xix IS NATURE CRUEL? 377 



weapons exist for the purpose of shedding blood or giving 

 pain is wholly illusory. As a matter of fact, their effect is 

 wholly beneficent even to the sufferers, inasmuch as they 

 tend to the diminution of pain. Their actual purpose is 

 always to prevent the escape of captured food of a wounded 

 animal, which would then, indeed, suffer useless pain, since 

 it would certainly very soon be captured again and be 

 devoured. The canine teeth and retractile claws hold the 

 prey securely ; the serpent's fangs paralyse it ; and the wasp's 

 sting benumbs the living food stored up for its young, or 

 serves as a protection against being devoured itself by 

 insect-eating birds ; which latter, probably, only feel enough 

 pain to warn them against such food in future. The 

 evidence that animals which are devoured by lion or puma, 

 by wolf or wild cat, suffer very little, is, I think, conclusive. 

 The suddenness and violence of the seizure, the blow of 

 the paw, the simultaneous deep wounds by teeth and claws, 

 either cause death at once, or so paralyse the nervous 

 system that no pain is felt till death very rapidly follows. 

 It must be remembered that in a state of nature the 

 Carnivora hunt and kill to satisfy hunger, not for amusement ; 

 and all conclusions derived from the house-fed cat and 

 mouse are fallacious. Even in the case of man, with his 

 highly sensitive nervous system, which has been developed 

 on account of his unprotected skin and excessive liability to 

 accidental injury, seizure by a lion or tiger is hardly painful 

 or mentally distressing, as testified by those who have been 

 thus seized and have escaped. 1 



Our whole tendency to transfer our sensations of pain 

 to all other animals is grossly misleading. The probability 

 is, that there is as great a gap between man and the lower 

 animals in sensitiveness to pain as there is in their intellectual 

 and moral faculties ; and as a concomitant of those higher 

 faculties. We require to be more sensitive to pain because 

 of our bare skin with no protective armour or thick pads of 

 hair to ward off blows, or to guard against scratches and 

 wounds from the many spiny or prickly plants that abound 

 in every part of the world ; and especially on account of 

 our long infancy and childhood. And here I think I see 



1 See a brief discussion of this subject in my Darwinism, pp. 36-40. 



