Part 19

A woman told this story: "When I was a child in the country there was an old cow that we all knew and loved. She was red and white like Stevenson's cow that ate the meadow flowers. Her name was Mary--Mr. Devlin's Mary. The Devlin children played with us, and they were like other children in every way, only a little fatter and ruddier perhaps. The calves disappeared annually (one of the mysteries) and the Devlin children were brought up on Mary's milk. It wasn't milk, they said, but pure cream. We came to know Mary, because she was always on the roadside--no remote back-pastures for her. She loved the children and had to know what passed. We used to deck her with dandelions, and often just as we were getting the last circlet fastened, old Mary would tire of the game and walk sedately out of the ring--just as she would when a baby calf had enough or some novice had been milking too long. I have been able to understand how much the Hindus think of their cattle just by thinking of Mary. For years we passed her--to and from school. It was said that she could negotiate any gate or lock.

"Well, on one Spring morning, as we walked by the Devlin house, we saw a crated wagon with a new calf inside, and they were tying Mary behind. She was led forth. I remember the whites of her eyes and her twisted head. Only that, in a kind of sickening and pervading blackness. The calf cried to her, and Mary answered, and thus they passed.... 'But she is old. She dried up for a time last summer,' one of the Devlin children said.

"Devlin wasn't a bad man, a respected churchman.... I spoke to certain grown-ups, but did not get the sense of tragedy that was mine. No one criticised Devlin. It was the custom, they said.... Even the butcher had heard of old Mary.... You see how ungrippable, how abstract the tragedy was for a child--but you never can know what it showed me of the world. None of us who wept that day ate meat for many days. I have not since. I cannot."

Her story reminded me sharply of a recent personal experience. I had been thinking of buying a cow. It appears that there are milch-cows and beef-cows. Country dealers prefer a blend, as you shall see. I said I wanted butter and milk, intimating the richer the better; also I wanted a front-yard cow, if possible.... There was a gentle little Jersey lady that had eyes the children would see fairies in----

"Yes, she's a nice heifer," the man said, "but now I'm a friend of yours----"

"I appreciate that. Isn't she well?"

"Yes, sound as a trivet."

"A good yielder?"

"All of that."

"What's the matter?"

"Well, a cow is like a peach-tree, she doesn't last forever. After the milktime, there isn't much left for beef----"

"But I don't want to eat her."

"But as an investment--you see, that's where the Jerseys fall down--they don't weigh much at the butcher's."

The styles change more slowly in the country.... I found this good economy so prevalent as to be rather high for humour. In fact, that's exactly why you can't get "grand" stakes in the country.... I related the episode to a man interested in the prevention of cruelty. He said:

"Don't blame it all on the country. I saw one of those butcher's abominations in a city street yesterday--cart with crate, new calf inside, old moaning mammy dragged after to the slaughter--a very interesting tumbril, but she hadn't conspired against the government. For a year she had given the best of her body to nourish that little bewildered bit of veal--and now we were to eat what was left of her.... Also I passed through a certain railway yard of a big city last holidays. You recall the zero weather? Tier on tier of crated live chickens were piled there awaiting shipment--crushed into eight-inch crates, so that they could not lift their heads. Poe pictured an atrocious horror like that--a man being held in a torture-cell in such a position that he could not stand erect. It almost broke a man's nerve, to say nothing of his neck, just to read about it.... I had seen this thing before--yet never as this time. Queer how these things happen! A man must see a thing like that just right, in full meaning, and then tell it again and again--until enough others see, to make it dangerous to ship that way. I got the idea then, 'Suppose a man would make it his life-work to change those crates--to make those crates such a stench and abomination, that poultry butchers would not dare use them. What a worthy life work that would be!...' And then I thought, 'Why leave it for the other fellow?...' The personal relation is everything," he concluded.

There was something round and equable about this man's talk, and about his creeds. He was "out for the chickens," as he expressed it. This task came to him and he refused to dodge. Perhaps he will be the last to see the big thing that he is doing, for he is in the ruck of it. And then very often a man sets out to find a passage to India and gets a New World. In any case, to put four inches on the chicken-crates of America is very much a man's job, when one considers the relation of tariff to bulk in freight and express.

