May We Kill?

I

IN many countries a new sort of championship of animals has come into evidence since the war. The most popular, one may say sacrosanct, of sports in England has been fox hunting. One of Gilbert’s heroes in Ruddigore, doomed to commit a crime every day, was cheered to the echo when he reported to the jury of his ancestors that he had shot a fox. That was a crime indeed! It was not pity for the fox that created the crime, but a sense of shame that it should be killed in any other way than by the agency of a pack of hounds.

To-day in England there are landowners and poultry keepers who go so far as to boast of shooting foxes, with a view to their extermination. But more than this, popular newspapers as well as specialistic humanitarian societies of considerable wealth and wide support raise almost daily protests against all ‘blood sports,’ so called. There is evidence, in short, that in many, perhaps most, countries the community is preparing to retest accepted formulæ in regard to sport and the treatment of wild animals.

The Church has taken a hand. There still exists, though in less robustious form, that most curiously English of characters, the sporting parson, who was once capable of slipping a surplice over his hunting coat, that he might hurry from church to the covert-side. As he tends, softly and silently, to vanish away, greater dignitaries of the churches give to the world their later views on humanity to animals. When t he Dean of St. Paul’s, a most modern divine, wrote a prophecy of the coming extinction of blood sports, he was attacked with a shrapnel of pamphlets, not for his prophecy, but for his moderation. He had not condemned blood sports with sufficient heat and vigor to please the humanitarians. Though Saint Francis is as truly a type of t he champion of the lower animals (so called) as Buddha, who shrank in horror from the death of a fly, historic Christianity, as expressed in the New as well as the Old Testament, has not very obviously or strongly concerned itself with kindness to animals. There exist, however, in oral tradition some moving anecdotes on the theme. When the Founder of Christianity passed a dead dog, which the passers-by stigmatized in various idioms as repulsive and loathsome, he stopped and, looking down at the poor beast, said, ‘Pearls are not equal to the whiteness of its teeth.’ There spoke real pity.

The theme is omitted in most Christian literature, and even to-day is not heard in a great many pulpits. Nevertheless the Church may soon be forced to answer the plain question: Does it sanction hunting and shooting? Parliaments may be asked a like question. Indeed, in Czechoslovakia a parliament has notably emphasized the movement by an absolute prohibition of the trap. It is illegal to set any traps for any animal, with the sole exception of the muskrat, which was imported from America, and has proved so serious a public danger, especially to irrigation works, that permits are issued for using ‘open traps,’and even official trappers are appointed. In Britain the toothed steel trap will probably soon be made illegal. Its use is to-day horribly abused, and the popular agitation against it grows steadily. At the same time a loud outcry against deer hunting, if not against fox hunting and shooting, has actually begun to reduce the area of the sport.

In the old days, humanitarian and sportsman were bitterly opposed, as bitterly almost as research students and antiviviscctionists to-day. One effect of the new movement has, rather surprisingly, issued in an attempt to discover a common ground. One example is that in both Eastern Europe and Britain the endeavor to prohibit trapping has been led by the sportsmen themselves. In Britain one of the chief leaders is a Master of Foxhounds, and he finds himself on the same platform with professional humanitarians. It is of more than parochial interest to know that he is famous as a naturalist and protector of the rarer birds; for his case, with its utter scorn of abstract logic, is a test case.

Can the sportsman pretend to be also a humanitarian? May a man or woman or child kill, and call itself kind? Is the higher virtue the sole property of the extreme humanitarian? Does Buddha stand alone? Has Christianity a hole in its moral armor? Shall we one day follow the humane articles of Buddha’s creed and confess, in the phrase of a confession made to Another in another reference: ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean’?

The question is crucial to the social life and morality of a large section of the community in every civilized or semicivilized country of the West or the East.

It is well to look back a little way to get a line of advance. Scarcely more than a generation ago, bear and badger baiting and cockfighting were countenanced and even widely enjoyed. We see daily new examples of the law of accelerated progress. Shall we soon think of shooting and hunting what we now think of badger baiting, and regard the pink coats of huntsmen or the pelts of the trapper with the sort of feeling aroused by those gayly caparisoned matadors who take the eye in the Sadic spectacle of a Spanish bullfight?

