BIG GAME SHOOTING
Nowadays it is the fashion for the wealthy young man about town to go to India or Africa to hunt big game. So it may be of interest to discuss a little this big game shooting from an educational point of view—which point of view had not arisen, and of which there was no need, before or during the last generation. But, alas! different times and different men have turned hunting into a mere pastime of the lowest kind—into an excuse for killing in an unsportsmanlike fashion, to be used as a sop for a feeble, decadent vanity.
Such mighty hunters as Mr. Selous and the late Captain Gordon Cumming made it possible only to honour and respect in every way such men, who hunted in a clean, hard, fearless manner, spending their lives and caring little of the way they risked them, so long as the task set was accomplished. There was no necessity then to question as to the sportsmanlike manner in which big game was hunted. It is more than a pity that the same cannot be said at the present day.
In imagination one sees the many mighty hunters of bygone days: the men who laboured and sweated in Africa during the time when elephant ivory was a paying game. The years of hardship, of carrying one’s life in one’s hand—the only thing that kept death away, an antiquated rifle that took a minute to load—these were men to whose memory all real sportsmen must doff their hats and bend their heads in reverence.
One or two are still left to us, and written on their faces is the story of the lives they have led—a story clean and fine to read—eyes that look out with no shiftless look, bright and clear as steel; firm lips that have suffered, perhaps, but have never trembled from fear; lines drawn plentifully by the sun-god, but each line shaped by a wholesome thought. No sagging lines of self-indulgence in these faces; even if they had their merry roystering times on their few returns to civilisation, they wiped out the marks by the months of arduous and self-denying living which they spent hunting. Some to make money, others because they had been born hunters and would continue to hunt until the Most Mighty of all Hunters stretched forth His hand and claimed them in their turn.
Sportsmen these in the greatest sense of the word. Turn in your graves, ye who have passed on! Or, rather, let us pray that it is denied to you to see the men and methods that follow so feebly in your footsteps.
Let me try and compare the going forth to hunt of a rich young man of the present day, and one of these old hunters. The rich young man starts, say, from Mombasa—it is the pet place of rich young men, as it is easily got at, and a non-feverish hunting-ground can be reached with little trouble. He, the rich young man, is quite often accompanied by a professional white hunter, who takes all trouble from off his shoulders, engages his men, runs the whole outfit for him, and generally acts as male nurse to the rich young man, seeing that he does not run his valuable head anywhere in the direction that danger might lurk. He is, as a rule, a first-class shot, so if his charge misses or maims a dangerous animal, he can always rectify matters. In fact, he sets the scene, writes the play, acts as audience, and the rich young man plays the chief part, and the whole thing as much resembles real big game hunting as the theatre resembles real life.
Of course the running of the caravan is in itself no light work, as the rich young man would find it terribly uncomfortable to travel with less than sixty or ninety men, there are so many things to carry, tents, chairs of different kinds to rest the aching back, tables, dozens of plates, spoons, forks, and knives, beds, a mosquito-room to dine in, champagne to restore the rich young man after his fatiguing day, two or three portmanteaus of clothes—he might get fever if he did not change constantly, and to sit about in sweaty clothes is very dangerous he has heard—and then, my God! he might die, if he hasn’t brought a doctor with him this time: he most certainly will if he ventures back into Africa again.
The above may seem exaggerated, but I can most sincerely assure my readers that it is not. It is merely the modern young man’s idea of sport.
Bah! let me take a deep, clean breath, and get back to talking about the real men, the hunters of old whom we can respect and look up to, and feel glad that sometimes they will let us sit at their feet, and learn from them a little of the wisdom they have massed together during years of solitary travel. They are always quite modest men, putting little value on their brave deeds, regarding it all in the day’s work—though sometimes their eyes will sparkle as they tell of some great adventure in bygone days. For it is near to their hearts, this life of wandering, and they would lead no other. To do an unfair or cowardly act would be an impossibility to these men, they are just good sportsmen, and they want no fairer name.
