So the farmer is to be grateful to the fox-hunter because the fox is killed, and the fox himself is to be grateful to the same person because he is not killed! It is obvious that the sporting folk cannot have it both ways; they cannot take credit for the destruction of a pest and also for preventing that pest being exterminated by the injured farmer. Let them choose one of the alternative arguments and keep to it.
“Hark ye, then, whose profession or pastime is killing!
To dispel your benignant illusions I’m loth;
But be one or the other, my double-faced brother—
Be saviour or slayer—you cannot be both!”
The more one considers it, one cannot but smile at the sportsman’s “love” for the animals whom he so persecutes and worries. Tom Tulliver, we remember, was described by George Eliot as “fond of animals—fond, that is, of throwing stones at them”; and so it is with this affection of the sportsman’s. “What name should we bestow,” says an old writer, “on a superior being who, without provocation or advantage, should continue from day to day, void of all pity or remorse, to torment mankind for diversion, and at the same time endeavour with the utmost care to preserve their lives and to propagate their species in order to increase the number of victims devoted to his malevolence, and be delighted in proportion to the miseries which he occasioned? I say, what name detestable enough could we find for such a being? Yet if we impartially consider the case, we must acknowledge that, with regard to the inferior animals, just such a being is the sportsman.”[30]
Trust the Specialist.
Such, then, are the arguments which are advanced in all seriousness, and without a suspicion or twinkle of humour, to prove that blood-sports are a benefit to mankind and to the lower races alike. But before concluding I must mention one other piece of reasoning which is as amusing as any specimen of sportsman’s logic—the “trust the specialist” fallacy, which asserts that none but sportsmen can fairly pass judgment on sport. For example, when a memorial was presented to a former Prime Minister against the Royal Buckhounds, a certain paper gravely remarked that “what proportion of the protesting gentlemen had ever been on horseback, it was not easy to determine.” The assumption, it will be seen, is that when any cruel practice is arraigned before public opinion, we are not merely to trust the specialist on technical matters that rightly lie within his ken, but we are to let him decide the wider ethical issues, on which, being no more than human, he is certain to have the strongest professional prejudice. It is an argument worthy of the Sublime Porte itself.
In like manner Lord Ribblesdale, when defending stag-hunting in his book on “The Queen’s Hounds,” expressed the sportsman’s case as follows: “Most people will agree that conclusions founded on practice must always have a slight pull when placed in the scales with conclusions based upon theory, hearsay, or conjecture—even granting the fullest credit for sincerity and bona fides to the opponents of stag-hunting.”