II

In seeking a ground of prophecy and of propaganda, let us be honest. No one is logical. Perhaps the least logical of all is the professional humanitarian, unless he is also a vegetarian, in the narrowest sense of that much-misused word, and unless he refuses to eat the produce of the dairy and the poultry yard or to wear wool or leather. The most active of humanitarian pamphleteers — incidentally a good classical scholar — has confessed that the bull calf tramples the vegetarian’s logic in the mud. The young bull must be killed. If we recognize killing even to this extent, we have abandoned the most straight and simple of principles, and are left to chop arguments about degree.

’Nature, red in tooth and claw,’ kills to live and, for the most part, hurts with zest, even kills for the fun of the thing. Some animals, of course, are so feline that, obeying their natural instinct, they torture or at least kill so slowly that we in our sensitive fashion call the delay torture. We so feel for the victim that we instill it with our own feelings. It would be abominable for a man to torture on the excuse that the cat tortures, or even to hunt because the lion hunts. Yet the sportsman when he hunts undoubtedly feels himself to be flowing with the stream of the difficult world in which he has his being. He is conscious of a certain sanction extracted from the scheme of things.

Wordsworth has given us a portrait of the Happy Warrior, the born soldier of whom it is yet true that his

Similarly there exists beyond all question ‘the happy sportsman,’ such as Richard Jefferies once was, who more or less delights in fishing, shooting, and hunting, but whose nature is kindly, whose most penetrating pleasures come from the observation of wild animals and of the fields and woods in which they live. You may say of him with satisfactory satire what George Eliot said of the boy, Tom Tulliver, who was ‘very fond of birds, that is of throwing stones at them.’ The shaft penetrates; and yet — and yet this so-named happy sportsman in practice does more useful humanitarian service than any other member of society. He founds sanctuaries, he protects birds, he would abolish the steel trap, he is particular to kill humanely (if the two words may go together), he lets no creature ‘linger in its agony,’ does not shoot wildly, and is precise to observe not only the close season, — the Wappenstillstand, — but the date when animals begin to pair, whether it fits the almanac or no. ‘The happy hunter’ is an actual type. He exists and rejoices in what some will always regard as his hypocrisy, like the French philosopher who said of the British race, ‘It is saved by its want of logic.’

The two American naturalists of whom Europe knows most were perhaps those two eminent friends, Roosevelt and Burroughs. It was a liberal education to watch small birds under the guidance of Roosevelt at Oyster Bay. A letter that the writer much cherishes begs him to come to Oyster Bay to see the red tanager.

Now Roosevelt’s attack, in alliance with his friend, against the ‘nature fakers,’ the people who dared to say the thing that was not in the sphere of observation, was inspired by a feeling that was almost a religion. Yet this happy hunter was a shooter of great game, and traveled to remote places for no other reason than to see and to kill. He found with others that there are few sensations more thrilling on this crowded and conventional earth than to watch herds of the greater mammals in their native haunts, whether they be dangerous, as elephants and lions and grizzlies, or almost harmless, as giraffes and quaggas and black bears. Those who live where such animals flourish sometimes find it necessary to kill. A letter from India is before me describing a vigil up a tree at the foot of which lay a native’s body mauled out of recognition. Presently the tiger returned to his kill, looked up at the tree as the man’s rifle moved, and took the bullet over the eye. In an instant all was over. The man-eater who had terrorized a group of villages for three years was dead. Here was nature crudely red indeed. Against such an act as the shooting of this tiger no one will rebel. And whom did the harried natives call on to rid them of this threat? Their Saint George was of course a hunter, a man who had taken delight in the higher risks. He had been nearly killed himself by both bear and bison. Are we to condemn him for the long training in hunting, in jungle lore as well as in marksmanship, in firmness of nerve and in quickness of eye, that had fitted him for that particular act?

But it is more. It is a deep, racial, inherited desire to hunt, or even to be hunted.

