[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—May I presume to
reply to some erroneous statements contained in your recent correspondence on hunting ?
" A hunted fox Ithows that he is running for his life," &c. Until the very end, he most emphatically does not know this. He knows he has been disturbed in his morning's sleep and must find another place of warmth and silence. There have been well-authenticated incidents of a hunted fox snapping up a rabbit and carrying his prey for more than a mile. This is not the action of a terror-stricken animal.
Fox-hunters do not " wantonly add to suffering." They reduce it. Comparisons are beside the point. Bear-baiting and fox-hunting are fundamentally different. Bear-baiting wantonly adds to suffering. The fox wounded by the shot gunof the humanitarian would undoubtedly cry " Save me from my friends." If the race of foxes is to be exterminated by shooting or by poison or by trapping. they are destined to suffer more agony,• 'mental and physical, in a comparatively brief period than would be inflicted in whole centuries of fox- hunting.
Certainly " Whipper-In's " contention of the survival of foxes stands like a rock. The big guns of naval officers and others have not found the range. I would ask Commander Cather one question. If he were to be informed that his life was to be instantaneously cut off to-morrow by an unperceived motor-omnibus (I will not admit a long and painful demise), would he seriously lament the fact that he had been born ? I think not. Probably he has enjoyed too much the cruel and overbearing vituperation that he has lavished on " Whipper- In."
The drag is a substitute of a kind ; but a poor one. There can be no fine houndwork. All the cunning, the uncertainty, the woodcraft, the intimacy, one might say, with the unexpec- tedness of Nature, are absent in this form of amusement. If the chase goes, the country gentleman will go too. Few
will remain except in the arable Eastern Counties. Is it expedient ? Economically the farmers alone'hold the warrant of arrest. In the Old Berkshire country out of an average mounted field of eighty, never less than 85 per cent. are farmers.' Horse shows also would disappear, with the hounds. Point!: to-points and the smaller steeplechases would not long survive. Who will dare to say that the countryside would be better without all theie good things ?
May I end with a story containing a moral ? During the
war a well-known Guards officer ralliedhis men with a huntirig horn and gained his objective. It was an offence against Army Orders punishable by Court-Martial I Much agitation followed. Should he receive a censure or should he be recom- mended for a V.C.? "Hushed sup" his action could not be. He had blown his horn too loudly and too clearly, like a huntsman. The authorities decided very wisely. You cannot censure a man for turning defeat into victory.—I am, Sir, &C., 26 Mallord Street, Chelsea, S.W. 3. ANTHONY CROSSLEY.
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