Blood Sports Doomed?

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 240, 30 December 1927, Page 16

Blood Sports Doomed?

ENGLAND’S CHANGING SENTIMENT

Stag and Fox Chasing Assailed

IT seems safe to predict that English blood sports are doomed. One of the most deeply entrenched and picturesque privileges of “country” people in England, the riding to hounds, is being killed by public opinion, says a writer in the “New York Times.” Many signs point to this, chief among them the fact that the sportsmen themselves are on the defensive.

TOURING the hunting season just ended the correspondence columns of the newspapers here have seldom been without letters from people of all classes protesting against alleged cruelties in -stag and fox hunting. Incidents Arouse Feeling These letters, and still more the fact that masters of hounds all over the country have felt it necessary to reply to them in defence of the sport, make it evident that there is a widespread movement in England to abolish a form of hunting that, however useful it may have been at one time in ridding the country of pests, no longer serves that purpose. As, naturally the strongest protest comes from people of Liberal and Labour sympathies, it is not improbable that legislation may be introduced to abolish the sport altogether under the next Labour Government. Several incidents during the hunting season this year have served to rouse this feeling to an unprecedented pitch. In Somerset a stag, after being chased for 17 miles, leaped in desperation from a cliff into the sea. Hounds and huntsmen raced up and down the beach in hopes that it would return, but the animal swam straight out through the breakers. One of the hunt finally went to a telephone box on the moor and ordered a motor-boat, in which the huntsmen chased the stag through the water, and roped it over its antlers. Then the animal was hauled aboard and its throat cut. In another one of the hunts a stag was chased a score or so of miles before it stopped, covered with sweat and exhausted, in the main road at Preston. Then, frightened by a passing motor eaidSf ed h six :s° ot wa!l into a cottage to move h ° stayed ’ to ° exhausted This stag had been roused at Dunay th s r i evor ‘ an d Somerset stSghounds, who, having lost it, went honfe. nf thS passing motorist told members of the Quantock staghounds, who were UIVUU® afte r a day ’ s hunting from their Triscombe meet, about it, and they went to Preston, to find it in the garden. It was too exhausted to put up any resistance, and a knife soon finished it. The villagers, who had gathered to photograph and pet it, angry protests against its being killed, for its helplessness and beauty had endeared it to them. Farmers’ Troubles The indignation in the country seems to be based on the fact that stags are carefully protected throughout the greater part of the year in order that in the autumn they may be run nearly .to death and then toiled, The far-

mers, on the whole, would be glad to have them all killed off at once, since they do a great deal of harm to crops during the protected season, for which the hunt pays inadequate damages. The same reasoning applies to foxhunting. Foxes are vermin of no good to the country except as they provide sport for a small number of people. Until the last generation or two country people were only too glad to have huntsmen kill them off, and acquiesced in the tradition that to shoot a fox was a social crime. It was an understanding acceptable to both sides —the gentry killed the foxes, and the farmers returned the favour by not interfering in the sport by killing them in any other way. The farmers’ attitude has changed of late, however. To the consternation of the hunters they are exterminating the foxes ruthlessly in defiance of the unwritten law of sport. Especially is this so in the home counties about London, where there is much poultryraising. Here the foxes are exterminated almost openly by the farmers, who say that the compensation the hunt allows them for damages covers the bare value of the fowls, with nothing for their own labour and time, nor for the potential value of eggs and chicks. In the shires the work of extermination goes on more secretly, since in the great hunting counties to kill a fox other than by running him to death is considered an ungentlemanly thing to do. Since the war the antagonism between sporting people and farmers has grown more and more acrimonious. The fact that a large number of Norwegian vixens were imported a few years ago into the country for the purposes of sport has nullified the plea that the hunters are the farmer’s friends in that they rid him of his pestiferous enemy. Centuries of Opposition For several hundred years in England there has been opposition to blood sports on the part of people of outstanding intelligence. Sir Thomas More said that the place for hunters was in the abattoir. In the eighteenth century Lord Chesterfield wrote to his godson:— “I think you are above any of those rustic, illiberal sports of guns, do* • and horses, which characterise our English bumpkin country gentlemen, who are the most unlicked creatures in the world, unless, sometimes by their hounds. . . . “All these country sports, as they are called, are the effects of the ignorance and idleness of country esquires who do not know what to do with their time.”

Thomas Hardy, the dean of living English novelists and poets, lately in-

ferred to fox and stag hunting as one more proof that the human race Is still largely barbarous. It has taken time for this attitude, always held by emancipated thinkers, to penetrate to the mass of people. The scores of letters on the subject in the papers during the season show that people in general attack blood sports from three points of view. There are the sentimental ones who consider that it is wicked to kill animals for sport, and say the English had better look to their own sporting honour before criticising the bull fights of Spain. Hunters, in defending their sport, argue that if stag hunting were abolished the wild red deer of Exmouth would be entirely exterminated within a few years. The farmers would shoot the deer on sight, in season and out, if compensation were no longer given by the hunts in protecting them. The hunters also say that stag hunting gives employment, directly and indirectly, to thousands of people. It is hard to say how much weight the sentimental objections will have when the time comes for legislation on the subject. The people who would like to see stag and fox hunting abolished because it is not within the reach of the poor are many. There are still more who would do away with it because they believe it is wrong to make animals suffer. And, lastly, there are many people who pride themselves on their sporting instinct, and who believe that the chasing of a stag into the sea by a crowd of 500 horsemen and a horde of hounds, and bringing it back in a motor-boat to cut its throat on the quay is a travesty of sportsmanship and fair play.

This last point of view was responsible for a strange scene at a famous sports club in London the other night. At a dinner of sportsmen the health of the Devon and Somerset staghounds was proposed. Thereupon all of those at the table arose, solemnly filed out into the street, and poured their wine into the gutter.