Such are some of the results of the trapping, but
the cardinal offence is the cruelty inflicted by the steel traps on the rabbits. Exactly what happens in many parts is this : a trapper makes a large contract for the supply of so many rabbits a week. To secure them he pays a good round sum annually to, say, four or five farmers in return for a monopoly of the right of trapping on the farm. At first the requisite supply is easily procured from a small area of ground. The killing is cruel enough then, for the steel trap is a diabolic instrument at any time. It cuts and tears the flesh, it breaks the limb of the struggler ; but it does not inflict any mortal injury. The suffering continues till the setter of the trap arrives. All one can say of the trapping on a small area and in a small way is that the period of suffering is reduced. The traps can be visited frequently, and none is likely—we may hope—to be altogether or even temporarily forgotten. The case is very different when the area is large ; and sometimes at certain seasons it is very large. When the trapper goes over his ground the first time he can, as I have said, procure his quota off a comparatively small area. But when he traps the second or third or fourth time he has to spread his traps wider and wider. He may be forced, in order to supply the full number for which he has contracted, to range over four or five different farms. They may not be contiguous, indeed they often are not. By the compulsion of mere time and space it is impossible for the man who set the traps to visit all within twelve or even twenty-four hours. Some traps may be wholly forgotten ; and as all who have experience on the land know, a certain number of animals, mostly rabbits, but cats, dogs, and vermin, and even birds are included, are left to struggle till they die of hunger or agony or both. The system is, devilish ; the sum of cruelty inhuman. Loud and much advertised protests arc raised in England about a great variety of cruelties and alleged cruelties, such as medical vivisection ; but I know none that inflicts pain so acute in each instance or so general as this steel-trapping of rabbits. Tens of thousands of rabbits are so caught and tens of hundreds of other animals suffer. The law forbids pole-traps, which do not compare with the steel trap in the sum of inflicted agony.
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