THICK-HIDED CRUELTY.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Last Christmas there was a discussion in your columns about killing turkeys, and all that. Thinking it was a little overdone, I determined to wait for some fresh opportunity of saying a word or two. Your correspondent " An Opponent of
Vivisection" is surprised at "the tacit assumption that all humane persons are alive to the claims of the lower animals." And well he may be.
A few years ago, some respectable and very particularly serious " working " people sent to me to offer me sonic fowls, as they were killing their stock by degrees. I do not mention the religious connection of this family, or else you would have fifty letters from "the body," assuring you that cruelty to animals formed no part of their teaching. But one day, the fowl not coming to time, I sent to inquire about it. My young messenger was taken into a garden, and shown the victim. "There he is, you see; he'll soon be ready," said the house- mother, her children hanging to her gown. Yes, Sir; there he
was—it was a capon—and whore was he? His legs were tied, and he was hung by the string to the garden fence, head down- wards. Alive? Yes, and wobbling about, with a common table-knife poked up his throat. "That's to make the flesh white," said the good house-mother. I was calmly informed, in the course of the interpellations which arose, that sometimes the bird struggled down or ejected the knife. What then ? 13 e was reinstated, with all the honours.
Again, Lady Fanshawe' never could bear ' Professor Blackie ;1 I mean, my finest doe rabbit did not " affect " my finest buck
—a magnificent beast, named after the author of that beautiful Carlyle quatorzain in your last number, on account of his colour, I mean the buck's colour, not the poet's. We voted a new buck in the estimates, and 'Blackie' into the pie dish, for Lady Fanshawe' was too lovely to be eaten. Now, the man that I used to ask to kill my own fowls and rabbits was a milkman, a mild man, and a blameless husbaud and father. As for his reli- gion, be had not, as my other friends bud, a definite creed, I fear ; lie had eight children, and his faith abounded in any direction where coals, half-crowns, and blankets did much more abound. So far as I could make out, he used to do something sudden and decisive to the necks of my animals.
But with Professor Blackie ' he was unsuccessful, at first. While he was chatting over his little honorarium, there came a yell of horror from the shed in which the poor rabbit was supposed to be lying dead. The man rushed in, to find the great, black beast very much alive, and---. Never mind, Sir, never mind 1 But you should have heard that good follow
laugh. The end of it was that we would have no more rabbits killed; we sold, first, the canaille, and at last, with many tears, the beautiful Lady Fanshawe.'
Sir, I take it to be, as your correspondent says, a " surprising assumption" that "all humane persons aro alive " to suffering in the lower ereatures.—I am, Sir, &e., FUR, AND FEATHERS.
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