With the repetition of these manœuvres in the case of every lion killed in the author’s gentlemanly advance across Africa, I had a stronger and stronger impression that somewhere else I had encountered this sort of reasoning. Somewhere I had heard it all before; or if I had not heard it, I had seen it. But how could I, a Vermont rustic, ever have seen anything which might remind me of lion-hunting according to these impeccably sportsmanlike rules? I laid down the book, trying to bring up the haunting memory more clearly, and in a moment it had flashed up vivid and clear-cut. Why yes, the sportsmanlike method of killing lions reminded me of something with which I had been familiar all my life,—of a cat playing with a live mouse before eating it. It was now more evident that, in comparison with the brutally direct methods of the pot-hunting dog, the cat is actuated by the finest devotion to the ideals of sportsmanship. Not for her the quick pounce and avid crunch of Rover. She “gives the mouse a chance,” and only kills him after she has extracted the most deliciously titillating excitement out of his frenzied dashes for liberty. The facts that he never does get away from the cat, and that the lion does sometimes get away from the man only prove how infinitely more clever in this game of sportsmanship, is the cat than the man, since the open purpose of both cat and man is to kill the other animal in the end.
Now nothing can be more unphilosophical in one’s attitude towards the world than to blame creatures for acting according to their natures, and I have never felt in the least inclined to censure the cat, although I always put her out of the room with some violence if she brings in a live mouse and begins her sportsmanlike tactics with him. This is not because I think the cat is a wicked animal and ought to be punished, but merely because the sight of the frantic mental sufferings of the mouse happens to be very disagreeable to me. I have no illusions about pussy. I know that if I kicked her out of the room a thousand times ten thousand, I could never inculcate in her any genuine conception of the idea that it may be wrong to get her fun out of another’s extreme pain. That is the way cats are. Her virtues lie in other directions. If she keeps herself and her kittens clean, and does not steal my beef-steak, I can ask no more from her.
But now as I meditated on her character, for which I felt a contemptuous tolerance founded on a knowledge of her limitations, I was most disagreeably struck by the close resemblance between her nature and that of the gentleman-sportsman. It is all very well to make the best of the cat’s shortcomings, to refrain from expressing, in the only way she can understand, my disgust at a trait she cannot alter, but it is quite another thing to resign myself to the presence of the same trait in the character of many human beings for whom I should like to feel nothing but admiration and respect.
I recognize of course that the lion-hunter may shift his ground, admit that he hunts more for the excitement of the chase than to protect poor colonists from marauding lions, yet still protest against my criticism. “It is unfair,” he may urge, “to assume that human nature is all mind and spirit. Flesh and blood exist and have their claim for consideration. Killing animals might be unworthy for a seraph, but I am a man, and for me it is a harmless method of exercising my age-old inherited battle-lust. I as well as the cat am linked to the past. Is it fair for you to censure in me what you pass over in her?”
Such a plea will hardly answer. Human nature is not animal nature, and though dogs and cats may possibly have their own standards of right and wrong, based on the needs and possibilities of their species, man with his different needs and possibilities has no ethical point of contact with them. But in his own case he is and always has been convinced of the spark disturbing his clod. He is not content to regard himself as a highly intelligent primate, destined to make over the material world for his own uses; whatever his practice may be, he cannot free himself from the belief that he must be good, and must become better. Nor has this conviction wasted itself in impotent speculation. Throughout his history, he has continued to set up standards of conduct so lofty that no age has come near to living up to its profession of right living. Nevertheless aspiration has induced development: for the standard of its ancestors has seemed inadequate to every generation. What the grandfather considered a matter of course, and the father condoned as a peccadillo, the son and his contemporaries proclaim a vice. They may themselves indulge in the vice, but they do so with a feeling of guilt, and they hail with rejoicing the moments when they resolve to improve their lives: such wishes are everything: the rest is merely a matter of time.
No man, therefore, can regard himself solely as the son of an earthy family: for with the lusts of the flesh he has also inherited the aspirations of the spirit; and he is bound by this mental heredity to hold himself responsible as the father of a posterity always advancing toward perfection. Unless he is willing to confess himself either an imbecile or a criminal, he is not justified in yielding to an impulse which he recognizes as unworthy.
Again, the gentleman-lion-hunter may object that I am stating the matter with too much heat. Even though forced to admit that hunting is neither really useful (since lions can be exterminated more easily and surely without it) nor an ineradicable heritage from man’s savage past (since men have outgrown so many other supposedly ingrained instincts) he may make a stand on the contention that hunting is a blameless pastime, and that if a gentleman chooses to spend his vacation shooting lions, instead of climbing mountains, neither he, nor society, nor posterity will ever be a penny the worse for it.
I cannot agree with the Gentleman-sportsman. His contention that lion shooting is an obviously blameless recreation for civilized men does not appear to me self-evident. Among the difficulties which beset us in our great campaign to keep the higher elements in human nature, and to discard the lower ones, there is no more puzzling problem than the question of our relation to the animal-world. On this problem there is a great difference of opinion between the older and the younger branches of the Aryan family. The Hindus elaborated their merciful and elevated theory of life at a time when, so to speak, we were still tearing meat from the bones and eating it raw. When, at a much later period, we ourselves came to face the problem, the discoveries of science had so widened the horizon of our knowledge that we were unable to accept the Hindu doctrine of never taking animal life because the principle of life is sacred. Aware that life is not only animal, but exists in everything, we perceived that to eat a dish of oatmeal is to destroy life as truly as to butcher an ox. It is apparent to us that one of the dark mysteries of the world is that we can avoid taking life only by refusing to live ourselves.
Confronted with this problem, when we began to question our habits, we have, after a fashion, worked it out on logical grounds, and have decided that we have a right to take life which is necessary to ours, or which is injurious to ours; but we have tempered this high-handed decision by the feeling, based on all that is best and highest in our natures, that to take life is a serious business, should be undertaken in a serious spirit, for some evident purpose, and should be accomplished in the most painless fashion possible. All the nation-wide campaign against flies has not lessened by a jot our horror at the child who amuses himself by tearing off their wings. Moderns think of themselves as the legal executioners of those animals which they elect must die; and the essence of the executioner’s duty is to be merciful, quick, competent in the accomplishment of his task. Most of us would not care to work in a slaughter-house, but that is not because we think the butcher a wicked man. Neither would we choose of our own accord to care for the insane, or clean out the sewers in a city, but that is not because those are shameful acts. They are necessary but uncomely parts of the world’s economy, to be performed with a decent reticence and as quickly and economically as possible.