STAG _ HUNTING [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR, —Your
correspondent Mr. Hendy may be a competent naturalist, but his arithmetic is weak. He expresses horror at the prospect. of a humanitarian holocaust of four hundred stags. 'He has, however, no objection to an annual holocaust of two hundred. Will he kindly explain why it is worse to kill four hundred stags in one year than to kill two thousand in ten years ? Will he also explain why it would be worse to be cruel to a small percentage of stags (by badly-managed shooting) than to be deliberately cruel to the full 100 per cent. ? -
If he genuinely believes that to regulate the number of Exmoor stags by shooting would need even half the cruelty at present involved in hunting, he must logically advocate complete extermination. But," he will answer, " I like keeping stags because I am a naturalist. The stags must put up with the consequences."
Well, I like keeping cats and dogs, but I shouki utterly decline to keep them if it were necessary for every animal to be put to a cruel death in the prime of life. I should regard those who insisted on keeping them under such con- ditions as sadistic peisons.
It is perfectly obvious that regulated shooting could lie tested over a given period of years ; if it proved to be really unsatisfactory, extermination could be resorted to. I do not think that anyone would dare to suggest the revival of hunting.
Such extermination of the Exmdor deer would be regret- table ;" but the present system is more than regrettable, it is intolerable.
The ludicrous attempts made by supporters of stag hunting to explain away not only Mr. Lovat Fraser's description of a hunt, but their own descriptions, remind me of Jerome's bull-fighter's explanation that the horse which the spectator imagined to be screaming with pain was only laughing at the comical appearance presented by its own inside.
If we are to allow the obvious signs of terror, exhaustion and physical pain resulting from hunting to be explained away by naturalists (or by Sir Francis Acland), we may assume that all signs of suffering in an animal may be dis- regarded, and abolish all our anti-cruelty laws at once.
If it is not extreme terror that causes stags to leap over cliffs and swim out to sea, what is it ?
I am one of those whom Mr. Hendy would regard as having no right to an opinion. I have never seen a stag hunt or lived in the Exmoor country. But I have talked with stag hunters, with people who have given up hunting, with people whose holidays have been spoilt by a meeting with a hunt, and with people who have been convinced of the demoralizing effect of hunting by a visit to the Exmoor country. I claim the same right to judge stag hunting that we all claim to judge evils that are very much further from home. We have already judged the traders who import osprey feathers. They have a better defence than the stag hunters since they might plausibly claim that if they do not kill the birds, somebody else will. We are willing enough to condemn evils in far away lands where definite evidence is far more difficult to come by than is the evidence of the cruelties that go on in glorious Devon under our very noses. Finally, I would point out that the crowds that attend meets are no proof of the popularity of hunting. I have attended meets myself. If Sir. Denis Bowles were publicly hanged I, daresay a pretty good crowd would turn up.— 46 St. John Street, Oxford.
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