To the Editor of the Eton College Chronicle.
SIR,—I had not intended to take up more of your space, but in answer to your enquiry I should say that the best way to keep down hares is to cease to preserve them. There is as little logic as humanity in first preserving animals for purposes of sport, and then making a merit of their destruction. Hares can be killed with the gun if their numbers unduly increase.
I thank you for your thoughtful proposal that I should have a day with the E.C.H., and so witness the “atrocities” (I do not remember using the word “atrocities,” but let that pass). Here, however, a difficulty arises. The trial would not be a satisfactory one unless I were “in at the death,” and I doubt whether my running powers—not to mention my principles—would permit me to be in at anybody’s death except my own. Moreover, in order to determine whether the sport be cruel or not, I think we ought to try to discover the feelings not of the pursuers but of the pursued; and this knowledge would be best attained if, instead of running comfortably behind the hounds, some one would volunteer to be hunted, and perhaps broken up, by them. I deeply regret that I cannot myself act in this capacity: but I venture to suggest that you, Sir, young and active as you are, might well undergo the experience, and I feel sure that if you survive it, as I trust you will, your opinions will be somewhat changed in a humanitarian direction.
Yours faithfully,
Henry S. Salt
Humanitarian League
London
Eton College Chronicle, April 1, 1909, p. 460