Part 12

All these essentials are found equally in a drag hunt. Those who have had experience of drag hunts (from which an animal quarry is eliminated) will admit that there is as much pleasure in them as in the fox-hunt. Nay, they are more advantageous, and for two reasons. In a “drag” you are sure of a run; you are not dependent on the accident of a “find.” And, secondly, you have the benefit of knowing when you may order your change to meet you, and thus avoid inflicting pain on your horse. The drag obviates all cruelty in a sport which is otherwise invigorating and virile. Therefore, in Heaven’s name, let the masters of hounds, who are also men of feeling, cease to preserve the fox, and cultivate the drag.

The abolition of the Royal Buckhounds did much to throw into disfavour the abominable sport of hunting a tame stag, and it is known that aristocratic circles do not look with favour on the atrocious sport of coursing. Is it impossible to enlist the sense of the upper classes in this country in the abolition of fox-hunting?

FOOTNOTES:

This article originally appeared in the Daily Mail of February 8, 1905.

BIG-GAME HUNTING

BY ERNEST BELL

“If asked why I had gone elephant-hunting at the age of nineteen, I would say that it is simply because I am the lineal descendant of a prehistoric man.”

F. C. SELOUS.

Apparently there is a considerable public who like reading books about the slaughter of what is called “big game,” or we should hardly have such a continuous supply of them issued from the press. As, however, vanity is apparently no small incentive to the deeds of the big-game hunters, it is perhaps a fair deduction that the same feeling may have something to do with the publication of their records, and that such books are in fact not always speculations on the part of publishers, but are sometimes printed by the authors themselves.

Certainly the unbiassed reader might be excused for agreeing with the sentiment expressed in the preface of one of the exponents of the art, when he writes: “I shall guard myself against the desire to make the reader be present at the death of my 500 victims, which would be very monotonous to him, for after all, though circumstances may vary, the result of a hunt after wild animals is always the same.”

A study of several books of the sort certainly confirms the impression that the subject is a very monotonous one. The illustrations also share the same want of variety, for almost all represent dead animals, varied only by the arrangement of guns and naked savages about them. They apparently illustrate nothing at all but the one fact--which one would think was neither surprising nor creditable--that the perpetrators, with the aid of Express double-barrelled rifles, Winchester six-shot repeaters, revolvers, explosive bullets, smokeless powder, rockets, the electric projector, Bengal lights, etc., and a band of natives to load and work the machinery, succeed in destroying the lives of some more beautiful animals. As it is expressed by one author: “At the very spot where a minute before there rose, in all its savage beauty, this majestic conception of Nature, the largest and the most powerful of the animals of the earth, nothing more than a mass of grey flesh appears in the blood-spattered grass.” The climax is reached when we see the “hero,” as sometimes happens, sitting with proud mien on the top of some huge animal, not apparently realizing that the same juxtaposition which brings out the size of the animal is apt to suggest also the smallness of the man whose greatest pride and delight can be wantonly to destroy so grand a creature. We must beg to differ with this writer’s enthusiastic exclamation that elephant-hunting is certainly “the greatest and noblest sport in the world.” Rather we should be inclined to call it the meanest and most contemptible abuse of man’s superior powers.

EXPLOSIVE BULLETS.

Of the means employed to accomplish the hunters’ ends let us say a few words. Explosive bullets we know have been universally condemned in human warfare on account of their barbarity, but against defenceless animals they are still held to be legitimate by so-called sportsmen. Thus, we read: “The impact causes the bullet to expand. Often it breaks into pieces or else takes a mushroom shape, the head in its tremendous velocity dragging and catching with its edges the flesh and viscera; and it often happens in the case of delicate animals that upon leaving the body it makes a hole as big as the crown of a hat.” That a sportsman writing for other sportsmen should feel no shame in making such a statement shows only how we take our morality from our surroundings, and how demoralising in this case the surroundings must be. After this, we cannot expect to find much chivalry displayed in this “the greatest and noblest” of sports, and we cannot be surprised to find the author telling us with pleasure how in pure wantonness he hid behind a tree within 10 yards of a female elephant and lodged a bullet in her heart. This, however, is outdone by an incident in another volume we remember, where we were told that the finest stag was shot by a certain Grand Duke, “while it was asleep, at 20 yards.” In fact, most big-game hunters seem--perhaps not unnaturally--to suffer from a similar want of chivalry. We find Mr. Seton-Karr, an authority on the subject, relating how one of his party imitated the young fawn’s cry of distress, when, as he says: “The immediate result was to entice within range numbers of Virginian deer or blacktail, most of them does, and eight fell victims to this somewhat unsportsmanlike device.” Whether such treachery is to be considered “unsportsmanlike” must depend on what meaning we attach to the word, but if it means “unlike a sportsman,” we fear the word is misused here.

