As when a giant dies."
This pathetic lesson of humanity is given by the poet of nature. Aiming at the same end by different means, our benevolent artist here steps forth as the instructor of youth, the friend to mercy, and advocate of the brute creation.
In the prints before us, an obdurate boy begins his career of cruelty by tormenting animals; repeated acts of barbarity sear his heart, he commits a deliberate murder, and concludes in an ignominious death. These gradations are natural, I had almost said inevitable; and that parent who discovers the germ of barbarity in the mind of a child, and does not use every effort to exterminate the noxious weed, is an accessory to the evils which spring from its baneful growth. To check these malign propensities becomes more necessary from the general tendency of our amusements. Most of our rural and even infantine sports are savage and ferocious. They arise from the terror, misery, or death of helpless animals. A child in the nursery is taught to impale butterflies and cockchafers. The schoolboy's proud delight is clambering a tree
"To rob the poor bird of its young."
Grown a gentle angler, he snares the scaly fry, and scatters leaden death among the feathered tenants of the air. Ripened to man, he becomes a mighty hunter, is enamoured of the chase, and crimsons his spurs in the sides of a generous courser, whose wind he breaks in the pursuit of an inoffensive deer or timid hare.
Many of our town diversions have the same tendency. The bird, whose melodious warblings echo through the grove, is imprisoned in a sort of a Bastille, where, like an unplumed biped in a similar situation, it frequently perishes through anguish or want of food. The high-crested chanticleer, whose courage is innate, and only vanquished by death, is furnished with weapons of pointed steel, when, set in opposition to one of the same species, armed in a similar style, these two champions, for the diversion of the humane lords of the creation, lacerate each other until one or both of them are slain.
The faithful dog, whose attachment and gratitude are exemplary, and worthy the imitation of man, when in the possession of a farmer, or country 'squire, is well fed, and has no great cause of complaint, except his ears and tail being lopped to improve nature, and having a rib now and then broken by a gentle spurn; but if the poor quadruped falls into the hands of a tanner, a surgeon, or an experimental philosopher, of what avail are his good qualities?[26]
The Abyssinian cruelties of our slaughter-houses[27] and kitchens[28] I do not wish to enumerate. The catalogue would fill a volume. Humanity demands that the brute creation should be protected by the Legislature.
The Mosaic Law, to guard against tortures being inflicted on animals which were slaughtered for sustenance, ordained them to die by a highly polished and pointed instrument; if the bone was pierced, or the beast mangled, it was deemed unclean, and burnt.