CRUELTY TO MICROBES. Boiled Lobsters and Hooked Fish.

Free Lance, Volume III, Issue 111, 16 August 1902, Page 8

CRUELTY TO MICROBES. Boiled Lobsters and Hooked Fish.

THE Wellington S.P.C.A. have been asked to try to prevent the formation of a coursing club in the city. The Society in saying that they cannot interfere, probably see an endless list of cases in which it would hardly be correct for them to intrude were they to be instumental in preventing hare coursing. They would stop rabbit shooting and trapping at once. * * * The life of a rabbit that reposes through a freezing night with its leg in a iron gin cannot be particularly pleasant, and a shot "bunny " with a couple of broken legs, carried in a gamebag over rough country, isn't the subject for a pastoral poem. What about the "sport" of gun clubs and its maimed pigeons, which are often kept until they get fit to fly again ? " Who is to say that a hare's life is not as much to itself as those of the persons mentioned as president and committee as to themselves?" This from a newspaper objector to the coursing sport. * ¥■ # Of course, the life of a hare is equally important to itself as is the life of a man, or the minute animalcuhe in the kettle, or the lobster which gets boiled to death by tender-hearted housewives, or the fish that one daily hauls out of the ocean to die by slow degrees with mouths roughly torn by barbed hooks. Isn't it morally as cruel to cut the jugular vein of a fowl and let it bleed to death, as to allow a powerful dog to follow ii stinct and to crack a hare's spine and crush his heart with one vigorous bite ? • * • We are convinced that the destruction of animal life for mere sport is inherently cruel, and that if coursing can be stopped it should be. But to get up in the stirrups and compare harecoursing to the slow pastime of bullfighting, is, to say the least, straining comparisons. That there are cases enough of cruelty to draught animals in Wellington to occupy all the spare time of philanthrophists is so obvious that they need not look far for a job. * * * We observed a horse but a few days since suffering from an immense callous growth on his off hind leg. The poor beast hasn't the chance of getting chased for a few hundred yards and then getting killed with a couple of bites. He has his daily task to do. There is work for philanthrophists right to hand, and may be in time the human heart will have grown so tender that the wily anmialcula wilt revel in its little life, which is to itself of as much importance as is that of the people who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

Messrs. On- and Loclder, the proprietors of the Believue Gardens, are making their picture spot very widely known. The "Canterbury Timea" this week contains a double page of magnificent views of the gardens, and an article by Mr. James Muir, of Wellington, who will be best remembered as a hydropathic specialist, formerly resident at Te Arohai and Rotorua. The views, the finest of which is from the camera of the American photographer, Vaniman, are quite the best that have been produced of the Bellevue Gardens.