I THINK a good many humanitarians, while heartily agreeing with Bishop Bagshawe’s views on the wickedness of vivisection, must have read with some amazement his extraordinary justification of “field-sports,” and must have suspected the validity of the principles which led him to so contradictory a conclusion. Let us examine the arguments put forward by him in the January number of the Animals’ Friend.
(1) “They [field- sports] are not carried on so as to appeal to and excite the bad passion of cruelty.” Are they not ? Take fox-hunting, for example. I should say that, if it were deliberately desired to find a practice which, from one end of the land to the other, in every class and every age of life, should publicly inculcate a ferocious, cowardly, and brutal habit of mind, it would be difficult to invent anything more effective than fox-hunting. It demoralizes every man, woman, and child who takes part or interest in the “sport,” from the proudly equipped huntsman to the little village urchin who gapes after him as he passes. It sets everywhere an example of cruelty and hardness of heart, and perpetuates in a (so-called) civilized country, and under quite artificial conditions, a form of chase which ought long ago to have died out. It ends with a savage scene of killing and mutilation, which is a disgrace to the manhood or womanhood of every one who is concerned in it. And now, when the conscience of the more humane part of the nation is beginning to resent these utterly unnecessary barbarities, we have a Catholic Bishop and an anti-vivisectionist coming forward to make excuse for them !
(2) “The suffering they [field- sports] inflict resembles the sufferings universally inflicted on one another by animals, since God caused all creation to ‘travail and groan’ because of the sin of man.” I would fain hope that the lack of time of which the Bishop complains in another part of his article is responsible for this sentence. Surely he cannot really have meant what he here says ? For consider the sequence of the argument—so fearfully and wonderfully made that the thinking mind stands aghast at it ! Man sins. Therefore God causes all creation to “travail and groan.” Therefore the animals prey on one another. Therefore it is right for man to inflict unnecessary suffering on the animals. That is to say, it is right for man to kill for sport, because the animals kill for sustenance ; and the “travail of creation ,” which was due in the first instance to man’s own sin, now justifies this further infliction of pain on the innocent animals ! Was there ever such a “vicious circle” of reasoning as this, in which man is made out to be morally inferior to the animals, and God scarcely better than man ; and this by a writer who has just said that “as God is loving and merciful to all His creatures, we must be so always, not for their rights, but for the love of their Maker” !
In offering this criticism of Bishop Bagshawe’s arguments, my object has been not merely to condemn “field – sports,” or “blood-sports” as they are more properly called ; that is quite a minor and subsidiary matter. I wish rather to show how very insecure and treacherous a foundation for a humane treatment of animals is that which is laid indirectly on a supposed religious duty, instead of being based directly on a recognition of the inalienable rights of all sentient beings. Humanity has nothing to do with creeds and formulas and theologies ; it rests on wider and deeper ground than that. The best reason for being humane is that we are human ; we do wrong to our own nature, our own wisest instincts, when we inflict any unnecessary suffering on any living creature whatsoever. And I would add that the true condemnation of vivisection, and the only hope of abolishing the horrors of the laboratory, must be sought in the fuller and fuller recognition of this great humane principle—that the lower animals, like the human animal, have rights. The man who condemns vivisection, while he sanctions the other forms of cruelty which spring from the same source, simply puts himself hors de combat in our intellectual battle with Injustice, and retards, instead of promoting, the cause which we have at heart. As I have said in my book on “Animals’ Rights,” “vivisection is not the root, but the fine flower and consummation of barbarity and injustice, the ne plus ultra of iniquity in man’s dealing with the lower races. The root of the evil lies in that detestable assumption (detestable equally whether it be based on pseudo- religious or pseudo- scientific grounds) that there is a gulf, an impassable barrier, between man and the animals, and that the moral instincts of compassion, justice, and love, are to be as sedulously repressed and thwarted in the one direction as they are to be fostered and extended in the other.”
With all possible respect for Bishop Bagshawe, and for the personal kindness of heart which makes him an opponent of vivisection, I must say that the general principles professed by him appear to be substantially the same as those of the Catholic vivisectionist school. If “by cruelty to animals we do not offend against justice,” it is impossible to find any moral basis for humane treatment of animals, and we have to fall back on our duty to the Supreme Being, with the result, in Bishop Bagshawe’s case, that we find the cruel sports of hunting, shooting, and fishing justified as “legitimate recreations,” and of great value to mankind !
The official attitude of the Catholic Church towards animals is hard, cold, and unsympathetic. The best that Bishop Bagshawe can say of it is that he “knows not of any pronouncement of the Church about it,” which means, in plain language, that the Church is perfectly unconcerned on the subject. We learn from Cardinal Vaughan’s reply to the editor of the Animals’ Friend that his time is at present ” so much occupied ” that he cannot even express an opinion on this question of humanity. It matters so little whether a few thousand animals are daily done to death with every kind of unnecessary torture. When we contrast this sacerdotal indifference with the “Golden Rule of Zoophily,” so well advocated by Miss Cobbe—”Treat the beings beneath you as you would wish to be treated by beings above you”—we may well ask, Who are the religious ?
Henry S. Salt
The Animals’ Friend, Vol. 2, 1895-96, p. 97