employment is probably to be accepted as evidence that the occupation in
question is substantially make-believe.
A further feature in which sports differ from the duel and similar
disturbances of the peace is the peculiarity that they admit of other
motives being assigned for them besides the impulses of exploit and
ferocity. There is probably little if any other motive present in any
given case, but the fact that other reasons for indulging in sports are
frequently assigned goes to say that other grounds are sometimes present
in a subsidiary way. Sportsmen--hunters and anglers--are more or less in
the habit of assigning a love of nature, the need of recreation, and the
like, as the incentives to their favorite pastime. These motives are no
doubt frequently present and make up a part of the attractiveness of
the sportsman's life; but these can not be the chief incentives. These
ostensible needs could be more readily and fully satisfied without the
accompaniment of a systematic effort to take the life of those creatures
that make up an essential feature of that "nature" that is beloved
by the sportsman. It is, indeed, the most noticeable effect of the
sportsman's activity to keep nature in a state of chronic desolation by
killing off all living thing whose destruction he can compass.
Still, there is ground for the sportsman's claim that under the existing
conventionalities his need of recreation and of contact with nature can
best be satisfied by the course which he takes. Certain canons of good
breeding have been imposed by the prescriptive example of a predatory
leisure class in the past and have been somewhat painstakingly conserved
by the usage of the latter-day representatives of that class; and these
canons will not permit him, without blame, to seek contact with nature
on other terms. From being an honorable employment handed down from the
predatory culture as the highest form of everyday leisure, sports have
come to be the only form of outdoor activity that has the full sanction
of decorum. Among the proximate incentives to shooting and angling,
then, may be the need of recreation and outdoor life. The remoter cause
which imposes the necessity of seeking these objects under the cover of
systematic slaughter is a prescription that can not be violated except
at the risk of disrepute and consequent lesion to one's self-respect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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