WILD ANIMALS IN CAPTIVITY 
owners, if allowed the use of their perfect wings. I think 
these facts ought to hold good in support of the opinion 
that the common or mute swan is still undomesticated, 
because however tame it may be, the tameness of the bird 
is no argument that it is a domestic animal. 
It is quite true that the swans reared at Abbotsbury 
Swannery, the property of Lord Ilchester, where I have seen 
two thousand adult birds and five or six hundred cygnets 
within a mile and a half of the spot where they were 
hatched, are allowed the full use of their wings. Out of 
this large number many occasionally desert his lordship’s 
grounds. I have seen from two to three hundred 
deserters on the coast, about Weymouth and the Isle of 
Portland. 
It was well known to whom they belonged, as a large 
number were missed from the swannery; it was in the 
early spring of 1882, and a very large proportion of these 
swans was lost. 
In 1878 a case Avas brought by the Society for the 
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals before a full Bench at the 
Slough Petty Sessions, against J. Abnett, waterman, of East 
Moulsey, in the employ of the Vintners’ Company, for 
having cruelly ill-treated and tortured four swans by 
cutting the mandibles with a knife and plucking feathers 
from the Avings. 
Inspector Nicholls, Superintendent Whitehouse, and a 
Veterinary Surgeon went up the Thames on August 8,1877, 
to see the SAvan-upping. Hamilton, the Queen’s sAvan- 
herd (now deceased), Avas marking the swans, and Hicks 
and Abnett Avere assisting. After a considerable amount 
of evidence for and against had been given, the Bench 
dismissed the case, it being decided that the defendants 
Avere not guilty of cruelty in carrying out a practice that 
had been in use for centuries. 
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