CRUELTY IN SPORT.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I have read the essay by Mr. Gwynn in your issue of June 7th with much interest, but without much satisfaction. Consideration for your valuable space makes it necessary that any reply be much more brief. It does not seem to me to matter how much or how little a hooked fish may suffer from our point of view, the real essence is that he suffers whatever pain he is capable of suffering. Probably he has little memory cf suffering, just as is so much the case with children, who laugh and play the moment the actual pain is over. Would Mr. Gwynn on that account justify the infliction of pain on them needlessly ?
One sentence of Mr. Gwynn's own condemns the whole of his specious article : " Nobody has a right to do for his pleasure what he feels to be cruel." That is all there is to say about the matter. There is much of the brute yet in many of us, but the day will come when it will no longer be considered to be the sign of a superior nature to find its-satisfaction in the slaughter of animals. Consider what you do when you fish : You offer to a harmless creature a tit-bit of food ; when he comes to bite it you stick a hook into his mouth or gullet, drag him out of the water at once, or after some time of " play " (save the mark !), and drown him in the air. There is no meaner deed which man can do to an animal. Compared with that, shooting is comparatively innccent, fur at least you do not perjure yourself. How any decent man can care to add to the sum of suffering, solely for hi4 own amusement, and can reconcile it with his conscience, passes the comprehension of,
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