JANUARY 29 



by their natural foes ; trains some of these foes to take 

 some of the game at prescribed seasons, and enjoys a 

 health-giving pastime besides. Grouse and partridges 

 are no losers under this arrangement. The same man 

 who takes delight in tearing the rocketers out of the 

 skies, or artistically dropping scores of driven grouse 

 round his box, will endure tortures on seeing a 

 retriever unmercifully beaten for a blunder, and feel 

 his heart bleed for the sufferings of a cab-horse with 

 navicular disease. Nor will he be content merely to 

 give sympathy, however sincere. He will be foremost 

 in those efforts which, happily, are characteristic of 

 our civilisation for protecting beast and bird from 

 unnecessary suffering or wilful abuse. It is not in the 

 sportsman's stable that cruelly tight-bearing reins are 

 permitted, nor in his study that you need look for a 

 lark imprisoned in a tiny cage. One can best realise 

 the effect of sport on the welfare of wild animals by 

 imagining what would have been the present state 

 of things had the Game Laws been abolished, as many 

 earnest and well-meaning persons think they ought to 

 be, and shooting put an end to as a pastime. Game 

 would have ceased to exist, except, perhaps, in the 

 walled parks of a few very rich men. Grouse, the only 

 exclusively British species of bird, don't frequent walled 

 parks, and would have been wiped off the face of the 

 earth; we should be talking of them with the same 

 melancholy interest that invests the dodo and the 

 great auk. 



So much from the naturalist's point of view, but the 