Whatever decision we come to in the sequel on the cardinal articles of the humanitarian’s faith, we have to acknowledge that this instinct is as strong in man as in tiger. If we condemn it, we must do the thing that is especially forbidden in the etiquette, in the code, of the medical profession: the doctor must not destroy a native desire if it can be in any way preserved.

So feels many a sportsman, and even when he is scarcely conscious of it this feeling is behind his mind and his actions.

III

It must be granted that this desire exists even in some of the most highly intellectual men. Personally, though I have met more able men, I have never met anyone who had a greater control of his own mental processes than Theodore Roosevelt ; and in him this hunter’s zest was ineradicable.

So far as we, with our limited imagination can see, the sport of hunting plays — for the moment — an almost necessary part in the world’s economy. The most professional of killers is known technically on British sporting estates as a ‘keeper.’ It sounds a satiric title; but it remains that the sportsmen are everywhere the leaders of preservation. Those immense herds of wild animals that roam the greatest hunting ground in the world, — in Kenya, Tanganyika, and East Africa, — those animals of which among others Roosevelt took some toll, would have been clean wiped out but for sportsmen. They were the people who cared.

It is an obvious riposte that they cared because they wanted to kill, because they thought their cruel practices would be stopped for want of material. This motive doubtless was not altogether absent. Even so they may claim to have preserved whole herds in order to kill half a dozen animals. That the killing is not the chief pleasure we all know who have shot or had traffic with sportsmen; and it happens that within the last few years a number of the most famous, or notorious, biggame hunters have almost entirely surrendered the gun for the camera. When the millennium comes shall we all change our rifles into lenses as well as our spears and swords into pruning hooks ?

Now, as a matter of pure history, what happens again and again with sportsmen who have taken delight in the chase is that as they grow older they grow more soft-hearted. One old sportsman used to say, ‘I’ve grown so soft-hearted in my old age that I am ashamed of myself.’ There is no doubt at all that extreme reluctance to slay is usually correlated with low or lowered vitality. The weak cannot even endure to put a suffering creature out of its pain; and no one could commend that physical reluctance to do a necessary act.

It is the commercial mind, not the sporting, that is reckless and capable of a policy of extermination. It may be a sign of weak nerve, not an advance of true civilization, that sentimentality increases, as when we allow hundreds of human beings to die from disease, and cry out in horror because chloroform is administered to a dog whose inspection may provide curative science with a pain-saving secret.

We must see things as they are, even when we nurse our dearest ideals. Therefore it is a fact germane to the present theme that the great preservers of wild animals arc chiefly recruited from the ranks of sportsmen. It is a second essential fact, in another field of activity, that those who spend the most time and energy and thought in the endeavor to save mankind from pain, disease, and a short or ineffective life are often the most earnest believers in experiments on animals, experiments that have already immensely reduced the sum of pain in the world. In illustration of the first point, the red deer, the finest of the wild animals found in Britain, which is not rich in mammals, would have quite disappeared from the southern counties but for the staghounds. Extermination, if not the intention, would be the result of the humanitarian’s, not the sportsman’s, creed. I do not agree with sportsmen who use this argument as a direct defense of hunting. We could have compulsory preservation in reserves, of which Yellowstone Park is an ideal example. Nevertheless, all preservation also entails cold-blooded and deliberate killing. Let there be no question of that. Those who would avoid pain and death must vote bravely for extermination as an alternative. In the North Island of New Zealand, a law has been passed treating the red deer as vermin and allowing its destruction by any available means, even poison.

Life consists of alternatives; and it is at least arguable that the shooting down of animals by an official butcher has a worse subjective effect on the butcher than killing for sport on the sportsman, and at the same time inflicts as great a sum of pain.

The humanitarian and the sportsman both are, as I have said, necessarily illogical. They are involved in contradictory categories from which neither escapes. Man lives by plunder and destruction, as the lion lives. Doubtless this fact of existence may be a devil’s quotation. The sportsman who kills may nevertheless be rightly proud of his work as a preserver; yet he commits something very like Plato’s ‘sin in the soul’ when he argues, as some do, that he has a right to be cruel because nature is cruel. The argument would mean that men must never

. . . . . rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things,

nor ever

let the ape and tiger die.