How different their hunting! One or two men would carry all they needed for months of travel; no stock of tinned food here, they ate what they killed, and if they killed nothing, went without. A little flour and rice, a knife, a spoon, perhaps a fork!—it was not a necessity, so why take it? A small tent, a few odds-and-ends, a couple of shirts. Everything worked down to the lowest limit. Not how much can we take—the new gospel—but how much can we do without, and they did without most things. They were there to hunt to the best of their ability, not to coddle their bodies; they would have been ashamed to do that at any time, as coddled bodies and clean souls do not as a rule go together, and these men were essentially clean-souled.
Yes, they were out to hunt big game—man against beast—teeth and claws against rifle—fair and square we met him and the best of us won. Sometimes they died of fever, sometimes they were killed by the animals they hunted—but one thing may be a certainty, and that is that each and all who met his death did so fearlessly and with no repining. They had taken the chances, and if the chances were too many for them, it was all in the day’s work.
How pitifully few of our modern young men will stand comparison with these old hunters—and it is in the comparing of the old with the new which brings up the question in one’s mind as to whether it is not actually excessively wrong from all points of view to hunt in the manner indulged in by the man of the present day.
The question as to our right in the taking of animal life is bound, I suppose, to arise in the minds of all who have children to educate, and who think at all—and I personally find it one extremely hard to answer, and am fain to make a compromise, which I know is, as a rule, a great mistake: the young as a rule do not question, they hunt and take life in a purely heartless fashion, seeming to feel no doubt as to the right or the wrong of it, and while this is felt I should say hunt if—and this is a very large if—the hunting is done so that benefit for mind and body is got from it; but there is little doubt that, indulged in as it is by the rich at present, it becomes a merely degraded form of amusement. In the future, perhaps, we shall understand more clearly and realise more definitely as to whether the taking of an animal’s life is wrong or not. Let me try and explain what I mean when I say sport ought only to be indulged in when of benefit to body and soul.
It seems to me the only permissible excuse for killing ought to be, firstly, for food; and secondly—by far the most important—that in the pursuit and killing of game, a man becomes a finer, cleaner type owing to the life he is forced to lead during that pursuit. It is a life in the open air. He has to work hard, to lead a primitive life, and generally has a chance to brush away from his mind and body the uncleanly thoughts and clothes that are fostered and imposed by civilisation. He must be independent, relying only on his own strength and skill; he must live and hunt as nearly as possible as his savage forefathers lived and hunted, and, having shaken clear of civilisation, he has time to examine his mind and generally get things into their proper perspective. He gives himself a chance to face his God and himself if he does this fairly (and a few months of a primitive, clean life will make him do it in spite of himself); he will come back from his hunting trip a better, saner, and stronger man mentally and physically than when he started, and his hunting will have provided the object necessary to encourage him to lead this kind of a life. And now we come back to the question, to kill or not to kill. There are certain people, but rarely young people, who can go out and lead a hard, primitive life, for the sheer love of the thing and for the good of their souls, and not need any definite object to lure them on and keep their minds busy. But the average man has travelled such a little way along the big road of thought, that he requires to have something to amuse the superficial part of his mind while he is straightening and patching his tired soul and body.
Therefore, if killing is only used as an excuse for leading a clean, healthy life, and it is done in a sportsmanlike fashion, it seems to my humble judgment better to hunt and be clean, than not hunt and be unclean. A compromise, I know, but the only one my poor judgment allows me. If sport is not undertaken to make a better man of you, nowadays, when it is not a necessity to hunt to live, then leave it alone, for it can only deteriorate and hinder. Worthless is the man who goes out hunting with no reason for his going beyond nurturing his personal vanity, with the desire only of bringing home so many heads and skins and showing them off to admiring relations and friends. Only too often, he cares little if the trophies were gotten in a sportsmanlike manner; he goes, accompanied by all the trappings and comforts of civilisation, everything arranged and made easy, often even to having the animals he hunts found and marked down for him. In fact, he sets forth to accomplish a series of well-arranged animal murders, and he calls it sport.
