2i 4 PROTECTION OF ANIMAL LIFE 



in the Lowlands, the shooting and selling of hares at any time 

 were forbidden. A curious penalty attaches to a decree of 

 1707, made during our conflict with Louis XIV of France, 

 for it was ordained that no one shoot hares without a licence 

 from the proprietor of the ground, under penalty of being 

 sent abroad as a recruit. 



What the actual effect of such protection was upon the 

 stock of hares in the country I have no means of estimating. 

 I imagine that it must have kept the number up to a level that, 

 could not have been attained had hares been slaughtered at 

 all times by all and sundry; and this supposition is confirmed 

 by the reduction of numbers which followed upon the setting 

 aside of the older Game Laws by the Ground Game Act of 

 iSSo 1 . Yet in the old days hares do not seem to have 

 been overplentiful, judging from the slight evidence I have 

 gathered. To Mr A. O. Curie I am indebted for an extract 

 from the manuscript of the Moray Papers, which I quote 

 here by permission of the Right Hon. the Earl of Moray. 

 It appears in a letter, dated 22 January 1582, from John 

 Guthrie in Castle Campbell to the Countess of Argyll, 

 relating a libel against Argyll made to the King by the Prior 

 of Pluscarden, accusing him of 



the foullest and greatest slauchter of hares that ever he saw, felling them 

 in thair setts and lowsing of 10 or 12 leish of dogs by [Pforbye] ane great 

 number of raches at ane hare and so wald slay in ane day 12, 16, or 20, 



no very great "slauchter," as things go in our day of sporting 

 guns and ammunition, though with dogs a very fair bag. 

 In the middle of the eighteenth century the number of hares 

 and leverets in Great Britain was estimated, according to 

 Dr John Campbell, I do not know on what basis, at a stock 

 of twenty-four thousand, and an annual breed of twelve 

 thousand. 



As in the case of Deer and Game Birds, the War has 

 made more apparent than ever before, the influence upon 

 the hare's numbers of even the modicum of protection now 

 afforded it. Owing to the absence of sportsmen and game- 

 keepers, the annual destruction of hares has been lessened, 

 and the effect of preservation, no longer obscured by com- 

 pensating slaughter, stands out clearly in an enormous 



1 See p. 1 80, where also the Hares' Preservation Act of 1892 is 

 referred to. 



