Part 21

Thus writes Mr. H. Cholmondeley-Pennell, a distinguished authority on angling. We fear, however, that an examination of the “gentle craft” will scarcely justify the assertion; for the fact cannot be gainsaid that to kill fish for mere amusement is to gratify one’s own pleasure at the cost of another being’s pain, and that, regarded from a moral standpoint, it will not materially affect the case to plead that the fisherman is “contemplative,” or that in the pursuit of his pastime he is brought into touch with the softening influences of nature. Unfortunately, as far as his sport (which is the only point in question) is concerned, there is no sign of this softening tendency on him. Contemplative he may be (in the intervals between “rises” or “bites”), but his contemplation has apparently not taken that introspective turn which would seem to be most needed. He may be gentle--in some relations of life; but in the matter of impaling live-bait and hooking fishes his gentleness is of a worse than dubious quality. One would have thought that a sense of humour would withhold fishermen from making these ludicrous claims to virtues in which, qua fishermen, they are very signally deficient. “There are unquestionably,” says Leigh Hunt, “many amiable men among sportsmen, who, as the phrase is, would not hurt a fly, that is to say, on a window; at the end of a string the case is altered.”

The stories told by anglers of the alleged “insensibility” of fish--how a hooked salmon that has just broken away will sometimes return to the bait--do not prove very much; for that fish are less intelligent and less sensitive than warm-blooded animals is no excuse for torturing them to the extent of their feeling. And it is evident, on the showing of the fishermen themselves, that the process of “playing” a large fish is a very cruel one, since it means gradually and mercilessly wearing down the strength of the victim during a desperate struggle prolonged sometimes for hours. Reading, for example, such a passage as the following, taken from Dr. Hamilton’s book on “Fly-Fishing,” one marvels at the mood which can find enjoyment in so barbarous a sport:

“I know of no greater excitement when, after casting the fly, a sudden swirl of the water tells you that a salmon has risen, and the tightening of your line that he is hooked. Then the mighty rush of a fresh-run fish; the rapid whirl (sweet music!) of the reel, as the line is carried out; the tremendous leaps and tugs and efforts as the fish tries to free himself. Good fisherman as you may be, the chances are against you. You at one end of the line doing all you can, and putting all your experience to the test, to keep and bring to bank the prize you covet. The fish at the other end, with all his knowledge of the rocks and bad places at the bottom of the river, doing all he can to circumvent you.… And then, after a slight pause, with skilful management the strain is put on. An anxious moment; he gives, but oh! how slowly, how reluctantly. The question is, who is to conquer. You feel your power as you wind up; you see his silver side; you know there will be yet one or two terrific struggles for life as he gets a glimpse of you and the gaff; then comes the final rush, the line paying out inch by inch. It is over! Another roll or two, and he is on the bank--and then the soothing pipe while you study his fine proportions.”

Under some conditions the sport consists in practically drowning the fish in its own element. “The most killing place,” says Dr. Hamilton, “when the hook is well fast, is in the lower jaw. The strain of the line prevents in a great measure the free current of water through the gills, and the fish becomes suffocated.”

To what extravagance the angling mania can run may be seen from certain forms of sea-fishing. The tarpon, an inhabitant of the Gulf of Mexico, is a great fish of the herring kind, weighing from 50 to 180 pounds, and measuring from 5 to 7 feet in length. It is not used as food by any but the negroes and “lower classes,” and its chief value, we are told, is for “sporting” purposes. In The Queen of December 7, 1895, an account was given of “an angling feat” performed by a lady who caught a monster of this kind. “The lady’s grip,” we were told, “was firm,” and defeated the endeavours of the fish “to shake the cruel hook from its throat.” In this, and in all angling records, it will be observed that the cruelty is purely wanton--the killing being done not because it is necessary or useful, but because the sportsman enjoys it.

Again, one of the most nauseous features of the “gentle craft” is the use of “live bait”--that is, of worms, maggots, flies, grasshoppers, frogs, and small fish. Here is one of the directions given by Mr. Cholmondeley-Pennell:

“In using the lob-worm-tail only, the worm must be broken about the middle, longer or shorter according to circumstances, and the hook inserted at the point of the breakage, the worm being then run up the hook until the shank is somewhat more than covered and only the end of the tail remains at liberty.”

It is pointed out by Mr. Alexander Mackie in “The Art of Worm Fishing,” that a “particularly beautiful” blue-nosed lob will account for as many as four trout, if cut in two parts and used successively, and that no worm of this class should be thrown away when only “slightly shattered.”

The impaling of a worm or maggot is disgusting enough; but when live fish are used as bait the cruelty is still worse. It will be observed that it is the angler’s object to prolong the misery of the living bait to the utmost extent. Thus Mr. Cholmondeley-Pennell, with reference to pike fishing:

“With regard to live-baits, a good deal must of course depend upon the state of the water. Should it be very bright and clear, a gudgeon, which is also a very tough fish, will generally be found the best, and in extreme cases even a minnow used with a small float and a single gimp hook passed through its upper lip or back.… Probably the best live-bait of all for thick or clouded water is a medium-sized dace, as its scales are peculiarly brilliant, and the fish itself by no means easily killed. In case of waters in which the pike are over-fed, I should recommend my readers to try them with live gold-fish.… If gold-fish are not forthcoming, small carp form a very killing and long-lived bait. The bait should not be left too long in one place, but be kept gently moving. It should also be held as little as possible out of water, on to which, when cast, its fall should be as light as possible, to avoid injury and premature decease.”

