Killing for Sport: Essays by Various Writers — John Shaqi
Killing for Sport: Essays by Various Writers
Philosophy
Killing for Sport: Essays by Various Writers
Animal welfare; Hunting -- Moral and ethical aspects; Hunting -- Religious aspects
It all comes back to fellow-feeling and appetite for fruitful activity
and a high quality of life: there is nothing else to appeal to. No
commandment can meet the case. It is no use saying “Thou shalt not
kill” in one breath, and, in the next “Thou shalt not suffer a witch
to live.” Men must be killed and animals must be killed: nay, whole
species of animals and types of men must be exterminated before the
earth can become a tolerable place of habitation for decent folk. But
among the men who will have to be wiped out stands the sportsman: the
man without fellow-feeling, the man so primitive and uncritical in his
tastes that the destruction of life is an amusement to him, the man
whose outlook is as narrow as that of his dog. He is not even cruel:
sport is partly a habit to which he has been brought up, and partly
stupidity, which can always be measured by wastefulness and by lack
of sense of the importance and glory of life. The horrible murk and
grime of the Pottery towns is caused by indifference to a stupid waste
of sunlight, natural beauty, cleanliness, and pleasant air, combined
with a brutish appetite for money. A _battue_ is caused by indifference
to the beauty and interest of bird life and song, and callousness to
glazed eyes and blood-bedabbled corpses, combined with a boyish love
of shooting. All the people who waste beauty and life in this way are
characterized by deficiency in fellow-feeling: not only have they none
of St. Francis’s feeling that the birds are of our kin, but they would
be extremely indignant if a loader or a gamekeeper asserted any claim
to belong to their species. Sport is a sign either of limitation or of
timid conventionality.
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