Nothing can be more shocking than the treatment commonly accorded to rabbits, rats, and other small animals, on the plea that they are “vermin,” and therefore, it is tacitly assumed, outside the pale of humanity and justice; we have here another instance of the way in which the application of a contemptuous name may aggravate and increase the actual tendency to barbarous ill-usage. How many a demoralizing spectacle, especially where the young are concerned, is witnessed when “fun” is made out of the death and torture of “vermin”! How horrible is the practice, apparently universal throughout all country districts, of setting steel traps along the ditches and hedgerows, in which the victims are frequently left to linger, in an agony of pain and apprehension, for hours, or even days! Yet there are no means of redressing these barbarities, because the laws, such as they are, which prohibit cruelty to animals, are not designed to take any cognizance of “vermin.” All that has been said of hunting and coursing is applicable also--in a less degree, perhaps, but on exactly the same principle--to the sports of shooting and fishing. Let me quote a striking testimony to the wickedness and injustice of sport, as exhibited in one of its most refined and fashionable forms, the “cult of the pheasant.”[36] “For what is it but the deliberate massacre in cold blood every year of thousands and tens of thousands of tame, hand-reared birds who are literally driven into the jaws of death and mown down in a peculiarly brutal manner?... A perfect roar of guns fills the air, louder tap and yell the beaters, above the din can be heard the heart-rending cries of wounded hares and rabbits, some of which can be seen dragging themselves away, with both hind legs broken, or turning round and round in their agony before they die. And the pheasants! They are on every side, some rising, some dropping, some lying dead, but the greater majority fluttering on the ground wounded, some with both legs broken and a wing, some with both wings broken and a leg, others merely winged, running to hide, others mortally wounded gasping out their last breath of life amidst the fiendish sounds which surround them. And this is called _sport_!... Sport in every form and kind is horrible, from the rich man’s hare-coursing to the poor man’s rabbit-coursing. All show the ‘tiger’ that lives in our natures, and which nothing but a higher civilization will eradicate.” It does not in the least matter, so far as the question of animals’ rights is concerned, whether you run your victim to death with a pack of yelping hounds, or shoot him with a gun, or drag him from his native waters by a hook; the point at issue is simply whether man is justified in inflicting any form of death or suffering on the lower races for his mere amusement and caprice. There can be little doubt what answer must be given to this question. CHAPTER VI. MURDEROUS MILLINERY.