There is a reasonable likelihood that a number of the existing sports will presently be brought to an end by public opinion and go the way of the badger baiting and cockfighting of the eighteenth century. I may cite one. Perhaps the most cosmopolitan spot in Europe and one of the loveliest is Monte Carlo. A picked crowd from all parts of the civilized world assemble there for their pleasure and no other reason. At the very centre is a semicircular lawn devoted solely to the amusement of pigeon shooting. Day after day you cannot escape the sound of the guns being fired there, and must watch the trapped pigeons either falling on that tapis vert or circling round and from time to time dropping wounded, either among the fashionable crowd or out at sea or among the ragged urchins on the road below. Everything about the sport, so called, offends the senses. The sum of pain is greater than in most shooting, for the birds are mauled before being released from the traps. Their tail feathers are pulled out in order to make them rise more quickly and so increase the difficulty of the shooting. Those who support the sport — and they come from both America and Europe — are perhaps chiefly concerned with the betting. It would be a libel on humanity to suggest that such a sport in such a scene will be allowed to continue into the golden age. We gather no sanction for such exhibitions of slaughter from the pounce of the hawk or the spring of the panther—‘They are beasts and we are men.’

IV

These contradictions and excuses, these controversies between humanitarian and sportsman, one as short of logic as the other, bring me to what I consider, not the conclusion of the whole matter, for we never reach that in humane affairs, but a working creed. Let it be presumed that we all want to advance beyond the brute in all the thoughts and actions of our life, according to the great Hegelian principle that in most conflicts one conception of good is fighting another conception of good, not good fighting evil. Let us recognize that the vivisectionist is a man of science who has the welfare of humanity at heart, that the sportsman who uses either the gun or the rifle may be an ardent naturalist and hater of cruelty, that the sentimentalist and humanitarian are not necessarily hypocrites because they eat meat and countenance the trapping of vermin or the extermination of a species. We can only advance to the end of a reduction of the sum of pain by general coöperation.

As things are at this moment in history, abuses horrible in the eyes of both sportsmen and humanitarians flourish in our midst in every country. On the lovely stretch of coast where France and Spain touch hands near Fontarabia, you may see any day in the breeding season gunmen slouching along the sands, firing promiscuously into flocks of dunlin, sea birds, and wading birds, and not so much as troubling to gather what birds they may kill or maim. The west side of Britain, where nature has conspired to heap up peaceful beauties, is made hideous over wide areas by the professional, commercially-minded rabbit trappers whose steel-toothed traps set in the open kill and maim not only the rabbits for which they are set, but dogs and cats and vermin and birds of all sorts. You find among the gorgeous mountains of North America evil traps holding the skeletons of the animals for which they were set. The trappers have neglected their own grim engines.

We may hope that the great sanctuaries and reserves, which provide almost all that a naturalist could desire, — the Yellowstone Park, Banff, the Government areas of East Africa, — will extend, and that on these wide native parks will be preserved beyond reasonable danger of total extermination the species of great animals who have roamed the wilds. Yet, even so, some animals must be excluded; and if they are to continue, the wild must be left untamed, the hunting ground be preserved. There is no reasonable prospect that sport will cease, that men will no longer shoot or catch fish with a fly. All that is likely to happen is an increase of regulation. Those holocausts of caribou which have defamed Newfoundland cease, and everywhere the hunter is being ‘rationed.’ He maykill so many and no more. Trappers will be licensed and will be forbidden to set traps that they cannot visit immediately. Probably the nature of the trap will be regulated and humane traps invented, as humane methods of slaughter for stock have been perfected.

We must kill. All that we can ever hope for is to make the act quick and as painless as may be. Since this is so, the one fruitful method of advance is for humanitarians and sportsmen to coöperate to the end of destroying agreed abuses, such as the indiscriminate use of the steel-toothed trap, or the shooting and maiming of caged pigeons. As an example of the reverse policy, I would quote the duel between the doctors and the antivivisectionists. I should say that nothing in this department of human activity, in what is called by the silly and ugly word ‘humanitarianism’—nothing has so certainly arrested progress as the lying outcry against men of science who have endeavored to reduce the sum of pain and loss in the world by experiments on anæsthetized animals. One reason for the unhappy conflict is that science deals with the actual truth and sentimentality often with imagined truth. Humanitarians too often alienate their deepest sympathizers by unwarranted, though kindly, emotions. They are truthful, but not true. For truthfulness is a correspondence between word and thought, while truth goes further. It is a double correspondence: between word and thought and thought and things.

