STAG HUNTING
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—The committee of the Devon and Somerset Staghounds has found it advisable to issue a kind of manifesto which has been distributed broadcast with their compliments. It begins by calling us who oppose stag hunting "a possibly small and certainly ignorant section of the community."
I do not perceive of what it is we are ignorant. We are not ignorant of the fact that stags are hunted for hours, that they suffer anguish of fear and exhaustion, that they sometimes leap over cliffs in their terror, that they will swim out to sea till they drown, and that on occasion they are savaged by the hounds' teeth till their flesh is torn down to the bone before they are finally killed. None of this is or can be denied.
A long dissertation written more than twenty years ago by Mr. Bayford, now Lord Bayford, when he was master of the staghounds, is reproduced. He says the stag is not a " noble animal," but a glutton, a sensualist and a bully. But the instincts given the stag by nature have nothing to do with the question of whether it is decent or manly to treat it as the Hunt treat it. Next he maintains that the stags have a happy time till they are hunted ; and would be exterminated if they were not preserved for hunting. Again, that the creatures are happy is no reason for treating them abominably ; and it is better to exterminate them than torture them, if that is truly the only alternative.
A large number of people, he says, enjoy the hunting of stags. So did a large number enjoy the awful spectacles in the Roman amphitheatre, and in this country a large number used to enjoy the horrid spectacle of bear-baiting, cock-fighting, and other shameful shows, and would still enjoy them if decent people had not put them down by Act of Parliament.
Lastly, we are told that the hunting of stags is an old custom and " has great traditions behind it." So was witch- burning an old custom with great traditions behind it, also torturing witnesses in Courts of Justice, and many another dreadful old custom. The longer an evil custom survives the more imperative becomes the demand for its prohibition. So much for this manifesto ; Lord Bayford and the stag-hunting committee must try again.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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