It would be truly instructive, if it were possible, to turn one of these so-called men loose in Africa out of reach of civilisation, and make him live as the real hunter of past days lived, dependent entirely on his own eyesight, skill, and endurance. I very much doubt if one week would not see him dying or dead, as from constant self-indulgence from earliest youth, and soft living of all kinds, his eyesight is rotten, his hearing is of no use whatever, and his staying power, unless bolstered up by incessant stimulants, does not exist at all. Unless the hunter of old had had all his senses very finely developed, he would not have got very far, and Africa would have claimed more white lives than she has already done.
The unfortunate thing is that this type of decadent young man who overruns the healthy hunting-grounds of Africa, has done, and is doing, a great deal of harm to sport. He has more money than brains and he has no self-respect whatever. Therefore he indulges in a form of sport that is no sport at all, but merely the seeking of a worn-out, unhealthy mind after amusement. He goes in for a form of vice in sport, which is a lust to kill in large numbers—how, does not in the least matter, it is the quantity that matters; quality even does not attract him largely, rather three small heads than one good one.
Also, to be cruel is perhaps more amusing than not to be cruel. I do not think I am wrong in saying that in the old days the man who did not kill as quickly and cleanly as possible would have been called a bad sportsman. Boys were brought up to consider sport a very serious thing, and to be named a good sportsman more or less hall-marked you. They regarded sport very seriously, these great-grandfathers of ours, and often in a manner which would appear to us with wider interests somewhat ridiculous. But the trouble is that sport is still freely indulged in—big game hunting more than it used to be, since great distances can now be covered with ease and comfort—and the good old rules as to what made a good sportsman and what didn’t, have, instead of becoming more stringent, almost ceased to exist. The high ideals which the old sportsmen kept constantly in front of them have gone, and in their place reigns a most unwholesome desire to slaughter at all costs, which has naturally led to many cruel forms of hunting that would not have been tolerated in the old days. Fair play for man and beast was the gospel of the old hunters. Amusement for the hunter is the cry nowadays, and a poor lot of human beings indulging in a very poor form of sport is the result.
A ceaseless endeavour to kill dangerous animals, and to remain perfectly safe while doing so, is, from a sportsman’s point of view, a somewhat nauseating sight. A favourite device of this sort is tying up a live animal, such as a donkey or a goat, climbing up a tree to a safe perch, and from there shooting lions, &c., which will come to devour the tie-up. The feelings of the said tie-up during the hours of waiting do not require much imagination to realise.
Hunting a lion with a pack of hounds, four or five men on ponies with rifles, is another very favourite pastime nowadays. It has its advantages in being fairly safe—for the men; the hounds, of course, may suffer. The King of Beasts—would any one recognise him by that name, as, hunted, winded, dazed by the clamour of many hounds, he tries to make the long grass?—and, when he does make a break for the open, it does not matter if one rifle misses, or only wounds him, there are always two or three more to finish him off before he can retaliate.
If we will not face him on our feet, man and rifle against beast and claws, would it not be more sportsmanlike to leave him alone? A pack of hounds and four or six rifles against one lion. Well it is that you mighty lion-hunters, who, unaided and badly armed, sought out and killed your lions by sheer skill and bravery, taking all chances, and only proud if the chances were against you—well it is that you have passed on; or do your spirits still haunt that land of fascination and disease, and, perchance, mourn over each great beast that is done to death by the hands of degenerate creatures, who manage to preserve their worthless lives against your mighty strength, merely by being able to entirely obliterate from their minds what the words ‘good sportsmen’ once meant?
