51S 



land was generally smothered with weeds. Mr. Punnett and 

 Mr. Abbott had kindly consented to act on his behalf at the 

 trial at Bowhill, and he repeated in public the request which 

 he had made to them in private, that they would give their 

 decision without bias either for one plough or the other, so 

 that the implement which did really make the best work should 

 be known. Throughout the whole matter Mr. Russell had 

 acted in the most fair and honourable spirit, and he therefore 



THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



hoped that this question would now be set at rest. Mr. £1* 

 vey concluded by inviting all present to visit Bowhill on that 

 occasion, observing that a luncheon would be provided for 

 them, and expressing a hope that afterwards they would swell 

 the company at the dinner table in the evening, not for his 

 own sake, but as a compliment to Mr. Russell, who would send 

 his ploughs from a distant part of the county to engage in 

 the competition. 



CRUELTY TO ANIMALS: A WOMAN'S MISSION. 



Sir, — The account given by Professor Spoontr of the 

 unparalleled barbarities exercised on horses in the vete- 

 rinary schools of France, to which you have so earnestly 

 called the attention of your readers, must have sent a thrill 

 of horror and indignation through every Englishman who 

 has read it. 



When Bruce, in the narrative of his travels, asserted that 

 the Abyssinian soldiers frequently cnt off flesh from living 

 cows for food, and continued to do so from day to day till 

 the animal died, the story was disbelieved, the existence 

 of even a savage people capable of such inhuman atrocities 

 being considered incredible. But to the disgrace of Chris- 

 tendom it appears that cruelties more horrible are actually 

 perpetrated on defenceless animals, day by day, " under the 

 hypocritical mask of science," in the heart of a Christian 

 nation, which boasts itself to be in the van of civilization. 



I shall make no apology for again holding up before your 

 readers the Professor's direful picture of these veterinary 

 horrors : — " The facts are these : At Alfort, which I visited, 

 and still more I hear at Lyons, the pupils are instructed in 

 surgery by cutting up living horses ! Oh, then, is surgery 

 fiendhood ? Two days a week, at 9 o'clock in the morning, 

 the doomed horse is cast ; and then he is subjected to all 

 sorts of surgical operations, such as firing, neurotomy, 

 cutting away pieces of cartilage of the foot — operating as 

 for stone in the bladder, extirpating the parotid and other 

 glands, or the eyes ; or any organ that forceps can pull, or 

 that knives and saws can reach. Steel and fingers, guided 

 by stony hearts, invade the poor animal at all points. These 

 operations on the same horse lasts from nine o'clock in the 

 morning until four in the afternoon; unless, indeed, he 

 becomes unfit for the diabolism by dying in the meantime." 



What were the cruelties of the savage Abyssinians com- 

 pared with the deliberate, long-protracted, and reiterated 

 torments now inflicted in the so-called pursuits of science, 

 by French veterinarians ? Men who mercilessly cauve and 

 dissect the living palpitating members of a noble animal 

 with as much cool indifference as they would pull to pieces 

 the component parts of a railway engine. Disregard of the 

 infliction of pain and suffering on the defenceless has ever 

 been considered a distinctive trait of savage life ; but where 

 amongst the Red Indians of America or the Dahomees of 

 Africa could you find worse devilries practised than these ? 



It is preposterous to plead the necessity of such fearful 

 inhumanities in the cause of science, since the fact is in- 

 contestable that it is not necessary, even could it ever be 

 justifiable, to dissect [the living animal for the purpose of 

 teaching surgery, any more than, as the learned professor 

 remarks, it is for the human surgeon to cut and slash the 

 living human subject. Such practices are the fruit of 

 brutal and depraved minds, of a wanton and ignorant hax- 

 barity. 



Besides, scientific knowledge implies— and in exact pro- 

 portion to the degree of it— the cultivation not only of the 

 intellectual faculties, bat of the whole moral being ; and ac- 

 cordingly is incompatible, philosophically considered, with 

 the exhibition of cruel propensities. 



Professor Spooner warns us, and I trust unnecessarily, to 

 be on our guard against the growth of tendencies to similar 

 practices in this country. If any Englishman knows of the 

 existence of any approach to such devilism, he incurs a 

 heavy responsibility if he hesitates to expose it, that it may 

 be branded by public abhorrence. 



Instances of savage depravity will occur in every com- 

 munity ; but so much has the public mind of England been 

 raised and softened by the progress of intelligence and re- 

 finement, that the humbler classes would now turn with 

 sickening horror from the brutal spectacles once in favour 

 with our ancestors, and would certainly pursue a.ny scientific 

 dissecter of living animals from the police-court to the tread- 

 mill with well-merited execrations. 



All history shows that familiarity with the suft'erings of 

 inferior animals infallibly leads to cruelty towards one's own 

 species. Tastes are vitiated, hearts hardened, minds brut- 

 alized by such acts, till they acquire an appetite and thirst 

 for blood. Thus the barbarities of the Coliseum, where 

 polished Romans sought their sport and pastime in the 

 savage rending and dying agonies of brute animals, led in 

 due time to the demand for hecatombs of human sacrifices ; 

 and who can tell how often from such scenes as these veteri- 

 nary amphitheatres of France, reeking with the warm blood of 

 writhing victims, may have gone forth a Nemesis to mete 

 out the same measure to the sons and daughters of the 

 land ? 



In the hideous catalogue of cruelties which have marked 

 each successive revolution in that country, human creatures 

 have in numberless instances been mangled, mutilated, and 

 tortured to death with equally ruthless indifference. " Mur- 

 ders were committed wholesale," as one of their own writers 

 has observed, ''not from any lust or revenge, or avarice, but 

 merely from the luxury to the perpetrators of seeing their 

 victims die, to feast the ear with their groans, and to delight 

 the eye with their contortions," till these fiends in human 

 form attained to such a refinement of cruelty, that witnesses 

 of their deeds are known to have died with horror. 



But it is only amongst the dregs of any civilized nation 

 that these propensities of the uncultivated savage prevail, 

 and it is impossible to conceive that these diabolical horse- 

 tormentors can spring from any but this class. What good 

 result then could be expected from any deputation of our 

 Humane Society to the heads of these institutions — to men 

 who have themselves sanctioned, directed, and participated, 

 perhaps for years, in these horrible vivisections, till they 

 have become so inured to tbem as to be ineeniible to their 



