Another voice

The pain and the pity

Auberon Waugh

The RSPCA's decision to condemn foxhunting did not go down well in West Somerset. Mr Jack Hosegood, joint master of the Exmoor Foxhounds, issued a statement expressing concern at the terrible pain these animals will suffer if they are poisoned or snared; shooting is even worse, he says, because "their bodies reject lead and soon develop gangrene". Mr Ben Burton, joint master of the Dulverton East, opined that it was a "retrograde step".

They might have added that if foxes are not hunted, poisoned, trapped or shot they will probably die of something else—old age, perhaps, or hypothermia, which can be very painful—or measles, or Parkinson's disease, or over-eating, or they might choke on a chicken bone. Every time a fox dies in pain we are all diminished, are we not ? Even as I write, I expect there is a fox in great pain within five miles of me. Well, if it comes to me I will offer it an aspirin.

I don't hunt nowadays although I frequently shoot at things, and even if I seldom hit them the intention is definitely there. But I can see what fun it must be for other people to try and stop me shooting. Quite apart from tender feelings for animals there is all the simple pleasure of stopping people from doing things they want to do and making them do something else they don't want to do. For myself, I am not tempted that way. I do not think it is a very healthy pleasure, and suspect there is just as great an element of sadism in it as there is in foxhunting. But even if one sees this busybodying as a degrading and anti-social form of enjoyment I don't see how one can try to stop people from indulging it without succumbing oneself.

So the wretched fox must cater for three human appetites—for those who like chasing it, those who like to stop other people from chasing it, and those who feel affectionate and gooey at the sight of these dreadful beasts. I belong to none of these categories, but I am convinced there is no element of sadism in the pleasure of foxhunting for the good reason that on the rare occasions I tried it I never once saw a fox, and I do not understand how anyone can be accused of rejoicing in the discomfiture of an animal he never sees. Perhaps it is a little undignified and absurd for parties of grown men and women to spend all day on horses chasing a small animal they never see, but then so are most human pleasures when one comes to think about them— eating oysters, taking a bath, scratching one's nose.

Fishing has always struck me as more sadistic, especially the idea of "playing" a trout or a salmon, just as a cat plays with a mouse before eating it. A recent court case in Scotland established that there is no limit to the cruelty one can inflict quite legally on a prawn. This is probably because there are three million anglers in the United Kingdom, a fact which might suggest that degenerate, detribalised urban man has not quite lost his hunting instincts for all the goo he likes to read about foxes in the Daily Mirror.

Of all the cruel sports I have witnessed, the one I found most objectionable was bull-fighting. This was not so much because I found the sight of bulls being tortured and killed unpleasing, although I did, and it certainly wasn't because I witnessed scenes of bloodthirstiness or sadistic glee in the crowd, although I should probably have found them distressing if I had. In fact, I detected the opposite emotion in the crowd —a lively and vociferous compassion for the bull and this was something I found much more disgusting: the quick, clean kill was applauded precisely because it involved no pain to the bull; a bungled job was booed because of the unnecessary pain and distress it caused.

This seems to me the ultimate perversion: that an animal can be brought forward and tortured to death in public so that the crowd can indulge compassionate feelings towards it. There can be no doubt that such compassionate feelings are pleasurable— whole branches of the film, literary and journalistic worlds thrive on it and there was a school of criticism in the 1960s which

judged novels exclusively by the amount of compassion they dished out to all and sun

dry. But of all the available candy-coloured tangerine-flake streamline consumer satisfactions available, the Kwick Kompassion Kick strikes me as the most distasteful.

Bullfights have never caught on in England as a means of exciting this enjoy able emotion of pity—partly, no doubt.

because they are not yet available in aerosol containers. Until recently, I thought our

national equivalent has been established in the country's 400-odd thalidomide victims. They, too, were not yet available in aerosol containers, but Sunday colour supplements were plainly the next best thing.

Nobody with any human feelings can fail to experience a violent emotion on seeing these photographs. The first reaction, as at the Jew's funeral, was to try and measure the emotion in terms of money—other people's money, of course. Lady Hoare's Thalidomide Appeal was not spectacularly successful, and it soon became apparent

that damages were being demanded on a

scale which was not compensatory or even punitive so much as poetic. We soon became

like Ismaili Muslims watching an obese Aga Khan weigh himself in gold who insists on another nine-course meal every time the scale begins to balance.

The real scandal of thalidomide, it seems to me, does not lie in the human error which brought it about, nor even in the Distillers' Company's initial reluctance to act as society's scapegoat. It may lie partly in the readiness of the Sunday colour supplements to dwell on these tragedies week after week, year after year ever since. But far more, it lies in the appetite of the British public for gawping at these unfortunates. Even the High Priest and the Levite had enough good taste to pass by on the other side of the road.

I don't think The Thalidomide Spectacular ("This one will run and run") provides

an exact parallel with the Spanish taste for

bullfights because nobody can claim we actually called thalidomide into existence

in order to indulge our compassionate feelings towards its victims. A more exact equivalent can be found in the present hypothermia horror shock sensation.

Old people have always tended to die io the winter, as everyone knows. It is sad, of course, that anyone should ever die, and the more one dwells on it the sadder one becomes. The reason we have decided fo make a special fuss about it this year IS because this year society has deliberatelY chosen to let them freeze to death. Coal prices are prohibitive for pensioners because, in the election, the country chose to let coalminers make them prohibitive. There is no money in the social securitY kitty to cover the emergency because the country has tacitly decided, without a vote being taken, that there should not be enough. So now let us all sit back and erkioY compassionate thoughts about the old follt freezing around us. In Spain, they at least lay on a band for these occasions.