Seventy Years Among Savages

by Henry S. Salt

Mr. John Colam, for many years Secretary of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was a well-known figure in the zoophilist movement at the time of which I am speaking, and had a great reputation for astuteness. Wily he certainly was, with the vast experience he had acquired in evading the double pressure of those who cried “forward” and of those who cried “back”; and he was a veritable Proteus in the skill with which he gave the slip to any one who tried to commit him to any course but the safest. He used privately to allege the backwardness of his Committee as a cause for this seeming timidity; thus he told me in 1901, when the fate of the Royal Buckhounds was hanging in the balance, that the R.S.P.C.A. was unable to take any public action, not from any remissness on his part, but because certain members of the Committee were afraid of alienating subscribers, including King Edward himself. Personally I liked Mr. Colam; he was humane so far as his interests permitted, and when one had realized, once for all, the uselessness of attempting to bind him to any fixed purpose, it was instructive to have an occasional talk with him at Jermyn Street, and to observe the great adroitness with which he conducted the affairs of the Society; and he, on his part, when he saw that one had no longer any ethical designs on him, but approached him rather as a fellow-student, albeit a mere amateur, in the art of dealing with unreasonable people, would become chatty and confidential and tell amusing stories of a Secretary’s adventures. He would have made a successful Prime Minister, for his “wizardry” was of the highest order; as a humanitarian he left something to be desired.

With the Sporting League, which professed to discountenance “malpractices” in sport, yet opposed the Bill which would have prohibited rabbit-coursing and kindred pastimes, we were of course involved in controversy. We sought to bring this to a point by proposing a public discussion of the question: “What are malpractices in Sport?” But this challenge was declined, the Sportsman expressing the opinion that “such piffling folly is best treated with contempt,” and the Evening News that “cackling is the strong point of the faddists.” We were more successful in bringing to book some champions of aristocratic blood-sports, among them Sir Herbert Maxwell and Sir Edward Grey, who on one or two occasions appeared on neutral platforms, and seized the opportunity to eulogize their own favourite recreations, but showed little relish for the discussion which they themselves had provoked. Mr. F. G. Aflalo was another of our many antagonists in the magazines and the press; and I have a pleasant recollection of friendly encounters with him in the Fortnightly Review and elsewhere. Many other apologists of blood-sports there were, of a more sentimental and unreasoning kind, and with these, too, we much enjoyed the argument, which was quite as good sport to us as their hunting or coursing was to them.

Before passing from Sports to Fashions, I will speak briefly of those popular places of recreation, known euphemistically as “Zoological Gardens,” which in a civilized age would surely be execrated as among the saddest and dullest spots on the earth, being, in fact, nothing cheerier than big convict-stations, to which the ill-fated life-prisoners—“stuff,” as the keepers call them—are conveyed from many distant lands. How any rational person can find pleasure in seeing, for example, “the lions fed” (the modern version of Christianos ad leones) is a mystery that baffles thought. I have not been to the London “Zoo” for a good many years; but when I knew it, the incongruities of the place were so ludicrous as almost to obscure one’s sense of its barbarity: the Tiger’s den, for instance, was labelled: “Beware of pickpockets,” and the Eagle’s cage bore the inscription: “To the Refreshment Rooms”; and there, sure enough, within sight of the captive Bird of Jove moping disconsolate on his perch, was a waiter, serving out coffees or lemon-squashes, regardless of the great Raptor by whom his predecessor, Ganymede, had been carried off to be the god’s cup-bearer. Could bathos have gone further?

A friend of mine who, as an Eton boy, used to go to the “Zoo” in the holidays and amuse himself by teasing the captives, was converted to humanitarian principles in a rather curious way. An elk, or some large animal of the ruminant order, whose wrath he had deservedly incurred, coughed on him with such vehemence that he retired from the elk-house covered with a sort of moist bran, and with his top-hat irrevocably damaged. Though at the time this touched his hat rather than his heart, he afterwards came to regard the incident as what is called a “means of grace.” It caused him, too, to “ruminate,” and so brought home to him the fact that an elk is “a person.”

A pamphlet of mine, issued by the Humanitarian League in 1895, entitled “A Zoophilist at the Zoo,” was the beginning of an agitation which gradually led to a considerable improvement in the housing of the animals, in which discussion the most noteworthy feature was a series of articles contributed to the Saturday Review by Mr. Edmund Selous, and afterwards reprinted by the League. Another subject, debated with much liveliness, was the practice of feeding pythons and other large serpents on living prey—ducks, fowls, rabbits, and even goats being given to the reptiles, to be devoured in a manner which was sickening to witness and almost too loathsome to describe.[35] These exhibitions were open till 1881; then for publicity extreme secrecy was substituted, and all inquiries were met by the stereotyped statement that the use of live prey was confined to cases “where such food was a necessity.”

Who feeds slim serpents must himself be slim.

The League found the reptile-feeders at Regent’s Park exceedingly slippery to deal with, and it needed long time, and much patience, to bring them to book. In this task, however, I was encouraged by the recollection of a scene which I once witnessed in a crowded railway-carriage, when a large eel had made its escape from a basket which one of my fellow-travellers was holding, and created a mild panic among the company by its convolutions under the seat. An old lady sharply upbraided the owner of the eel, and I was struck by the reasonableness of his reply in rather difficult circumstances, when the eel had repeatedly slipped from his grasp. “Wait a little, mum,” he said, “until he gets a bit dusty”; and the result proved the man to be right. In like manner we waited till the excuses given by the Zoological Society had become very dusty indeed.

Some of the reasons offered for the old system of snake-feeding were themselves truly reptilian. “We follow God’s ordinances, and they must be right,” was the reverent remark of a keeper; and humanitarians were told that “to declare the use of live food to be cruel is to bring that charge against the Designer of Nature Himself.” So deep and fervent was the piety of the Reptile House! Nevertheless, we continued to urge our point, and the subject was hotly debated at more than one of the Zoological Society’s annual meetings, where, as a result of the protests raised by Captain Alfred Carpenter, R.N., Mr. Stephen Coleridge, Mr. Rowland Hunt, and other F.Z.S.’s, it was made evident that the majority of the Fellows, who regarded the Society as a sort of private club, were indignant at public opinion being brought to bear upon their concerns. It was a situation not devoid of humour. I happen to know that in the course of an excited meeting held in November, 1907, when the Duke of Bedford, as President of the Zoological Society, was in the chair, the following telegram was despatched to his Grace:

Beg you to stand firm for live food and maintain the ordinances of the Creator.

From Anna Conda.