V

To the facts about the humanitarian movements of our age must be added a note on the philosophy of pain. What is it, and who feels it? Mr. E. K. Robinson, who had some reputation as a naturalist in India, in America, and in Britain, wrote a long book to prove that nature was not ‘ red in tooth and claw’ in the human sense of the words; that pain as we understand it did not exist among animals other than man. His argument proved too much. His philosophy was too good to be true. He underestimated the penalties of pain as most of us exaggerate them, but his actual illustrations were all extremely accurate, and he might have gone yet a step further. An acquaintance of mine, a sportsman and no doctor, was forced to amputate the leg of an East African native badly mauled by a wild beast. The operation was successfully performed and the life saved, largely because the victim evinced no symptoms of pain whatsoever.

Similarly, in a South African war a white surgeon was called upon to extract from a native a bullet that was deeply embedded and had just touched one lung. As he pulled the bullet out, the native with a broad grin held out his hand and said, ‘Give it me, Doc.’ It is a common experience of medical science that these men are by natural instinct of the old Stoic philosophy, now sublimated in one aspect by Christian Science, that physical pain is not a great evil.

If some men feel like this, it is as certain as an inference can be that the sense of pain is yet further reduced as we descend the animal scale. We make all sorts of queer distinctions. Few humanitarians shrink from killing fish, and the reason is that they know of them as cold-blooded animals. Now a cold-blooded animal does not mean that the animal has sang-froid, as the French metaphor suggests, or that it is less susceptible to feeling. It merely means that its temperature varies according to the temperature of the surrounding medium. We have no absolute proof that an insect or a fish does not feel as acutely as we do, but the circumstantial and anatomical evidence are perhaps proof enough. I have seen a rabbit with a broken leg continue to feed as if nothing adverse had happened.

The pain that the sportsman inflicts is thus less than we imagine it to be, for half pain is thought. This is undoubtedly true, but the higher animals at any rate are very sensitive in their several fashions to pain plus fear. And fear overwhelms them when they can no longer have any free play for their native and natural powers. It is for this reason that the trap which holds and hurts, but does not kill, is an abomination, a blot on our human civilization.

The animal in a trap will scream aloud and exhibit pain such as you see no traces of when an animal, whether bird or beast, is shot in the wild. Even a hunted fox or deer never exhibits, at least in my experience, any of the distressing signs of pain and terror that mark the behavior of a trapped creature.

Again, in respect of birds, whose sensitiveness is high and whose brains are considerable, probably more pain is inflicted by the ejection of waste oil on the sea than by any form of sport. The oil clogs the wings, robs the bird of its proper mode of motion, and leaves it consciously liable to any attack by its enemies.

To prevent cruelties such as these that do no service to anyone, though they are world-wide, is a proper object of common endeavor between nations and continents. Again it is,

I think, beyond doubt that in illregulated slaughterhouses animals have agonized premonitions of the fate in store. Humane slaughtering is a duty laid on all peoples.

Even among sportsmen are some who nurse a half-mystic feeling that animals which die in fear provide a poisonous food; and medical science has produced some evidence in support of the belief. They find alien poisons in the flesh; and research into this strange example of the effect of mind, especially of strong emotion, on the body is going forward. However this may be, and the evidence is too little for dogmatism, we are all mystics enough to shrink from inflicting this pain of terror on this animal or that, whether we kill it for sport, or food, or clothing, or self-preservation. We may all coöperate, if we will, — research student and antivivisectionist, sportsman and vegetarian, male man or effeminate woman, — even these opposites may coöperate in a common effort to put an end to the acknowledged cruelties. We may postpone, till the date when they are remedied, the wrangles, often unseemly and buttressed by false prejudices, that too often prevail between professional humanitarians and amateur sportsmen.