SPORTSMEN’S FALLACIES
By HENRY S. SALT
Everyone knows the old story of the Wildgrave, that spectral huntsman who, for the wrongs done by him in the past to his suffering fellow-creatures, was doomed to provide nightly sport for a troop of ghostly pursuers.
“The Wildgrave flies o’er bush and thorn,
With many a shriek of helpless woe;
Behind him hound, and horse, and horn,
And ‘Hark away!’ and ‘Holla ho!’”
If we may judge by the signs of the times, a similar fate has now overtaken the modern sportsman, who finds to his dismay that his proud vocation no longer goes unchallenged, but that he is compelled to stand on his defence before the force of ethical opinion, and to play the part less of the pursuer than of the pursued. Nowadays it is the humanitarians who, in the intellectual discussion of sport, derive keen enjoyment from the “pleasures of the chase,” and having “broken up” the Royal Buckhounds after a ten years’ run, are hunting the sportsman from cover to cover, from argument to argument.
The sportsman, in fact, is now himself standing “at bay”; and it may be worth while to consider what value, if any, attaches to the excuses commonly put forward by him in justification of his favourite pastime. On what moral grounds are we asked to approve, in this twentieth century, such seemingly barbarous practices as the hunting to death of stags, foxes, and hares; the worrying of otters and rabbits; or the shooting of vast numbers of game birds in the battue? The hunted fox, as we know, has many wily resources for throwing his pursuers off the scent. What are the corresponding shifts and wiles of the hunted sportsman?[24]