Here upon the opening of the shooting season, I am reminded of the impression made on me some time ago by an article on hunting lions in Africa written by a very well-known author. I remember being much struck by his admirably expressed and lucid explanation of his reason for engaging in that pursuit. Being a native of Vermont I had never devoted much thought to the ethics of lion-hunting and was interested to read that the author of the article felt justified in killing lions because there is really no place for them in the modern world; because they are anachronistic and objectionable survivals from another phase of the world’s history; because they are obstacles in the advancing tide of colonization. This very obvious line of reasoning had never chanced to occur to me before. I stopped a moment to savor the pleasure one always feels at having hazy ideas clarified and set in order, and before I went on with the article I reflected that the world owes a debt of gratitude to the highly educated men of trained minds who undertake out-of-the-way enterprises, because with their habit of searching and logical analysis they bring out the philosophy underlying any occupation they may set themselves.

Then I read on further through some most entertaining descriptions of African scenery till I came to an eloquently written paragraph denouncing in spirited terms those men who hunted lions in “an unsportsmanlike manner.” My curiosity was aroused. I wondered what this objectionable method could be—probably one which involved the escape of many of these undesirable lions, or possibly more suffering to them. My astonishment was great, therefore, when I read that this pernicious manner of hunting lions consisted in going after them with dogs and horses, and that the author objected to it because it is practically sure to secure every lion hunted. He put it with an evident distaste, that the lion became so worn out with running and so dazed with the barking of the dogs that the hunter could walk up to him and put the rifle-barrel in his ear. If you really want to kill a lion, my sportsman-author went on disdainfully, the thing to do is to shoot a zebra, cut holes in the carcass, put strychnine in the holes, and leave the carcass where the lions can get at it. The ringing accent of scorn in which this whole passage was written cast me into the greatest bewilderment. Had I not just read that the author considered it a laudable thing to put lions out of the world? I must have mistaken his meaning. Feeling greatly perplexed, I hastily turned back over the pages until I encountered that first passage again, and found that I had not in the least mistaken his meaning. He had said in so many words that lions ought to be killed because they were an anachronistic survival, etc., etc. Putting the two statements side by side I looked from one to the other in the first of the seizures of complete perplexity which marked my attempt to understand his ideal of sportsmanship. I read on into the article with the liveliest curiosity, hoping that the author would throw more light on the subject of what constituted a really sportsmanlike method of killing an objectionable animal, and from the sum total of his remarks I made out quite clearly why he objected to the zebra-strychnine method. It was not after all because it was sure, for his own avowed aim was to kill every lion he encountered, and to look up all he possibly could, whether they evidenced any desire to encounter him or not. It was because it “did not give the lion a chance.”

In varying forms he repeated this sportsman’s ideal of “giving the game a chance,” but from the context it was clear, even to my inexperienced eye, that he did not mean to be taken literally. It was not a real chance the lion had when the sportsman could arrange matters to his taste—it was a hypothetical, metaphysical chance. The aim was to give the animal the illusion of having a chance, and when, acting on that idea, he had furnished the hunter with sufficient excitement in frustrating his desperate attempts to escape, the sportsman was to kill him in the end, thus proving his own skill and ingenuity. Yes, it was all quite clearly set forth in the same lucid style which had aroused my admiration at first.

With the repetition of these manoeuvres in the case of every lion killed in the author’s gentlemanly advance across Africa, I had a stronger and stronger impression that somewhere else I had encountered this sort of reasoning. Somewhere I had heard it all before; or if I had not heard it, I had seen it. But how could I, a Vermont rustic, ever have seen anything which might remind me of lion-hunting according to these impeccably sportsmanlike rules? I laid down the book, trying to bring up the haunting memory more clearly, and in a moment it had flashed up vivid and clear-cut. Why yes, the sportsmanlike method of killing lions reminded me of something with which I had been familiar all my life,—of a cat playing with a live mouse before eating it. It was now more evident that, in comparison with the brutally direct methods of the pot-hunting dog, the cat is actuated by the finest devotion to the ideals of sportsmanship. Not for her the quick pounce and avid crunch of Rover. She “gives the mouse a chance,” and only kills him after she has extracted the most deliciously titillating excitement out of his frenzied dashes for liberty. The facts that he never does get away from the cat, and that the lion does sometimes get away from the man only prove how infinitely more clever in this game of sportsmanship, is the cat than the man, since the open purpose of both cat and man is to kill the other animal in the end.

