, from 1891 to 1901, the League made the Royal Buckhounds serve as a “peg”—and a very useful peg it was—on which to hang an exposure of the cruelty of stag-hunting.[34] The doings of the Buckhounds were watched from season to season; detailed accounts of the “runs” were published, in contradiction of the shuffling reports sent to the papers by patrons of the Hunt, and a number of horrible cases of mutilation were dragged into light. Questions were put in Parliament; leaflets, articles, and press letters printed in hundreds, and many lectures given at various clubs and institutions.

In this work we had the sympathy of many distinguished public men and the support of a section of the press (notably of the Star, which was then edited by Mr. Ernest Parke); but every possible difficulty was put in our way by officials, whether of the Court, the Government, or the Hunt, who in this case, as in all, desired nothing more than to save themselves trouble by letting things go on as before. Red tape cared little whether carted stags continued to be disembowelled on iron palings and worried by hounds. For example, when, in 1898, we wished to lay before Queen Victoria the case against the Royal Hunt, in answer to Lord Ribblesdale’s book, The Queen’s Hounds, her private secretary, Sir A. Bigge, refused to bring the League’s publications to her notice; the Home Secretary also declined to do so, and so did the Prime Minister, each and all of them cordially advising us to apply elsewhere. Thus thwarted, we hit on the expedient of petitioning the Queen to allow the counter-case to be sent to her, and in this way the Home Office was finally forced to do what it had declared to be “contrary to practice.” The Queen, as we had known since 1891, from a private letter addressed to Mr. Stratton by Sir Henry Ponsonby, had been “strongly opposed to stag-hunting for many years past”; and when this fact was published after her death it settled the fate of the Buckhounds.

Looking back twenty years and more, it is comical to find the followers of the Royal Hunt trying to exploit the visit of the German Emperor, in 1899, in order to bolster up the failing reputation of their sport. They were very anxious that a “meet” of the Buckhounds should be one of the entertainments provided for the Kaiser, and on November 24th, in expectation of his being present, an unusually large company assembled; but the Humanitarian League had been beforehand in the matter, a letter of protest which it had addressed to the Prince of Wales had the desired effect, and the Kaiser had an engagement elsewhere. Had he been present, he would, as it happened, have seen a deer staked and done to death in the manner which was far from uncommon, and he would have learnt (if he had any doubt on the subject) that “Huns” are not entirely confined to Germany.

This rascally “sport,” though no longer a State institution, is still carried on by private packs in several parts of the country, and nothing but fresh legislation can prevent its continuance. A “Spurious Sports Bill” drafted by the Humanitarian League, with the purpose of prohibiting the hunting of carted stags, the coursing of bagged rabbits, and the shooting of birds released from traps, has been introduced at various times in the House of Commons by Mr. A. C. Morton, Mr. H. F. Luttrell, Sir William Byles, Sir George Greenwood, and other Members, and in the House of Lords by the Bishop of Hereford (Dr. Percival); but its opponents have always succeeded in preventing its becoming law. On one occasion (1893) it was “talked out” by Sir Frederick Banbury, who is renowned in the House as an anti-vivisectionist and friend of animals. It is not only human beings who have to pray, at times, to be delivered from their friends.

The Eton Beagles were another of the League’s most cherished “pegs,” and displayed as useful an illustration of the hare-hunt as the Royal Buckhounds of the deer-worry. Had humanitarians talked of the cruelty of hare-hunting in general, little attention would have been paid to them; but with concrete instances drawn from the leading public school, and quoted in the words of the boys themselves as printed in the Eton College Chronicle—a disgusting record of “blooded” hounds and of the hare “broken up,” or crawling “deadbeat,” “absolutely stiff,” “so done that she could not stand”—a great impression was made, and the memorials presented to the headmaster or the Governing Body, asking for the substitution of a drag-hunt (a form of sport which was formerly popular at Eton and led to very good runs), received a large number of very influential signatures, including that of the Visitor of Eton, the late Bishop of Lincoln, Dr. E. L. Hicks. But public opinion counts for very little at the school where ignorance is bliss; a far more important consideration for Governing Bodies and headmasters is the opinion of Old Etonians; indeed, it is doubtful whether a headmaster of Eton could even retain his position if he were to decree the discontinuance of what Dr. Warre described, with all due solemnity, as “an old Eton institution.” So obvious was this that we were inspired to borrow the title of Gray’s famous poem in an enlarged form, and to indite an “Ode on the Exceedingly Distant Prospect of Humane Reform at Eton College.”