Yet there is efficiency even to that added expenditure--a very thrilling one, if the public would just stop once and think. If you have ever felt the heat of anger rising in your breast, given way to it, and suffered the lassitude and self-hatred of reaction, it will be easy for you to believe the demonstrable truth that anger is a poison. Fear is another; and the breaking down of tissue as a result of continued torture is caused by still another poison. The point is that we consume these poisons. The government is very active in preventing certain diseased meats from reaching our tables, but these of fear, rage, blood-madness and last-days-of-agony are subtler diseases which have so far had little elucidation.

Though this is not a plea for vegetarianism, one should not be allowed to forget too long the tens of thousands of men and boys who are engaged in slaughtering--nor the slaughtered.... Long ago there was a story of an opera cloak for which fifty birds of paradise gave their life and bloom. It went around the world, that story, and there is much beauty in the wild to-day because of it. The trade in plumes has suffered. Styles change--but there is much Persian lamb still worn. Perhaps in good time the Messiah of the lambs will come forth, as the half-frozen chickens found theirs in the city yards.

The economical end will not cover all the sins; that is, the repression of cruelty on an efficiency basis. Repressed cruelty will not altogether clear the air, nor laws. A true human heart cannot find its peace, merely because cruelty is concealed. There was a time when we only hoped to spare the helpless creatures a tithe of their suffering, but that will not suffice now. A clean-up is demanded and the forces are at work to bring it about.

Formerly it was granted that man's rise was mainly on the necks of his beasts, but that conception is losing ground. Formerly, it was enough for us to call attention on the street to the whip of a brutal driver, but it has been found that more is required. You may threaten him with the police, even with lynching; you may frighten him away from his manhandling for the moment--but in some alley, he is alone with his horse afterward. His rage has only been flamed by resistance met. It is he who puts the poor creature to bed.

The fear of punishment has always been ineffectual in preventing crime, for the reason that the very passion responsible for the crime masters the fear.... It is difficult to discuss these ravages on a purely physical basis, for the ramifications of cruelty are cumulatively intense, the higher they are carried. Ignorance is not alone the lack of knowing things; it is the coarseness of fibre which resists all the fairer and finer bits of human reality. Just so long as men fail to master the animals of which they are composed, the poor beasts about them will be harrowingly treated.

So there are many arms to the campaign. Specific facts must be supplied for the ignorant, an increasingly effective effort toward the general education of the public; but the central energy must be spent in lifting the human heart into warmth and sensitiveness.

On a recent January night, an animal welfare society had a call to one of the city freight-yards where a carload of horses was said to be freezing to death. It was not a false alarm. The agents knew that these were not valuable horses. Good stock is not shipped in this precarious fashion. It was a load of the feeble and the aged and maimed--with a few days' work left in them, if continuously whipped, gathered from the fields and small towns by buyers who could realise a dollar or two above the price of the hide--to meet the demand of the alley-minded of the big city. The hard part is that it costs just as much pain for such beasts to freeze to death, in the early stages, at least. The investment would have been entirely spoiled had it been necessary to furnish blankets for the shipment.

The public reading a story of this adventure, remarks, "Why, I thought all that was stopped long ago----"

Just as underwriters will gamble on anything, even to insure a ship that is to run a blockade, if the premium is right--so will a certain element of trade take a chance on shipping such horses, until the majority of people are awake and responsive to the impulses of humanity. It isn't being sanctified to be above cruelty; it is only the beginning of manhood proper.

The newspapers and all publicity methods are of great service, but the mightiest effort is to lift the majority of the people out of the lethargy which renders them immune to pangs of the daily spectacle. The remarkable part is that the people are ready, but they expect the stimulus to come from without instead of from within.

Custom is a formidable enemy--that herd instinct of a people which causes it to accept as right the methods of the many. Farmers to-day everywhere are following the manner of Devlin; yet the story brings out the lineaments of most shocking and unforgettable cruelty. How can one expect effective revulsion on the part of a band of medical students when the bearded elders bend peering over their vivisections? What are children to do when their parents shout mad-dog and run for clubs and pitch-forks at the passing of a thirst-frenzied brute; or the teamster when the blacksmith does not know the anatomy of a horse's foot? Ignorance is the mother of cruelty, and custom is the father.

The great truths that will fall in due time upon all the sciences--upon astronomy, pathology, even upon criminology--are the results of flashes of intuition. Again and again this is so. The material mind is proof against intuition, and of necessity cruel. It keeps on with its burnings, its lancings, its brandings, its collections of skulls and cadavers, until its particular enlightener appears. The dreadful thing to consider is that each department of cruelty brings its activity up into a frightful state of custom and action, before the exposures begin.