Now nothing can be more unphilosophical in one’s attitude towards the world than to blame creatures for acting according to their natures, and I have never felt in the least inclined to censure the cat, although I always put her out of the room with some violence if she brings in a live mouse and begins her sportsmanlike tactics with him. This is not because I think the cat is a wicked animal and ought to be punished, but merely because the sight of the frantic mental sufferings of the mouse happens to be very disagreeable to me. I have no illusions about pussy. I know that if I kicked her out of the room a thousand times ten thousand, I could never inculcate in her any genuine conception of the idea that it may be wrong to get her fun out of another’s extreme pain. That is the way cats are. Her virtues lie in other directions. If she keeps herself and her kittens clean, and does not steal my beef-steak, I can ask no more from her.

But now as I meditated on her character, for which I felt a contemptuous tolerance founded on a knowledge of her limitations, I was most disagreeably struck by the close resemblance between her nature and that of the gentleman-sportsman. It is all very well to make the best of the cat’s shortcomings, to refrain from expressing, in the only way she can understand, my disgust at a trait she cannot alter, but it is quite another thing to resign myself to the presence of the same trait in the character of many human beings for whom I should like to feel nothing but admiration and respect.

I recognize of course that the lion-hunter may shift his ground, admit that he hunts more for the excitement of the chase than to protect poor colonists from marauding lions, yet still protest against my criticism. “It is unfair,” he may urge, “to assume that human nature is all mind and spirit. Flesh and blood exist and have their claim for consideration. Killing animals might be unworthy for a seraph, but I am a man, and for me it is a harmless method of exercising my age-old inherited battle-lust. I as well as the cat am linked to the past. Is it fair for you to censure in me what you pass over in her?”

Such a plea will hardly answer. Human nature is not animal nature, and though dogs and cats may possibly have their own standards of right and wrong, based on the needs and possibilities of their species, man with his different needs and possibilities has no ethical point of contact with them. But in his own case he is and always has been convinced of the spark disturbing his clod. He is not content to regard himself as a highly intelligent primate, destined to make over the material world for his own uses; whatever his practice may be, he cannot free himself from the belief that he must be good, and must become better. Nor has this conviction wasted itself in impotent speculation. Throughout his history, he has continued to set up standards of conduct so lofty that no age has come near to living up to its profession of right living. Nevertheless aspiration has induced development: for the standard of its ancestors has seemed inadequate to every generation. What the grandfather considered a matter of course, and the father condoned as a peccadillo, the son and his contemporaries proclaim a vice. They may themselves indulge in the vice, but they do so with a feeling of guilt, and they hail with rejoicing the moments when they resolve to improve their lives: such wishes are everything: the rest is merely a matter of time.

No man, therefore, can regard himself solely as the son of an earthy family: for with the lusts of the flesh he has also inherited the aspirations of the spirit; and he is bound by this mental heredity to hold himself responsible as the father of a posterity always advancing toward perfection. Unless he is willing to confess himself either an imbecile or a criminal, he is not justified in yielding to an impulse which he recognizes as unworthy.

Again, the gentleman-lion-hunter may object that I am stating the matter with too much heat. Even though forced to admit that hunting is neither really useful (since lions can be exterminated more easily and surely without it) nor an ineradicable heritage from man’s savage past (since men have outgrown so many other supposedly ingrained instincts) he may make a stand on the contention that hunting is a blameless pastime, and that if a gentleman chooses to spend his vacation shooting lions, instead of climbing mountains, neither he, nor society, nor posterity will ever be a penny the worse for it.

I cannot agree with the Gentleman-sportsman. His contention that lion shooting is an obviously blameless recreation for civilized men does not appear to me self-evident. Among the difficulties which beset us in our great campaign to keep the higher elements in human nature, and to discard the lower ones, there is no more puzzling problem than the question of our relation to the animal-world. On this problem there is a great difference of opinion between the older and the younger branches of the Aryan family. The Hindus elaborated their merciful and elevated theory of life at a time when, so to speak, we were still tearing meat from the bones and eating it raw. When, at a much later period, we ourselves came to face the problem, the discoveries of science had so widened the horizon of our knowledge that we were unable to accept the Hindu doctrine of never taking animal life because the principle of life is sacred. Aware that life is not only animal, but exists in everything, we perceived that to eat a dish of oatmeal is to destroy life as truly as to butcher an ox. It is apparent to us that one of the dark mysteries of the world is that we can avoid taking life only by refusing to live ourselves.

Confronted with this problem, when we began to question our habits, we have, after a fashion, worked it out on logical grounds, and have decided that we have a right to take life which is necessary to ours, or which is injurious to ours; but we have tempered this high-handed decision by the feeling, based on all that is best and highest in our natures, that to take life is a serious business, should be undertaken in a serious spirit, for some evident purpose, and should be accomplished in the most painless fashion possible. All the nation-wide campaign against flies has not lessened by a jot our horror at the child who amuses himself by tearing off their wings. Moderns think of themselves as the legal executioners of those animals which they elect must die; and the essence of the executioner’s duty is to be merciful, quick, competent in the accomplishment of his task. Most of us would not care to work in a slaughter-house, but that is not because we think the butcher a wicked man. Neither would we choose of our own accord to care for the insane, or clean out the sewers in a city, but that is not because those are shameful acts. They are necessary but uncomely parts of the world’s economy, to be performed with a decent reticence and as quickly and economically as possible.

This theory of the entire subservience of the animal world to our human needs can certainly not be criticized for being too ethereally exalted. In fact its best friends cannot claim that it is very elevated doctrine; but at least it is an honest acknowledgment of apparent necessity, it is tempered by all the mercy possible under the circumstances, it is fairly consistent, and it has been accepted by the majority of the inhabitants of the civilized world as a working theory. But how can the curious institution of the good sportsman be fitted into this frank and open modern attitude about a sombre mystery in the intertwined interests of the world? As a matter of fact modern ideas and the good sportsman cannot possibly be reconciled, and whenever society has cast a glance at sportsmanship, that institution, dreading a real scrutiny and a resulting question concerning its right to existence, has hastily thrown out a sop of concession, muttering angrily under its breath about the demagogic modern mob which undertakes to restrict the freedom of gentlemen. In this way, some hundred years ago, the institution of bear-baiting was conceded to be not precisely a sport to inculcate fine qualities in its human spectators; many years later, the contention that prize-fighting was good fodder for the younger generation was given up, and very recently, with a pettish protest that really the world is becoming too emasculated, the fine, virile joys of trap-pigeon-shooting have been grudgingly abandoned. But for the most part society is busy about more important matters, and no one except a few unheeded sentimentalists pays any attention to the conflicting claims of man and the animals. During such tranquil periods, the sportsman revises his code according to his own ideas, for, having long outlived the days when its contribution to the food supply gave it actual value, hunting has reached the critical, codified stage common to the senility of all institutions. To an outsider it is rather entertaining to see the unanimity with which each succeeding generation of sportsmen looks back with scorn on its predecessors as a parcel of muckers with no true idea of gentlemanly restraint in sport; a mild diversion is to be extracted from the elaborate platforms in which they set forth the latest rules,—that artificial flies are noble,—that bait is an abomination,—that a magazine shot-gun is fit only for the pot-hunter,—that men need precisely the exercise for their wit, courage, foresight, perseverance and skill which is to be found in hunting animals according to whatever rules chance to be in vogue in the sporting world of their day.

It is true that hunting animals trains a man to use his brains and perseverance in overcoming obstacles. It is also true that everything worth while is achieved against obstacles, so that we do well to train ourselves to overcome them in our play as well as our work. And it is true that a man playing a trout with light tackle enjoys the delight of exercising his own wit, ingenuity, and perseverance in the battle against obstacles; but so would he if, without tying the animal, he should set himself to the difficult undertaking of skinning a dog alive. The fact that he causes more pain in one case than in the other, differentiates the two pursuits only in the matter of degree. How shall the line be drawn? How much pain, in what manner, to what sort of animal, may a man cause for the sole purpose of enjoying the exercise of his wit, ingenuity and perseverance?

As to the exercise of courage in hunting, it is difficult to take seriously this claim on the part of huntsmen, who for the most part are quite unable to travel far enough to encounter any animals more ferocious than a trout, a fox (whose cowardice is proverbial), or at most a deer, who asks nothing better than to be allowed to run away as long as breath lasts. But there are exceptions. There is, for example, the gentleman-sportsman in Africa, who by the expenditure of a great amount of time, effort, and money has succeeded in getting to a country inhabited by an animal which, if sufficiently annoyed would undeniably eat up a gentleman-sportsman if he could get at him. This is exciting no doubt, this undoubtedly calls for physical courage. Courage is a virtue, and excitement is certainly a need of the human heart. No observer of human nature can deny that we need excitement as much as we do bread. But the modern world does not consider even this great desire to justify every and any mode of gratifying it. The man who hunts lions according to the code of the gentleman-sportsman gets his excitement out of the fact that the animal he is attempting to kill may possibly be able to turn the tables and kill him. It would be even more exciting and dangerous, and would call for even more courage, to attempt to track down and kill a man fully armed like the hunter. But the conscience of the world, insensitive as it is to some of the finer points of conduct, would not for a moment countenance turning loose even the lowest of convicted criminals for the purpose of allowing other men to extract excitement out of his chase,—no! not though all the most delicate distinctions of the most modern and fastidious code of gentlemanly hunting were thrown around this most inimitably thrilling of sports. The fact is that the world is becoming more and more squeamish about the way in which its inhabitants are to secure their excitement. There was a time when all the gentlemen-sportsmen supplied themselves with excitement by sitting in comfortable seats about an arena and watching wild animals tear human beings to pieces. There is still a modern nation which allows its gentlemen to vary the monotony of their lives by watching bulls gore horses and even men, to death. There is even a considerable amount of excitement to be extracted from a whiskey-bottle if administered to that end. But there are some ingenious moderns who manage to escape from boredom by seeking for rare and valuable new plants in remotest Thibet, or in risking their lives in the pursuit of the microbe which causes cancer, or (if these pursuits are too costly for their means) there is the profession of fireman in a great city, or coastguard on a dangerous shore, or surveying engineer in a new country. All of these occupations call for a reasonable amount of physical courage, and supply a change from the dull routine of humdrum life.

To return to our lions; although to hunt them by the sportsman’s code undoubtedly takes courage, does it not seem rather a pity to waste in the destruction of animals admitted vermin, a human quality so fine, so inspiriting, so necessary as physical courage, sanctified as it is by a thousand struggles of men against disease, against wrong and violence, against the inert forces of Nature? Lions interfere with the peaceable occupation of the world by humanity: therefore we believe we have a right to kill them. Formerly the only way in which they could be killed was by the exercise of physical courage on the part of men. But that is not in the least necessary, now that a powerful drug has been discovered which will do the unsavory but necessary task for us and leave us free to use our courage for more valuable purposes. Why not let this unimportant and unpleasant detail of the world’s work be attended to in the most competent way possible, without the unseemly attempt to make it at the same time an entertaining spectacle for human beings? And why not apply the same principle to the killing of other animals for whose destruction we feel we have a fair warrant of execution signed by our reasonable needs. Rabbits and foxes injure our crops, and propagate so fast that they are a menace to our husbandry. If they are to be killed, and everyone except an occasional zoÖlater grants that the world is not large enough now both for them and for us, let us kill as many as we need to put out of the way, as quickly and surely as may be, with no quaint discrimination against ferrets in the case of rabbits, or rifles in the case of foxes. If we need fish as a variety in our diet, let us go honestly about the business of securing it, and not quibble about the great ethical elevation of light tackle as opposed to nets. And if a man is trying to kill a bird for food, let him forget the grotesque reasoning that it is not fair to shoot it sitting on a bough where he can almost certainly kill it at one shot, but must let it fly so that there are ten chances to one that the shot will only maim or mutilate it.

Now it is certainly true that there are among our twentieth century men, a good many individuals from whom no help in the upward movement of the race can be expected, and whose fondness for hunting, undoubtedly is based upon the survival in them of the paleolithic liking to kill. They prefer to hunt rabbits rather than shoot at a mark, because a target cannot shed blood. If they make no pretence about this taste being the basis of their liking for hunting, it would be showing no due sense of the proportion of things to visit them with too serious a reprobation. It is possible that this sort of man, if he were not allowed to amuse himself by tormenting animals might react from the humane rÉgime of his time by committing deeds of violence against human beings. Only let this outlet for non-eliminated pre-historic instincts be frankly a drainage-pipe for the purpose of moral sanitation only. Let there be no attempt to fool our noses as to its true scent, by the use of the musk of pseudo-gentlemanliness. If hunters will but be open about it, theirs is not a very heinous survival of what was a most necessary, though now superseded instinct in humanity. There are many worse things than having fun out of the dying struggles of a trout or a rabbit. Hunting in the open air is certainly better than the opium habit. Animals nearly always die a violent death anyhow, and it does not, I daresay, make a vital difference to them whether it is a fox or a man, or a bigger fish which finally dispatches them.

The number of human beings unleavened by humanity appears larger than it really is, because most children as they live rapidly through their personal reproduction of the history of mankind, pass through the cave man’s phase of frank, thoughtless, and unconscious cruelty; and some of them are slow to pass out of it. But cases of prolonged atavism are few, and though disagreeable, need be little more regretted than the occasional outcropping survival in a modern of the tremendous jaw and beetling brows of our neolithic grandsires. Left to themselves, these anachronistic and objectionable traits will vanish as the race ascends the slow spiral of its upward way. Already most twentieth-century boys and girls (if their development be not arrested by perverted public opinion) tend to outgrow this relic of savagery, as they outgrow their exaggerated gregariousness, their slavish conformity to the ideas of others, and the rest of the primitive phases of their development. The process needs no special attention from their instructors: good example and encouragement to clear thinking about habitual actions will almost always do the work.

But few young brains are vigorous enough to continue clear thinking under the narcotic influence of a generally accepted social hypocrisy. It is not acquaintance with the grim necessity of killing as the butcher practises it which is dangerous to young consciences, it is the sight of the sportsman killing without necessity. What stupifies the moral sense in this connection is the pretence that to take one’s pleasure at the cost of another’s suffering is a commendable, highly respectable, nay, even very aristocratic amusement for grown men of brains and education. The most gentlemanly restrictions cast about hunting animals for fun, cannot mask the fact that its essence is enjoyment taken consciously at the expense of another’s pain, an enjoyment against which the conscience of the world has pronounced a righteous verdict of total condemnation. The butcher kills, the pot-hunter kills, the sportsman kills; but only the last openly finds entertainment in the act.