"All these fights are brutal, and in time they will, we trust, be made illegal. To pass a prohibitionary regulation, however, without the full consent of the Chiefs and people of Pahang would be a distinct breach of the understanding on which British Protection was accepted by them. The Government is pledged not to interfere with native customs, and the sports in which animals are engaged are among the most cherished institutions of the people of Pahang. To fully appreciate the light in which any interference with these things would be viewed by the native population, it is necessary to put oneself in the position of a keen member of the Quorn, who saw Parliament making hunting illegal, on the grounds that the sufferings inflicted on the fox rendered it an inhuman pastime. As I have said in a former chapter, the natives of Pahang are, in their own way, very keen sportsmen indeed; and, when all is said and done, it is doubtful whether hunting is not more cruel than anything which takes place in a Malay cock-pit or bull-ring. The longer the run the better the sport, and more intense and prolonged the agony of the fox, that strives to run for his life, even when he is so stiff with exertion that he can do little more than roll along. All of us have, at one time or another, experienced in nightmares the agony of attempting to fly from some pursuing phantom, when our limbs refuse to serve us. This, I fancy, is much what a fox suffers, only his pains are intensified by the grimness of stern reality. If he stops he loses his life, therefore he rolls, and flounders, and creeps along when every movement has become a fresh torture. The cock, quail, dove, bull, ram, or fish, [691] on the other hand, fights because it is his nature to do so, and when he has had his fill he stops. His pluck, his pride, and his hatred of defeat alone urge him to continue the contest. He is never driven by the relentless whip of stern, inexorable necessity. This it is which makes fights between animals, that are properly conducted, less cruel than one is apt to imagine." [692] I will now pass to the subject of cock-fighting, of which the following vivid description is also taken from Mr. Clifford's In Court and Kampong. [693] "In the Archipelago, and on the West Coast of the Peninsula, cock-fights are conducted in the manner known to the Malays as ber-tâji, the birds being armed with long artificial spurs, sharp as razors, and curved like a Malay woman's eyebrow. These weapons make cruel wounds, and cause the death of one or other of the combatants almost before the sport has well begun. To the Malay of the East Coast this form of cock-fighting is regarded as stupid and unsportsmanlike, an opinion which I fully share. It is the marvellous pluck and endurance of the birds that lend an interest to a cock-fight--qualities which are in no way required if the birds are armed with weapons other than those with which they are furnished by nature.