Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885Various
General
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
the number of “practices” which her principles should lead her to
pronounce as equally starting from a wrong view of the use of the
lower animals, and of their relation to us.
It is clear that the anti-vivisectionists are resolute in refusing
the challenge repeatedly made to them, either to denounce the
cruelties of sport or to hold their peace about the cruelties of
vivisection. One sees the shrewdness but hardly the consistency or
the courage of their policy in this respect. Sport is a time-honored
institution, the amusement of the “fine old English gentleman,” most
respectable, conservative, and connected with the landed interest;
hostility to it shows that you are a low radical fellow, quite remote
from the feeling of good society. Sport is therefore let alone. The
lingering agony and death of the wounded birds, the anguish of the
coursed hare, the misery of the hunted fox, even when not aggravated
by the veritable _auto da fé_ of smoking or burning him out if he
has taken to earth, the abominable cruelty of rabbit traps; these
forms of cruelty and “torture,” inasmuch as their sole object is the
amusement of our idle classes, do not move the indignant compassion
of the anti-vivisectionist. The sportsman may steal a horse when the
biologist may not look over a hedge. The constant cruelty to horses by
ill-fitting harness, over-loading, and over-driving must distress every
human mind. A tight collar which presses on the windpipe and makes
breathing a repeated pain must in its daily and hourly accumulation
produce an amount of suffering which few vivisectionists could equal
if they tried. Look at the forelegs of cab horses, especially of the
four-wheelers on night service, and mark their knees “over,” as it is
called, which means seriously diseased joint, probably never moved
without pain. The efforts of horses to keep their feet in “greasy”
weather on the wood pavement are horrible to witness. To such a nervous
animal as the horse the fear of falling is a very painful emotion; yet
hundreds of omnibuses tear along at express speed every morning and
evening, with loads which only the pluck of the animals enables them
to draw, and not a step of the journey between the City and the West
End is probably made without the presence of this painful emotion.
Every day, in some part of the route, a horse falls. Then occurs one
of the most repulsive incidents of the London streets, the gaping crowd
of idlers, through which is heard the unfailing prescription to “sit
on his head,” promptly carried out by some officious rough, who has
no scruples as to the “relations of the lower animals to us.” Again,
in war the sufferings and consumption of animals is simply frightful.
Field-officers—some of whom, it appears, are opposed to vivisection—are
generally rather proud, or they used to be, of having horses “shot
under them.” But this cannot occur without considerable torture to
the horses. The number of camels which slipped and “split up” in the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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