CHAPTER III 



DELIBERATE DESTRUCTION 

 OF ANIMAL LIFE 



The Hart, the Hynd, the Dae, the Rae, 



The Fulmart and false Fox, 

 The beardit Buck clam up the Brae, 



With birssy Bairs and Brocks: 



Sum feiding, sum dreiding, 



The Hunter's subtle snairs, 

 With skipping and tripping 



They play it them all in pairs. 



The Cherrie and the Sloe. 



NO other aspect of man's interference with the animal 

 world bulks so largely in the imagination as his deliberate 

 destruction of life. It is not that he has thus exterminated 

 more creatures than have been banished by the felling of 

 the woodland or the reclamation of moor and marsh ; it is 

 scarcely that the effects of gun and snare are more deadly 

 than the removal of breeding places and the destruction of 

 food supplies. Rather it is that the indirect influences are 

 gradual in their working, that man's attention is fixed upon 

 the fields which prosper under his care or the forests that 

 fall under his axe, while the creatures which inhabited them 

 wane and disappear unnoticed. But deliberate destruction 

 is prompt, obviously merciless and final. 



It has not always been so. In the earlier periods of 

 man's development, in the days of the hunters of the Old 

 Stone Age, the slaughter of animals was a necessity for 

 protection as well as for food. But this was no uneconomic 

 slaughter. It is true that wild animals were trapped in 

 numbers in hidden pits, and it is true that in the aggregate 

 many animals were killed, for more than two thousand 

 molar teeth of the Mammoth have been found gathered 



