Sporting Offences S PORTSMEN of fastidious taste, even more than professed
humanitarians, have been hurt in their finer instincts by a number of instances recorded in the chronicles of the past year. Some arc episodes in the hunting of deer and fox. Others concern forms of destruction by the gun so gross as to offend the suscepti- bilities "even of the youngest." The questions may be fruitfully considered at the opening of the hunting season this week. Not long ago the shooting of nearly two thousand shags, cormorants, and gulls was described with insatiate gusto in the pages of a paper that stands the world over as a standard of English life in the country. Now it may 'be 'economically wise to suppress the numbers of some species of birds. Here and,now we must recognize -* Chairman, Dr. O. W. Saleeby ;. Secretary, E. Y. Fitzgerald, New HealthSociety, 39 Bedford square, W.C. phases of a "nature red in tooth and claw," what- ever may be the far-off meaning and purpose. It is a very grim spectacle when the great black-backed gull drives its ruthless beak into some callow duck. This assassin seems possessed of a more deliberate savagery than any hawk. You may watch a peregrine stoop and forget the death in the magnificence of the impulse. Sentiment rather than logic takes command of our judgment ; and so it must be. A good many birds do serious harm to fishing, even the terns, those swallows of the sea. Rooks in excessive numbers and hordes of immigrant pigeons become a real threat to productivity. The numbers must be reduced. If the unpleasant work has to be done, let it be done quickly and as mercifully as may be. But the act takes on quite a different complexion when we foster enjoyment of it, decorate the theme, and select it for idealistic treatment in literature.
Many years ago the writer was presented with a charm- ing book written by a woman who had spent a month shooting deer in Scotland. Many of the descriptions of the scenery, of the life, and of the stalking were pleasant to read ; but among the pictures selected for illustration was the sportswoman standing in rapt contemplation of "the gralloching of the deer." It is indeed almost a commonplace of stalking to preserve pictures of this necessary but hardly lovely process. This photograph produced much the same effect as the use of the word " fine " sport in an account of the wholesale shooting of shags and cormorants. One of the worst offences against humanity commonly practised by folk of all sorts is the promiscuous shooting of sea-birds, whose bodies or wounded selves are allowed to fall into the sea and are never retrieved. Against such wanton cruelty the whole race of sportsmen ought to protest ; and it should be the etiquette—to use no bigger word—of their art and practice to do, say, or write nothing that should en- courage the desire to indulge in such insensate cruelty.
Those who have visited the shores by the Basses Pyrenees, both on the French and Spanish side, will have been shocked by the long-shore sportsman blazing into flocks of dunlin or at single gulls, and then moving on without troubling to pick up what they have struck. They will certainly have thought and probably described the practice as " un-English." If the word is justified we shall all be glad. This question of retrieving gives a fair working test of what is bad form, bad manners, bad morals in sport. The man who shoots and does not try to retrieve offends against all the canons. It is foul and heart- rending to see the dead bodies lying exposed on rock or sea or land. The saddest of spectacles is to watch a winged gull swimming away to its slow and painful death, merely because some callous or thoughtless being liked to see its momentary fall, and sought a sensation of personal pride.
The sum of pain inflicted in shooting is much greater than in hunting ; but episodes occur in hunting that stir the sensitive imagination more deeply. Such events continually happen in stag-hunting, which under some conditions may be the most artificial of all forms of hunting. In Kent, it was reported, a hard-pressed stag swam three miles out to sea and drifted another three, and when at last it landed was again hunted out of sight. When you have once seen a heavy hare or other mammal hardly pressed by harriers or beagles, you cannot forget the experience. The sight must leave the im- pression that what is sometimes called" the truce of God " has been violated, and a slur cast on the whole sport, on human nature itself. All our close seasons are too late. Partridges are shot when they have paired, and the boast of killing a May fox is outrageous. In some seasons cubs are born at the beginning of April. Some Of our best naturalists, our truest lovers of the country, are sports- men, and it is their proper business to be punctilious in supporting those qualities of fairness, kindness, and good taste that are associated the world over with British sport. Lord Wodehouse set a great example by protesting against otter-hunting on the ground that "it takes place in the months of May and June when all other animals are preserved." Other sportsmen have called attention to excessive killing and incidental cruelty in rook-shooting. Very many sportsmen, again, were in arms against the indiscriminate killing of badgers, after an account was published of the killing of seven in one earth. The present plea is not on behalf of the humanitarian against the sportsman, but in support of a stiffening of the etiquette of sport to the end of the re- duction of the sum of pain in the world and the cleansing of the sportsman's spirit.
Previous page