It would be of some interest to know how many lions, of the many that are killed nowadays, are met face to face, one man on the ground against one lion. Not so very many, methinks. One hears so much about the number of lions killed by So-and-so, but the methods of killing are generally left to the imagination of the listener. I believe there have been people degraded enough even to trap lions and think no shame of it. Hardly would this be permissible even if there was a famous man-eater to be killed, unless every other sporting method had been tried and failed. Why this type of creature, who does this sort of thing and boasts of it, is not taken and given a horse-whipping, and then expelled from decent society, I know not—except that I suppose the old sense of fairness and good sportsmanship is breathing its last. I felt this very strongly when in London a short time ago, I went to see some moving pictures of big game taken in Africa. One of the pictures remains unpleasantly clear in my memory: it was that of a hyena in a trap, caught by one leg; it grovelled along on its belly, tongue out, covered with dust, in an agony of fear, and showing the hideous misery of despair to be seen only in the eyes of trapped animals; he ceased his convulsive efforts to get free for the moment, and he was then stirred up with sticks, so that his struggles might prove an amusing picture to be shown all over the world. It was explained during this picture that the trap was padded and could cause the animal no pain, as if pain of a wounded limb be felt or matter much to a trapped animal. It is the terrible fear, the feeling of helplessness and being at the mercy of all comers,—they who have always been free—look at their eyes; and even if they be sorely wounded, it is not pain you see there, but sheer, horrible terror, the terror of the trapped animal, a thing to stamp out quickly by a merciful death, or, better still, give it back its freedom. It was also explained that anyway it did not matter much as the hyena was a horrible animal! Fifty years ago, if moving pictures had existed and such a picture had been shown to a house full of men, women, and children, I feel certain that it would have been greeted with hisses instead of the applause it received, and the man who had the indecency to show such a picture would most likely have visited the nearest horse-pond. Trapping has been done for years, as a rule to kill vermin, but it is generally left to paid men and regarded as a disagreeable necessity. We have come to sorry times indeed when we can regard the struggles of a trapped animal as an amusing spectacle, and take no shame in letting our children see such methods of sport. It is not only in hunting dangerous game that cruelty is indulged in, for it exists still more freely in the chase of the non-dangerous kind. Little shame is felt in wounding, and allowing a wounded animal to get away to die slowly in great pain from his wound, or perhaps to be eaten by one of the greater hunting animals.
Unless a man is a perfect shot, he is bound to wound sometimes. But he ought to do his level best to find the animal and put it out of its pain. Nowadays there seems a sort of slackness about bothering to go after a wounded animal, which must come from a total want of imagination, and also from the lack of having it instilled severely into boys’ minds like it used to be, that to wound and not to kill was something to be very much ashamed of, and that, if it had been done, it betokened a failure and a falling-off from the moral standpoint of a sportsman. When this feeling was strongly developed, men were more careful how they shot; they would not shoot at animals at a distance that five times out of six they were bound to miss or wound; they hunted more carefully, and took more pains about getting within reasonable distance before firing. The mass of stuff that goes away wounded in Africa from indiscriminate firing at long distances would make a vast total if it could be counted up. I imagine boys also used to be taught a more thorough knowledge of sport. The hunting of the animals was considered of as great an importance as the letting off of the rifle. A man was not content to have the beast found for him, and he himself led up to it, the rifle placed in his hands, and sometimes told even when to let it off! A good many of the young men of the present day would be greatly at a loss, I fear, if they had even to clean their rifles themselves, and to take a rifle to pieces would be a Chinese puzzle to them.
The old hunters were a mine of information on the countries they travelled in, and on the habits of the animals they hunted. The present-day man seems almost as if he were deaf and blind, so little does he know either about the animals he hunts or the countries he travels in.
Surely sport regarded merely as a means to get so many heads and skins, not caring if the lowest and most unsportsmanlike methods are used so long as so much stuff is collected, must have only the most degrading effect on the man who indulges in it.
Gone are the days when to live we had to hunt and kill. So if we now hunt at all, let it be as an excuse to be in the great open places of the world, bettering ourselves in mind and body. And let us at least try only to employ sportsmanlike methods, and to follow staunchly along the road that those mighty hunters of old marked so bravely for us.