OTTER HUNTING
[To the Editor of Tan SPECTATOR.] SIR,—The account given by your correspondent of otter hunting in Herefordshire reminds me of a conversation I had with Lord Hobhouse nearly 40 years ago when he was a very old man. He said that one of the most striking changes in his lifetime was the change that had taken place in the treatment of cats and dogs. In his early days the hunting of stray cats and dogs was a favourite amusement of the London streets. The conditions under which the people who enjoyed that sport were living were as bleak and colourless as any to be found in history. . The ladies and gentlemen who used their motor-ears to floodlight the last hour of an otter's struggle and suffering have a wider choice of pleasures than the richest class of any past age. It would be pleasant to hope that before the twentieth century closes, it may prove half as successful in civilising the pleasures of the rich as the nineteenth century was in Civilising the pleasures of the
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