On a recent January night, an animal welfare society had a call to one of the city freight-yards where a carload of horses was said to be freezing to death. It was not a false alarm. The agents knew that these were not valuable horses. Good stock is not shipped in this precarious fashion. It was a load of the feeble and the aged and maimed—with a few days' work left in them, if continuously whipped, gathered from the fields and small towns by buyers who could realise a dollar or two above the price of the hide—to meet the demand of the alley-minded of the big city. The hard part is that it costs just as much pain for such beasts to freeze to death, in the early stages, at least. The investment would have been entirely spoiled had it been necessary to furnish blankets for the shipment.
The public reading a story of this adventure, remarks, "Why, I thought all that was stopped long ago——"
Just as underwriters will gamble on anything, even to insure a ship that is to run a blockade, if the premium is right—so will a certain element of trade take a chance on shipping such horses, until the majority of people are awake and responsive to the impulses of humanity. It isn't being sanctified to be above cruelty; it is only the beginning of manhood proper.
The newspapers and all publicity methods are of great service, but the mightiest effort is to lift the majority of the people out of the lethargy which renders them immune to pangs of the daily spectacle. The remarkable part is that the people are ready, but they expect the stimulus to come from without instead of from within.
Custom is a formidable enemy—that herd instinct of a people which causes it to accept as right the methods of the many. Farmers to-day everywhere are following the manner of Devlin; yet the story brings out the lineaments of most shocking and unforgettable cruelty. How can one expect effective revulsion on the part of a band of medical students when the bearded elders bend peering over their vivisections? What are children to do when their parents shout mad-dog and run for clubs and pitch-forks at the passing of a thirst-frenzied brute; or the teamster when the blacksmith does not know the anatomy of a horse's foot? Ignorance is the mother of cruelty, and custom is the father.
The great truths that will fall in due time upon all the sciences—upon astronomy, pathology, even upon criminology—are the results of flashes of intuition. Again and again this is so. The material mind is proof against intuition, and of necessity cruel. It keeps on with its burnings, its lancings, its brandings, its collections of skulls and cadavers, until its particular enlightener appears. The dreadful thing to consider is that each department of cruelty brings its activity up into a frightful state of custom and action, before the exposures begin.
Which brings us to the very pith of the endeavour: The child is ready to change—that is the whole story. The child is fluid, volatile, receptive to reason. In all our world-life there is nothing so ostentatiously or calamitously amiss as the ignorance and customs of our relation to children. The child will change in a day. The child is ready for the beauty and the mystery of mercy. The prison-house must not be closed to sensitiveness and intuition. If that can be prevented the problem of animal welfare is solved, and in the end we will find that much more has been done for our children than for the animals. So often again we set out to discover the passage to India and reach the shores of a New World.