“Such a spectacle is enough to make the most hardened hunter feel remorse. It seemed to me that I had done a bad action. Several times have I said to myself, upon seeing those splendid animals suffer, that I ought to place my rifle in the gun-rack for ever.”
That a man who has spent several years in little else but the destruction of animals for his own pleasure should feel even a temporary remorse is evidence of the brutality of this particular scene, but we do not know how to characterise the combination of easy sentiment, costing nothing, with the cruel selfishness which immediately turns to the account of fresh slaughter.
The Hunter’s Joy.
Or take the following bloody tale, told with evident pride:
“As I came round a bush, I saw at the bottom of a kind of natural alley in the forest, framed in like a picture by the trees, a massive old female rhinoceros. She was facing me, and standing half in sunshine, half in shadow. From a bush protruded the hind-quarters of another. The distance was about seventy yards. I at once sat down and ‘drew a bead’ upon her chest. However, she swerved off, and the two broke away across the forest, crash after crash, dying away in the distance, marking their course as they receded. I followed, and once again caught sight of the animal standing motionless behind a bush; I fired, and the shot was followed by a couple of short, angry snorts, the stamp of heavy feet, and an appalling crashing which advanced and then swept round toward the left. A shot delivered standing, from the shoulder, was followed by two shrill squeaks, as the animal tottered a few paces and fell over on its side; I shall not easily forget that cry, a sound most disproportionate to the size and bulk of so large a creature, but which I instantly recognised, from Sir Samuel Baker’s description, as the death-cry of the rhinoceros; and the hearing of it filled me with a hunter’s joy!”
The hunter’s joy is in the death-cry of his victim, and he glories in the fact that he is the descendant of a line of prehistoric savages. What more evidence can we want of the barbarity of the whole proceeding?
Or, again, take and ponder the following extract from Ex-President Roosevelt’s recent book, “African Game Trails”:
“Right in front of me, thirty yards off, there appeared from behind the bushes, which had first screened him from my eyes, the tawny, galloping form of a big maneless lion. Crack! the Winchester spoke; and as the soft-nosed bullet ploughed forward through his flank the lion swerved so that I missed him with the second shot; but my third bullet went through the spine and forward into his chest. Down he came, sixty yards off, his hind-quarters dragging, his head up, his ears back, his jaws open, and lips drawn up in a prodigious snarl, as he endeavoured to turn to face us. His back was broken, but of this we could not at the moment be sure; and if it had merely been grazed he might have recovered, and then, even though dying, his charge might have done mischief. So Kermit, Sir Alfred, and I fired, almost together, into his chest. His head sank, and he died.”