show ia more concise and perhaps better style than that adopted by me 

 for this book some four years before, what an inestimable benefit sport 

 is to the country quite irrespective of amusement, while they deal 

 much more exhaustively with the glorious subject, bringing out, as the 

 second pamphlet does, a total of £47,313,000 as the sum permanently 

 invested in spor^, with an annual expenditure of £46,042,000, which, as 

 I say, is nearly half the National income, and more than double the 

 total charge for the National Debt ! 



Feel^g of Animals. — " Humanitarians " have also recommenced to 

 attack our sports, and in doing so they show themselves to be as 

 ignorant on the subject they deal with as are all other bigots and 

 faddists ; but as this book is one of reference and not of story, and as 

 this matter is of importance, I shall refer shortly to it, even though the 

 subject has been often threshed out by others. We all know that the 

 mental feeling of animals is vastly less acute than that of human beings- 

 For instance, in a day or two they will have forgotten the young they 

 had hitherto cared, perhaps " loved," so tenderly. Sights horrible to 

 us have, of course, no effect upon brute beasts, while such fear of 

 death as we have, although careful o[ their safety, can never occur 

 to them. Besides, when death comes suddenly, or after any great 

 shock, we don't even ourselves feel it much. We have good reason 

 to suppose that their bodily feeling is equally obtuse, for in the 

 case of the horse, whose cutaneous sensitivity is remarkable, he 

 will, without wincing or showing the least sign of feeling, put up with 

 a broken leg or other accident which would be to us such excruciating 

 agony that we would howl again. A cow, a sheep, and an ass, who we 

 all know have not nearly such thin skins as a horse, show the same in- 

 difference. A pig, however, will kick up a bobbery, but he would do 

 the same if he got the prod of a stick ! A hare will squeal when being 

 killed by greyhounds, but as that timid creature will sometimes do so 

 before she is caught it is just as likely as not that she cries from fear 

 alone. Surely a bird with a broken wing does not suffer like a man 

 with a broken arm. I saw a cock grouse picking heather tops half an 

 hour after having been wounded so. 



Fish, we may take i*-, are all constituted alike as regards bodily feel- 

 ing, and while I don't know if a salmon or the nimble trout would do 

 so, a pike will, in a few minutes after, go at the same bait which con- 

 ceals the hook on which, by the nose, he had been pulled at for perhaps 

 a quarter of an hour ! Does that indicate that he had suffered much 

 pain or was very much tormented, or even frightened, by the angler ? 



Numerous instances have been related which show how little fear 

 a fox has when being hunted. I myself saw one run fifty yards 

 out of his way to get at a flock of geese, although the hounds were 

 hunting his line not two fields behind. This he evidently did only for 

 a lark, for he made no attempt to catch one, and pursued his course 

 with a whisk of his brush after having scattered them cackling in all 



