THE ENGLISH GAME LAWS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5298, 19 March 1878, Page 3

THE ENGLISH GAME LAWS.

The Daily News (Jan. 23) reports that the highest criminal court in the realm has just declared that a gamekeeper may make free with his master’s game very much at pleasure. Stealing will not be stealing, embezzling will not be embezzling, in his case, and his defrauded master can do nothing more than discharge him. Such is in substance the purport of the astonishing decision at which the Court for Crown Cases Reserved has arrived. A gamekeeper had, without any authority from his master, caught and killed eighteen wild rabbits, and agreed to sell them. He was tried for stealing or embezzling hia master’s property ; there was no doubt as to the facts, and he was found guilty of embezzlement. But owing to the glorious uncertainty of the law, especially with reference to larceny and embezzle ent, he his been released. Rabbits and game running wild are not property at all in the eye of the common law, and cannot be stolen. When dead, they however become the property of the owner of the land on which they are killed ; and a poacher or trespasser who found a dead hare and put it into his bag could probably be punished as a thief. But, by a refined process of reasoning which does not recommend itself at first or even second thought, the Court came to the conclusion that this was not a case of stealing, seeing the killing and taking away formed one continuous act ; neither was it embezzlement, because the gamekeeper had never received posse siou of the rabbits “tor on account of” His master. In other words, the deliberate intention of the gamekeeper from first to last to cheat virtually saved him from conviction. Had the killing and selling of the rabbits been an after-thought he would probably have been punished. “Gases of this kind,” says Sir James Stephen, very truly, with reference to miscarriages of justice arising froin the highly artificial character of many of the rules on which questions of liberty of the subject arc determined, “ disgrace the law, and lead those who accidentally become aware of them to suppose that such cases are far more common than they really are, and to overlook the real merits of the system.” The Game Laws no doubt require revision and amendment ; but this mode of dealing with them scarcely commends itself to reason and common sense.