The old, ignorant prejudice that animals do not bleed freely if stunned first is now, I think, never advanced. So much for custom and dislike of change. But now we come to what is perhaps the real gravamen of the resistance—a little extra trouble, a suspicion of extra expense. This touches all the points in the irreducible minimum of reform. For instance, the various R.S.P.C.A. humane-killers cost about thirty-five shillings; the Swedish cattle-killer ten shillings and sixpence, with cartridges four shillings per hundred. You must spend perhaps an hour in learning how to use them, and five minutes or so per day in cleaning them. They are still new things—“fads”—although they have passed all tests, been proved by dozens of testimonials from butchers in this country to be perfectly efficient; _and the Swedish cattle-killer is used throughout several countries_. Again, it is convenient not to have to be careful to shut doors between slaughtering chambers and animals awaiting slaughter, or to have to pave your floors so that blood runs well away from the waiting pens. It is handy (especially in ill-constructed slaughter-houses) to kill animals in sight of each other. It is always, in fact, a nuisance to make any change that involves readjustment. And unfortunately animals have no force behind them, are not represented on the public bodies of the country; cannot lobby in the House of Commons, withdraw votes or commit outrages; cannot instruct counsel; have no rights save those which mere chivalry shall give them. “Besides,” says Defence, “everything is already done as well as it can be done. Switzerland, Denmark—who knows whether they are really better? The ways of our own country are good enough for us—the good old-fashioned methods—if there were any real need for reform we should be the first to undertake it!” Waste-paper, then, the Admiralty Report! Waste-paper! I have reckoned that in the case of sheep alone the amount of needless suffering inflicted must amount to some 33,000 hours of solid, uninterrupted death agony each year (number of sheep slaughtered without stunning, 8,000,000; period of suffering, five to thirty seconds—Admiralty Committee’s report)—all preventable by a few strokes of the legislative pen. But the truth is we don’t reflect; or if by any chance we do, we pass on with the thought: “Nothing can be done till the butchers themselves are convinced!” Is that true? Just this far true: As in every other case of new law, there would be required at first a little special activity. It is only a question of starting a new standard. In two years’ time, if these simple, harmless regulations concerning the slaughter of animals for food were enforced—not merely recommended, as now—there would hardly be an animal in this country bled without first being stunned by humane methods, or any beasts watching their fellows being killed.