human
The accomplished Englishman shoots for sport. Sport, being a mental impulse or appetite, is insatiable, and therefore far more deadly than hunger.... A boast is made that ninety millions of rabbits are reared for the consumption of our nation. Ninety million rabbits sent out at large to nibble the young shoots of the growing crops--each of whom destroys and wastes ten times what a tame rabbit would eat in a hutch--are boasted of as an increase of our supplies! If twenty million of these reach the town markets, it is much; how many beside are cruelly massacred with no profit to man! and how many beside, with unhappy hares, foxes, rats, stoats, and weasels, are held for days and nights in lingering torture by horrible steel traps? All this goes on in the midst of refinement, without prohibition from men or remonstrance from women. It is a fruit of the modern English system of game preserving;... and the artificial love of sport which cruel Norman tradition has fostered in the stolid Anglo-Saxon race. [Footnote:
gpt
On Cruelty (_Miscellanies_, III, by Francis W. Newman).] It is an unassailable truth that if you look for the last remains of barbarity in a civilized nation you will find them in their sports. But I confess that to me it is difficult to justify a _woman's_ love of sport when it is combined--before her very eyes--with the suffering of an animal. Yet I heard only the other day of a woman who boasted that she had been among the few