‘One, which appeared to carry the best horns, was more or less hidden by some rocks, but the other stood broadside on upon a little knoll, throwing up his head from time to time.... Resting my rifle on the ground, I took the easier shot. There was no excuse for missing, and as the bulletmade the well-known sound dear to the heart of the sportsman, I saw that it had broken the shoulder, and the animal, staggering a yard or two, fell over seawards and was lost to view.’
‘One, which appeared to carry the best horns, was more or less hidden by some rocks, but the other stood broadside on upon a little knoll, throwing up his head from time to time.... Resting my rifle on the ground, I took the easier shot. There was no excuse for missing, and as the bulletmade the well-known sound dear to the heart of the sportsman, I saw that it had broken the shoulder, and the animal, staggering a yard or two, fell over seawards and was lost to view.’
It is lost irrevocably. The joy of having slaughtered him is not, however, the less.
A little farther on the sportsman suddenly comes upon ‘a very much astonished bighorn; a fine old ram of the fifth or sixth year.’
‘I fired almost before I was conscious of it, but not a moment too soon, for the beast was in the act of turning as I touched thetrigger. It was his last voluntary movement, and the next instant he was rolling down the precipice....The fun was not yet over, for, perched upon a bare pinnacle, stood another of our quarry. The animal had been driven into a corner by some of our party on the cliff above. The next instant, after a vain but desperate effort to save himself, he was whirling through four hundred feet of space.... On going up to him I found one of the massive horns broken short off, and the whole of the hind quarters shattered into a mass of bleeding pulp.... Our decks were like a butcher’s shop on Boxing Day.’
‘I fired almost before I was conscious of it, but not a moment too soon, for the beast was in the act of turning as I touched thetrigger. It was his last voluntary movement, and the next instant he was rolling down the precipice....The fun was not yet over, for, perched upon a bare pinnacle, stood another of our quarry. The animal had been driven into a corner by some of our party on the cliff above. The next instant, after a vain but desperate effort to save himself, he was whirling through four hundred feet of space.... On going up to him I found one of the massive horns broken short off, and the whole of the hind quarters shattered into a mass of bleeding pulp.... Our decks were like a butcher’s shop on Boxing Day.’
And the scene seems so beautiful to him that he photographs it.
This is the tone which is general and which is considered becoming when speaking or writing of the brutal slaughter of harmless creatures. No perception of its disgusting callousness, its foul unseemliness, ever visits writer or reader, speaker or hearer.
When men kill in self-defence it is natural; when they kill for food it is excusable; but to kill for pleasure and for paltry pride is vile. How long will such pleasure and such pride be the rule of the world? They give the strongest justification that Anarchists can claim. If the heart of Tourguenieff could be put into every human breast, the quail would be a dear little feathered friend to all; but as the world is now made, the story of Tourguenieff’s quail would be read in vain to deaf ears, or, if heard, would be drowned in peals of inane laughter. Could that sense of solidarity of community between animals and ourselves, which is so strongly realised by Pierre Loti, be communicated to the multitude of men, cruelty would not entirely cease, because men and women are frequently horribly cruel to each other, and to dependents, and to children, and to inferiorand subject human races, but cruelty to animals would then be placed on the same plane as cruelty to human beings, would be regarded by society with loathing, and punished by the severity of law, as cruelty in many forms to human creatures is now punished. Whereas, now not only are all punishments of cruelty, other than to man, so slight as to mean hardly anything at all, in fact, totally inefficient and wholly inadequate,[J]but the vast mass of cruelty to animals, the daily continual brutal offences against them of their owners and employers, is placed, perforce, entirely out of reach of any punishment whatsoever.
A man can chain up his dog in filth and misery; the rider may cut his horse to pieces at his caprice; the woman may starve and beat her cat; the landowner may have traps set all over his lands for fur and feather; the slaughterer of cattle may bungle and torture at his pleasure; the lady may wear the dead bodies of birds on her head and on her gown; the mother may buy puppies and kittens, squirrels and marmosets, rabbits and guinea-pigs, to be the trembling plaything of her little children, tormented by these in ignorance and in maliciousness till death releases the four-footed slaves; all these and ten thousand other shapes and kinds of cruelty are most of them not punishable by law. Indeed, no law could in many instances find them out and reach them, for the cruelty often goes on behind the closed doors of house and stable, kennel-yard and cattleshed, nursery of the rich and garret of the poor. No lawcan reach it in its aggregate; law is indeed, as it stands, poor and meagre everywhere, but cruelty could not, by any alteration of it, be really abolished. To be eradicated, it must become a revolting thing in the eyes of men; it must offend their conscience and their love of justice. It would do this in time, could such a sense of unison with animals as is the inspiring motive of theBook of Pity and of Deathbecome general in humanity. There is little hope that it ever will, but the world would be a lovelier dwelling-place if it could be so.
Rome, it is tritely said, had no monument to Pity. Yet it was the Romans by whom the man was stoned who slew the dove which sought refuge in his breast. The multitudes of the present day are, all over the world, below those Romans in sentiment. Their farmers shoot even the swallows which build confidingly beneath the eaves of their roofs. Their gentry cause to be trapped and slain all the innocent birds which shelter and nest in their woods. The down of jays’ breasts flutters on the fans of their drawing-room beauties, andlophophoresandcolibrisparkle in death upon their hair. If in a mob of Londoners, Parisians, New Yorkers, Berliners, Melbourners, a dove fluttered down to seek a refuge, a hundred dirty hands would be stretched out to seize it, and wring its neck; and if any one with the pity of old Rome tried to save and cherish it, he would be rudely bonneted, and mocked, and hustled amidst the brutal guffaws of roughs, lower and more hideous in aspect and in nature than any animal which lives. There is no true compassion in that crowd of opposed yet mixing races which, for want of a better word, we call themodern world. There is too great a greed, too common a selfishness, for the impersonal and pure feeling to be general in it. Yet, as children are born cruel, but may often be taught, by continual example and perception, kindness and self-sacrifice, so perchance might the multitudes be led to it were there any to teach it as Francis of Assisi taught it in his generation, were there any to cry aloud against its infamy with the force and the fervour of a Bruno, of a Bernard, of a Benedict.
St Francis would have walked with Loti hand in hand, through the olive-trees, with the good wolf between them; and what beautiful things the trio would have said to each other!
But the Churches have never heeded the teaching of Assisi; they have never cared for or inculcated tenderness to the other races of creation in which, whether winged or four-footed, the preacher of Assisi recognised his brethren. They have been puffed up with the paltry pride of human self-admiration; and they are now being outbid and outrun in influence and popularity by the teachers of that still more brutal, more narrow, and more vainglorious creed which calls itself science, in which as many crimes are perpetrated as in the name of liberty.
As all religions reign awhile, then pass and perish, so will the reign of science; but very possibly not before its example and demands will have destroyed on the face of the planet all races except man, who in his turn will become nought on the exhausted surface of a dead earth. Meantime, whilst those whom we call inferior creatures are still with us, while the birds people the air which would be soempty without them, and the beasts live around us with their pathetic eyes, their wise instincts, their long, patient, unrewarded forbearance, we are nearer to the secret mystery of life when we feel, with Francis and with Loti, the common soul which binds ourselves and them, than when we stand aloof from them in a puffed-up and pompous vanity, or regard them as the mere chattels and chores of a bondslave’s service.