INTR OD UCTION. 1 7 



long while could I bring myself to watch a living creature 

 being drawn into that living trap. Nor could we — you and 

 I — feel aught but horror in visiting a slaughter-house and 

 watching a poor calf slowly die. Nor could we, for pleasure 

 merely, look coolly on at a painful surgical operation. Yet 

 we know that such things must be. The life of the snake 

 is as important as that of the frog. If we are to talk about 

 cruelty, this book of natural history, and of intended — let 

 me say, of hoped-for — usefulness, would become one of 

 political economy instead. We might discuss the sport of 

 the angler, the huntsman ; the affairs of the War Office ; of 

 railroad managers and of road-makers ; the matters of the 

 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ; followed by 

 an examination into the questions that have been ventilated 

 in so-called 'benevolent organs;' and how some of them 

 employ writers who in every tenth line betray their ignor- 

 ance of the creatures they attempt to describe. Not even 

 theology could be dispensed with in this work ; for, since the 

 time when Adam was told to have ' dominion over the fish of 

 the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living 

 thing that moveth upon the earth,' the question of 'cruelty' 

 has never been satisfactorily solved. Morally and broadly, 

 let us understand it to mean unnecessary torture — pain and 

 suffering that can be avoided, and which offers a very wide 

 scope indeed. In the animal world, ' every creature is 

 destined to be the food of some other creature ; ' and by 

 these economics only is the balance of nature maintained. 

 Happily we are spared the too vivid realization of the 

 destruction of life ceaselessly going on throughout creation ; 

 the myriads of Insects destroyed each moment by birds, the 



B 



