46 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
of fishing as a hook at one end and a fool at the other. I delight in 
being a sympathetic soul in the natural life of my non-human kindred. 
I would gladly stop every form of human interference that involves 
unnecessary pain—such as trapping and bull-fights, and anything else 
in which man is able to torture his fellow-beings without risking his 
own skin, except in brutal bravado, like the matador. I would also 
stop all butchery, cruelty and extermination for which the caprices 
of fashion are responsible. Down at Cobb’s Island they butchered 
twenty-eight thousand beautiful sea-swallows for ten cents a head, 
wholesale. In Astrakhan they kill the pregnant mother with every 
refinement of cruelty, so that her agonies may give the fur of her unborn 
offspring a more fashionable curl. And in Florida the snowy egret 
is threatened with extermination by plume-hunters in the breeding 
season, when the birds are in their most attractive feather, and death 
is more cruel than at any other time. These plume hunters will stick 
at nothing, even murder—they killed Bradley, the bird warden the 
other day—in order to get dollars from the dealers, who supply the milli- 
ners, who both stimulate and pander to the whims of fashion. Beauty in 
dress is good; just as beauty of person is entirely excellent. But 
beauty in dress is not worth having in the mere matter of a particular 
ornament at the expense of butchery and torture; and, in cases of 
extermination, the very thing for which our human greed kills out 
the species that produces it must itself be lost. Man, being in the 
machinery age, is able to destroy every strong and beautiful animal 
in the whole world, if he so decides. But when he can feed, clothe and 
adorn himself and womankind without such destruction; and when he 
can have legitimate sport as well, without upsetting the balance of 
Nature, what an arrant fool and vile knave he would be to break the 
spell of the wild and, with it, half the joy of the Earth! 
I say this and I mean it, every word. But I entirely believe in 
the struggle for existence, all the same. And I think it wholly justifiable 
to fight on all occasions when two contestants inevitably cross each 
other’s path and neither will give way, whether they be empires, masses 
or individuals. So, when man and other animals clash, man is right 
to fight for his own hand. This is, in fact, a kind of war, and quite 
as justifiable. But it should be conducted under the most humane 
conditions possible—what a difference the single letter e makes between 
human and humane! There is a time for war and a time for peace; 
and both are right in this life of ours, with its endless opposites and 
compromises. But, while war is war, between whatever parties it is 
waged, so murder is murder, throughout the whole animal creation, 
and all avoidable pain is a criminal offence in the eyes of universal 
justice, even when inflicted on what we call pests and vermin. 