Of the impartiality of the big-game hunter in his slaughter we have many instances. Any creature that can be shot is fitting game for him, and he delights in shooting it. One well-known writer gives the following list of creatures killed by him during six weeks:

“Five elephants, 2 lions (male), 8 leopards, 2 wart hogs, 11 great spotted hyænas, 7 striped hyænas, 4 oryx beisa antelope, 10 awal antelope, 2 common gazelle, 2 bottlenose antelope, 2 gerenuk antelope, 1 lesser koodoo, 18 dig-dig antelope, 4 bustard, 2 small bustard, 2 sand grouse, 3 genet, 14 guinea fowl, 22 partridge, 4 hares, 30 various.”

Thus 155 animals--mostly wholly unoffending creatures--were slaughtered by one man in six weeks. We are assured that on a second expedition much the same bag was made, but that he then got no elephants (which are rapidly being exterminated in that country). To further whet the appetite, the would-be young slaughterer is favoured with a view of a room in the mighty hunter’s house, which is decorated (or disfigured) apparently from floor to ceiling with the heads, skulls, and skins of these slaughtered animals--“trophies,” they are called--with a lavishness hardly inferior to that exhibited in a butcher’s or poulterer’s shop at the season when we commemorate the birth of Christ.

TEMPORARY REMORSE.

Of the actual cruelty involved in this kind of amusement--for it professes to be nothing more--we may give a few specimens:

“My victim, which I see only through a curtain of raindrops, visibly suffers, her flank swelling out abnormally and then subsiding; she is shot in the lungs. We pass round her in such a way that she shall not see us approach, but she seems more taken up with her sufferings than with us, and at the moment I am going to fire she falls down on the grass, still breathing. I draw near and give her the coup de grâce behind the ear. Around her is a large pool of blood, which the rain carries in a red stream towards the bottom of the little valley.

“It is the male at which I fired first of all. As I afterwards found, his shoulder was broken. Maddened by pain and his feeble efforts, the animal roars with rage, and, blowing furiously with his trunk, tears at everything within reach.… His cries and groans become so terrible that they must be heard a mile away.

“Poor beast!… Never have I been able to contemplate so near the death of an elephant in all its details. She is lying eight yards from us in the full sunlight at the edge of the water, which is tinged with red, and we look on in silence while life leaves the enormous body; her flank heaves, blood flows from breast and shoulder, her mouth opens and shuts, her lip trembles, tears flow from her eyes, her limbs quiver; with her trunk hanging down, her head low, she sways to right and left, then falls heavily on one side, shaking the ground and spattering blood in every direction.… All is over!

“Such a spectacle is enough to make the most hardened hunter feel remorse. It seemed to me that I had done a bad action. Several times have I said to myself, upon seeing those splendid animals suffer, that I ought to place my rifle in the gun-rack for ever.”

That a man who has spent several years in little else but the destruction of animals for his own pleasure should feel even a temporary remorse is evidence of the brutality of this particular scene, but we do not know how to characterise the combination of easy sentiment, costing nothing, with the cruel selfishness which immediately turns to the account of fresh slaughter.

THE HUNTER’S JOY.

Or take the following bloody tale, told with evident pride:

“As I came round a bush, I saw at the bottom of a kind of natural alley in the forest, framed in like a picture by the trees, a massive old female rhinoceros. She was facing me, and standing half in sunshine, half in shadow. From a bush protruded the hind-quarters of another. The distance was about seventy yards. I at once sat down and ‘drew a bead’ upon her chest. However, she swerved off, and the two broke away across the forest, crash after crash, dying away in the distance, marking their course as they receded. I followed, and once again caught sight of the animal standing motionless behind a bush; I fired, and the shot was followed by a couple of short, angry snorts, the stamp of heavy feet, and an appalling crashing which advanced and then swept round toward the left. A shot delivered standing, from the shoulder, was followed by two shrill squeaks, as the animal tottered a few paces and fell over on its side; I shall not easily forget that cry, a sound most disproportionate to the size and bulk of so large a creature, but which I instantly recognised, from Sir Samuel Baker’s description, as the death-cry of the rhinoceros; and the hearing of it filled me with a hunter’s joy!”

The hunter’s joy is in the death-cry of his victim, and he glories in the fact that he is the descendant of a line of prehistoric savages. What more evidence can we want of the barbarity of the whole proceeding?

Or, again, take and ponder the following extract from Ex-President Roosevelt’s recent book, “African Game Trails”: