During the past twenty-five years, chiefly owing to the action of the Humanitarian League in giving continuity to what had previously been only an occasional protest, the subject of certain cruel pastimes, called by the name of “sports,” has attracted a large share of public attention. The position of the League as regards the whole question of “sport”—i.e., the diversions and amusements of the people—is this, that while heartily approving all such fair and manly recreations as cricket, rowing, football, cycling, the drag-hunt, etc., it would place in an altogether different category what may be called “blood-sports”—i.e., those amusements which involve the death or torture of sentient beings.

But as it is recognised that humane reform can only come by instalment, and that legislation cannot outrun a ripe public opinion, the League has asked for legislative action only in the case of the worst and most demoralising forms of “blood-sports”—viz., those which make use of a tame or captured animal, and not one that is really wild and free. For the same reason the League pressed, and pressed successfully, for the abolition of the Royal Buckhounds, not because that particular hunt was in itself more cruel than others, but because it stood as the recognised and State-supported type of a very degraded pastime. “Your efforts have gained their reward,” wrote George Meredith to the League on the occasion of the Buckhounds’ fall, “and it will encourage you to pursue them in all fields where the good cause of Sport, or any good cause, has to be cleansed of blood and cruelty. So you make steps in our civilisation.”

But these steps in civilisation have not been easily made. It is not as widely known as it ought to be that since the prohibition of bull and bear baiting, more than half a century ago, there has been practically no further mitigation of those so-called sports which in this country absorb a great part of the thoughts and energies of the wealthier classes. The Acts of 1849 and 1854, which prohibited the ill-usage of domestic animals, gave no protection to animals ferÆ naturÆ, except from being “fought,” or baited; and the Cruelty to Wild Animals in Captivity Act, of 1900, applies only to those animals that are actually in confinement, or are released in a maimed condition to be hunted or shot. Thus, while humane feeling has steadily progressed, legislative action has obstinately stood still; and while we shake our heads at the cruel sports of our great-grandfathers, we are ourselves powerless to stop present brutalities which are as intolerable to humane thinkers now as were bull and bear baiting then.

In a civilised community, where the services of the hunter are no longer required, blood-sports are simply an anachronism, a relic of savagery which time will gradually remove; and the appeal against them is not to the interested parties whose practices are arraigned—not to the belated Nimrods who find a pleasure in killing—but to that force of public opinion which put down bear-baiting, and which will in like manner put down the kindred sports (for all these barbarities are essentially akin) which are defended by similar sophistries.

At a time when widespread attention is being drawn to questions concerning the land, it is especially fitting that the part played by the sportsman should not be overlooked, and that not only the cruelty, but the wastefulness of the practice of breeding and killing animals for mere amusement, should be made clear.

By including in this volume a number of recent essays, the work of several writers (each of whom is responsible only for the views expressed by himself), it has been possible to present the subject of sport as regarded from various standpoints, and in a fuller light than has ever been done before. The book, in fact, is the first one in which the humanitarian and economic objections to blood-sports have been adequately set forth.