We are happy to see that the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is bestirring itself to prevent the horrible cruelty of which poultry dealers and exporters are guilty to the living creatures they trade in. Mr. Colam, the Secretary to the Society, in noticing in last Monday's Times an appeal for its intervention, states that " recently this Society's officers stationed at Newcastle-on-Tyne intercepted certain packages of poultry near that town which had been forwarded from Dublin by boat and railway. Upwards of two-thirds of the animals were dying or dead, one-third being actually dead," from cramp, thirst, and suffocation. But no redress could be got, the Newcastle Justices declining to grant a summons, on the ground that proceedings ought to be taken in Dublin, and the Dublin Bench dismissing the information, though admitting the horrible cruelty, on the ground that the proceed- ings had been taken under a wrong section of the Act,—which was not the case. The truth is, we suppose, that public opinion fails as yet adequately to aupport punishments for cruelty to birds and other creatures with which the world in general has estab- lished little sympathy. But what these poor wretches do suffer, packed in big crates, without power to move, without water, and without even free breath, in journeys of forty-eight hours and often more, is just what the English prisoners in the Black-hole at Calcutta suffered.
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