[woop] LAURENCIANA 45 
puffins, queer owl-parrot-like sea-birds, red-beaked and footed, 
and nesting like rabbits. 
The Great Auk is extinct; so is the Labrador duck. The walrus 
has long been exterminated in Laurentian waters. The whale, too, 
will soon be as extinct as the auk and the dodo, if modern whaling 
goes on much longer. And all at the hands of that most wanton of 
the beasts of prey, “civilized man.” 
Now, I do not at all mean to range myself among the sentiment- 
alists by putting “civilized man” into the pillory of inverted commas. 
I am a firm believer in war, sport and meat. I believe in war because 
all the best breeds of men have excelled in war, because war is a great 
and good factor in evolution, and because excessive peace tends to 
rot the body politic away in the midst of the smug materialism of its 
“average man.” Besides—apart from some really whole-souled en- 
thusiasts—most pacifists are those who, as individuals, dislike all risks 
to their comforts or their skins, who, as classes, hate whatever enhances 
the value of the hero, and who, as peoples, naturally shrink from any 
ordeal which may prove them unfit. I believe in sport, in any form 
of true sport which means fair play and no favour to either side, and 
which requires exceptional skill or courage or both. A man is within 
the pale when he never indulges in wanton slaughter or individual 
cruelty, and when he instinctively observes the indefinable difference 
between a sportsman and a “sport,” which is exactly the same as 
between a gentleman and a “gent.” Wild animals don’t die what we 
call natural deaths; they starve or get killed. And they don’t suffer 
from nerves, like town-bred humanitarians. An animal that has 
just escaped death will resume its feeding or fighting or play as if 
nothing had happened. So the sportsman is only one more incident 
in the day’s work, and his clean shot the happiest of deaths 
in the wild. No true sportsman would ever wound without killing 
as soon as possible, no matter if he lost the rest of his bag by doing so. 
Nor would he ever kill, even beyond the reach of any game laws, at 
a season when the loss of a parent might cause the lingering death of 
the young. So, within these limits, I believe in sport as, within its 
own righteous limits, I believe in war. I also believe in meat, simply 
because we are the great omnivora—a good and sufficient reason 
by itself. 
Yet my whole heart goes out to all my fellow-subjects in the 
Animal Kingdom. I am an evolutionist, through and through, and 
fully recognize that every other animal is essentially the same as my- 
self in kind, whatever vast distinctions there are between us in degree. 
I cannot imagine, much less desire, a dogless heaven. I rarely pull 
a trigger. I am a perfect exemplification of the sarcastic definition 
