224 THE MASTER OF HOUNDS 



this partiality under the plea that forty years ago 

 animals' rights had not come up for settlement. Yet 

 cock-fighting was illegal and practically extinct in 

 1840, fifty-seven years before Mr. Stratton penned his 

 reply to Lord Ribblesdale's famous book, " The Queen's 

 Hounds." It must be remembered that the mouth- 

 piece of the Humanitarian League was not recognised 

 as an authority in regard to the polemics of sport. On 

 the contrary, he was an expert electioneering agent, 

 who in 1892 had published the first petition for the 

 abolition of the Royal Buckhounds. Unfortunately 

 for Mr. Stratton and the other promoters of the agita- 

 tion against the buckhounds, it transpired that the 

 majority of the signatories to the petition were 

 employees in Huntley and Palmer's Biscuit Works at 

 Reading. In order to prove to these employees how 

 ignorant they were, Lord Ribblesdale, on December 23, 

 1892, hunted an uncarted deer into the London 

 Road, one of the eentral streets of Reading, where he 

 was safely captured. 



In the first place, I could never understand what 

 relation there could be between hunting the uncarted 

 deer and humanitarianism. If the pursuit of the un- 

 carted deer were cruel, then the Society for the Pre- 

 vention of Cruelty to Animals should undertake the 

 prosecution. Yet Mr. Stratton gravely tells us that 

 " till the humanitarian eye became fixed on the Royal 

 Hunt, it was the rule when a stag met with what the 

 hunters call * an accident,' in a serious shape, to kill 

 and disembowel the animal and regale the pack then 

 and there lupon the entrails." I do not profess to 