A very cruel way of taking freshwater fish is by night-lines. The victims are often left for hours with large hooks in their mouths; and when at last taken from the water are exhausted or dead. This perhaps is a poacher’s method rather than a sportsman’s; but it is to be observed that as a rule the despised poaching methods--such as the netting, wiring, or “tickling” of fish--are far less barbarous than those which are honoured as “sportsmanlike.”

It is clear, then, that the title of “the gentle craft” is an absurd misnomer when applied to angling, and that, if humaneness had been reckoned among the virtues, we should not have seen the canonisation of Izaak Walton, the patron saint of fishermen. For as Byron says of him:

“The quaint old cruel coxcomb in his gullet Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.”

“It would have taught him humanity at least,” adds the poet in a footnote. “They may talk about the beauties of nature, but the angler merely thinks of his dish of fish; he has no leisure to take his eyes from off the streams, and a single ‘bite’ is worth to him more than all the scenery around. The whale, the shark, and the tunny fishery have somewhat of noble and perilous in them; even net-fishing, trawling, etc., are more humane and useful. But angling!”

VIII

SPOILING OTHER PEOPLE’S PLEASURE

It is a grave charge that is brought against us humanitarians, of “spoiling other people’s pleasure.” We are reproachfully bidden to look at “sport,” for instance, and to ponder all the manifold enjoyment which it provides for its votaries--the pleasure of the riders, the pleasure of the horses, the pleasure of the hounds, the pleasure (some assert) even of the fox himself--or, if not exactly pleasure, at least a praiseworthy acquiescence in the rôle assigned him as the purveyor of amusement for others; for has he not, like Faust, purchased the happiness of a lifetime at the cost of this brief hour of pain? And all this sum of pleasure the humanitarian would deliberately destroy! No wonder that speculation is rife among sportsmen as to any intelligible reason for such malice. Are humanitarians insane? Or is it a dog-in-the-manger instinct that prompts them to wreck a pleasure in which they themselves--poor joyless creatures that they are--can have no part?

We shall be expected, perhaps, in answer to these accusations, to plead some austere and weighty reasons, such as the danger of an excess of pleasure, the need of self-sacrifice, the duty of altruism, and the like. We shall do nothing of the kind. On the contrary, we shall point out that humanitarians seek not to diminish but to increase the pleasures of which life is capable; for it is precisely because we, too, love pleasure, and regard it, when rightly understood, as the sum and purport of existence, that we deplore the absurd travesty of it which at present passes muster among the thoughtless. Our complaint against the sportsman and his like is not that they enjoy themselves, but that they prevent other persons from doing so, through their very rudimentary and barbarous notions of what enjoyment means.

Consider, for instance, the exquisite pleasure, surely one of the greatest joys in life, of seeing perfect confidence and fearlessness in the beings around one--the intrepidity which is the special charm of children, when well-treated, and which is characteristic of animals also, in the rare cases when they have nothing to fear from man. We know with what child-like trust and guilelessness the primitive inhabitants of the West Indies greeted their Spanish discoverers, and how the wild animals in newly-found lands have often shown the same unguarded friendliness to man, until they knew better--or worse. The pleasure of the humanitarian consists in preserving and cherishing to the uttermost this friendly relationship; the pleasure of the sportsman consists in rending and shattering it, in making a hell out of a heaven, and is sowing distrust and terror where there might be confidence and love. Chacun à son goût. It is useless to dispute about tastes. But that the sportsman should proceed to denounce the humanitarian as being “a spoiler of pleasure” is a stroke of unintended humour from a very humourless source.

The part which the sportsman plays in the animal world--that world which might be a source of much genuine pleasure to us--may be easily pictured if we look at one of the London parks where the bird-life is protected. There we see a truce reigning between human and non-human, with a vast amount of obvious human enjoyment as the result. Imagine what would happen if a man were to run with a gun or some other weapon among the unsuspecting animals, and pride himself on the dexterity with which he reduced them from beautiful living creatures to limp and ugly carcases. He would be arrested as a lunatic, you say, by the park-keepers. True; yet that is exactly the way in which the sportsman is continually running amuck in this larger park of ours, the world, where unfortunately there are as yet no park-keepers to restrain him.

Nor is it only the sportsman, but everyone addicted to cruel practices of any sort, who makes the world a poorer and less happy place to live in. Centuries of persecution have, in fact, left so little real happiness in life that men have been fain to content themselves with these wretched beggarly amusements, which, from bull- and bear-baiting to stag-hunting, have disgraced our national “sports” from time immemorial, yet have always been defended on the ludicrous ground that their abolition would diminish the “pleasures” of the people.

Who, then, is the mar-joy? Surely not the humanitarian, whose desire it is that there should be far greater and wider means of enjoyment than at present, and who, far from discouraging the sports of the people, would establish in every part of the land facilities for manly and wholesome sports, such as cricket, football, rowing, swimming, running, and all kinds of athletic and gymnastic exercises. To humanitarians, pleasure--real pleasure--is the one precious thing; and it is just because there is so little real pleasure in the present conditions of life that we desire to see those conditions changed and ameliorated. Why else should we “agitate,” sit in committees, write letters to newspapers, and organise public meetings to expound our principles? Certainly, not because we enjoy such occupation in itself, for a more thankless task could scarcely be imagined; but because life is at present so narrowed and saddened by brutalitarian stupidity that to try to alter it, even in the smallest measure, is to us a necessary condition of any enjoyment at all.

INDEX

Accidents involved by hunting, 66

Adams, Maurice, on cost of sport, 45 et seq.

Afforestation conflicts with game preservation, 53

Agriculture ruined by sport, 38

Athletic exercises compared with blood-sports, 129