KILLING FOR SPORT _This volume is published by_ MESSRS. G. BELL & SONS _for the Humanitarian League_. KILLING FOR SPORT ESSAYS BY VARIOUS WRITERS WITH A PREFACE BY BERNARD SHAW EDITED BY HENRY S. SALT LONDON G. BELL AND SONS, LTD. YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET 1915 NOTE During the past twenty-five years, chiefly owing to the action of the Humanitarian League in giving continuity to what had previously been only an occasional protest, the subject of certain cruel pastimes, called by the name of “sports,” has attracted a large share of public attention. The position of the League as regards the whole question of “sport”--_i.e._, the diversions and amusements of the people--is this, that while heartily approving all such fair and manly recreations as cricket, rowing, football, cycling, the drag-hunt, etc., it would place in an altogether different category what may be called “blood-sports”--_i.e._, those amusements which involve the death or torture of sentient beings. But as it is recognised that humane reform can only come by instalment, and that legislation cannot outrun a ripe public opinion, the League has asked for _legislative_ action only in the case of the worst and most demoralising forms of “blood-sports”--viz., those which make use of a tame or captured animal, and not one that is really wild and free. For the same reason the League pressed, and pressed successfully, for the abolition of the Royal Buckhounds, not because that particular hunt was in itself more cruel than others, but because it stood as the recognised and State-supported type of a very degraded pastime. “Your efforts have gained their reward,” wrote George Meredith to the League on the occasion of the Buckhounds’ fall, “and it will encourage you to pursue them in all fields where the good cause of Sport, or any good cause, has to be cleansed of blood and cruelty. So you make steps in our civilisation.”