Singeing.
As it is incumbent on all civilized communities to be kind to every living being,—as our laws profess to maintain this Christian axiom,—and as there exists among us a Society self-constituted for the especial purpose of "the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," it would be very difficult satisfactorily to explain, at least to them, why, in violation of so benign a theory, we deliberately practise the following fashions:—
1. Of cutting off all our sheep's tails.
2. Of dittoing the tails of all dogs that take care of sheep.
3. Of dittoing the ears of terriers.
4. Of dittoing a portion of the tails, and occasionally of the ears, of our horses.
5. Of piercing with a sharp awl the ears of all our daughters, in order to insert therein golden rings, which, by equalizing all, can confer no possible benefit on any one: that is to say, provided Euclid is correct in declaring that "when equals are added to equals, their sums are equal."
If any person among us defaces a statue, he is liable to punishment and to the execration of the public; and yet there can be no doubt that in every sense of the word it is more barbarous to mutilate the living original of an Almighty Creator than a cold stone or marble copy thereof, chiselled more or less imperfectly by human hands.
About forty years ago it was the general custom to dock the tails of all hunters, covert-hacks, and waggon-horses, so close, that nothing remained of this picturesque, beautiful ornament of Nature but an ugly, stiff stump, very little longer than the human thumb, which, especially in summer time, was seen continually wagging to the right or left, in impotent attempts to brush off a hungry fly, biting the skin more than a yard off. At about the same period an officer in our army took to the Cape of Good Hope a gentle, beautiful, thoroughbred mare, which, to his astonishment, the natives appeared exceedingly unwilling to approach. The reason was, that her ears had been cropped; and as among themselves that punishment was inflicted for crimes, they were induced to infer that the handsome mutilated animal had suffered from a similar cause—in fact, that she was vicious.
From the same premises, and by the same reasoning faculties, they might as erroneously have conceived that the holes bored through most of the English ladies' ears denoted the existence of a uniform speck of some sort or other in their characters.
Having briefly enumerated only a few of the mutilations which, in different regions of the earth, man inflicts, not only upon the animals around him, but upon himself, we will proceed to notice a prescription of modern date which has produced very astonishing results.