But the spent fox, dead-beat before the pack—
His are the sweetest, strangest joys of all!”
This love on the part of certain animals for being hunted to death is surely one of the most curious facts in natural history, and makes it seem almost an injustice to horses, cows, pigs, and other domestic creatures, that they are denied a privilege which is so freely accorded to their wilder brethren. Why should deer, for instance, be specially favoured in this respect? The stag, as a noble lord once remarked, is a most pampered animal. “When he was going to be hunted he was carried to the meet in a comfortable cart. When set down, the first thing he did was to crop the grass. When the hounds got too near, they were stopped. By-and-by he lay down, and was wheeled back to his comfortable home. It was a life that many would like to live.” It appears, therefore, that it is a loss, a deprivation, not to be hunted over a country full of barbed wire and broken bottles by a pack of stag-hounds. Life is mean and poor without it; for, to humans and non-humans alike, sport, as the same nobleman expressed it, is “the gift of God.”
But the sportsman can be very “slim” when hard pressed in controversy by his implacable pursuers, and among his many devices for confusing the issue, the most subtle, perhaps, is the metaphysical argument which pleads that it is better for the animals to be bred and killed in sport than not to be bred at all, and that it is to the “preservation” which sport affords that certain species owe their escape from extinction. Mr. R. A. Sanders, late Master of the Devon and Somerset Staghounds, has thus written of the stag (Nineteenth Century, August, 1908):
“He has lived a life of luxury for years, and has a bad half-hour at the end. From his point of view surely the pleasure predominates over the pain. For if it were not for the hunting, he would not exist at all.”
When a Bill was introduced in Parliament in 1883 for the prohibition of the cruel sport of pigeon-shooting, it was opposed by Sir Herbert Maxwell on the ground that a pigeon would rather accept life, “under the condition of his life being a short and happy one, violently terminated,” than not be brought into existence; and the same sportsman has since stated, as a “salient paradox,” that one who takes delight in pursuing and slaying wild animals may claim to rank among their best friends. It escaped his notice, as it escapes the notice of all who seek refuge in this amusing piece of sophistry, that it is beyond our power to ascertain the feelings or the preferences of a pigeon, or of any other being, before he is in existence; what we have to deal with is the sentience of animals that already exist.
And as for the contention that animals are “preserved” by sport, it is sufficient to point out that it rests on a mental confusion between the individual animal and the species. It would be little comfort to the individual fox who is torn to pieces by the hounds to know, if he could know, that his species is preserved by his tormentors, and that the same process of death-dealing will thus be perpetuated. When it is asserted that but for fox-hunting the fox would have been exterminated in England like the wolf, the answer of course is that of the two methods extermination is far the more merciful. Can it be pretended that it would have been kinder to wolves to keep a number of them alive in order that sportsmen might for ever pursue and break them up?
And, really, if it is so kind to animals to preserve them that they may be worried with hounds, we ought to feel some compunction at having allowed the humane old sport of bear-baiting to be abolished; for, according to the same “salient paradox,” the bear-baiter was Bruin’s best friend. It is sad to think that there used to be bears in many an English village where now they are never seen!
It is for the fox, perhaps, that the sportsman’s solicitude is most touching and most characteristic. “If we stay fox-hunting,” it has been said, “foxes will die far more brutal deaths in cruel vermin traps, until there are none left to die.” How tender, how considerate, is this disinterested regard for the welfare of the hunted animal![29] The merciful sportsman steps in to save a noxious species from extinction, and in return for such “preservation” demands that the grateful fox shall be hunted and worried and dismembered for the amusement of his gentle benefactor. But are not our fox-hunting friends just a trifle too clever in making, at one and the same time, two quite incompatible and contradictory claims for their beloved profession—first, that it saves the fox from extermination; and, secondly, that it rids the country-side of a very mischievous animal? “For six good months,” says the Sportsman, “he is allowed to frolic at his ease, with all his poultry-bills paid for him.” The argument here is that there can be no cruelty in fox-hunting, because the fox is preserved; but, in that case, what about the following defence of fox-hunting by the editor of the “Badminton Library”? “The sentimentalist,” he says, “does not consider those other tragedies for which the fox is responsible—the rabbits, leverets, poultry, and game birds that he devours daily. The death of a fox is indeed the salvation of much life.”