Dr. E. C. Selwyn, headmaster of Uppingham, wrote to me if he were made headmaster of Eton, he would abolish the Beagles “at the earliest opportunity.” Unfortunately he was not the successful candidate for the post when Dr. Warre gave it up, or we might have seen some rare sport at Eton, and a hue and cry more exciting than any hare-hunt. Dislike of blood-sport as a school recreation is by no means confined to humanitarians, as may be seen from the following sentence which I quote from an interesting unpublished letter on the ethics of sport, addressed to Mr. Stratton in 1905 by Mr. F. C. Selous, the great lion-hunter: “After reading your pamphlet, I certainly think it would be better to substitute drag-hunting for the pursuit and killing of a hare. To see one of these animals worried and torn by a pack of dogs is not an edifying sight for a young boy.”

All hunting, whether of the hare, fox, stag, or otter, has many horrible features: perhaps the very nastiest is the custom of “blooding,” i.e. baptizing with the blood of the mangled victim any children or young folk who partake in the sport for the first time. The practice has been described, but too modestly, it would seem, as “a hunting tradition which goes back to the Middle Ages”; one would suppose it went back to still more primitive times. Yet to this day this savage ritual is patronized by our nobility and by royalty. “Prince Henry was blooded,” was the conclusion of a newspaper report of a “kill” with a pack of fox-hounds, January 9, 1920. There is a double significance, it seems, in the expression “a prince of the blood.”

“You can’t eliminate cruelty from sport,” says a distinguished sportsman, the Earl of Warwick, in his Memories of Sixty Years. In no form of blood-sport do we more clearly see what a veritable mania this amateur butchery may become than in one of Lord Warwick’s hobbies, “big game hunting,” the difficult and costly pursuit of wild animals in distant lands, for no better reason than the craze for killing. Tiger-shooting is doubtless an exciting pastime, and there are savage beasts that at times have to be destroyed; but what of that other tiger that lurks in the heart of each of us? and how is he going to be eliminated, so long as a savage lust for killing is a recognized form of amusement? For in spite of all the barriers and divisions that prejudice and superstition have heaped up between the human and the non-human, we may take it as certain that, in the long run, as we treat out fellow-beings, “the animals,” so shall we treat our fellow-men.

Every one knows how the possessors of such “trophies” as the heads and horns of “big game” love to decorate their halls with these mementoes of the chase. I was once a visitor at a house which was not only adorned in this way, but contained also a human head that had been sent home by a member of a certain African expedition and “preserved” by the skill of the taxidermist. When I was invited by the owner of the head—the second owner—to see that particular trophy, it was with some misgivings that I acquiesced; but when, after passing up a staircase between walls plastered with portions of the carcases of elephant, rhinoceros, antelope, etc., I came to a landing where, under a glass case, was the head of a pleasant-looking young negro, I felt no special repugnance at the sight. It was simply a part—and, as it seemed, not a peculiarly dreadful or loathsome part—of the surrounding dead-house; and I understood how mankind itself may be nothing more than “big game” to our soldier-sportsmen abroad. The absolute distinction between human and non-human is a fiction which will not bear the test either of searching thought in the study or of rough experience in the wilds.

Iniquitous as the Game Laws are, I have often thought it strange that Kingsley, even when regarding them, quite justly, from the poacher’s standpoint, should have hurled at the game-preserver that eloquent denunciation: