The answer to all this pious verbiage is, of course, very simple. In view of the fact that the sportsman of the present day professes to be _civilised_, and is at any rate nominally a member of a civilised State, it is quite irrelevant to plead that the propensity to hunt is natural to the _savage_ man. We are continually striving in other departments of life to get rid of ferocious instincts, an inheritance from a savage past, which may or may not be “God-planted,” but are certainly very much out of place in a society which regards itself as humane. Why, then, should it be assumed that an exception is to be made in favour of the hunting instinct? The charge against modern blood-sports is that they are an anachronism, a survival of a barbarous habit into a civilised age; nor can it possibly be any justification of them to show that Nature herself is cruel, for as we do not make savage Nature our exemplar in other respects, there is no reason why we should do so in this. And as for the statement that a man’s treatment of the lower animals is a “personal” affair “between that man and his God,” it can only provoke a smile. For man is a social being, and not even the sportsman, belated barbarian though he may be, can be allowed the privilege of thus evading the responsibility which he owes to his fellow-citizens in a matter affecting the common conscience of the race. But the wild animals, it is argued, put themselves outside the pale of consideration because they prey on one another. One searches in vain for justice and mercy among the lower animals--such is the strange reason advanced as an excuse for showing no justice or mercy to _them_.[25] But, in the first place, it is not a fact that these qualities are non-existent in the lower races, where co-operation is as much a law of life as competition; and, secondly, if it were a fact, it would have no bearing whatever on the morality of sport. For why should we base human ethics on animal conduct? Still more, why should we imitate the predatory animals rather than the sociable? And finally, why, because some animals kill for food, should _we_ kill for pleasure? The cruelty of Nature can afford no possible justification for the cruelty of Man, for, as Leigh Hunt wrote in that trenchant couplet which may be commended to the notice of the sportsman-- “That there is pain and evil is no rule That I should make it greater, like a fool.”