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KILLING
FOR SPORT
ESSAYS BY VARIOUS WRITERS
WITH A PREFACE BY
BERNARD SHAW
Edited
by HENRY S. SALT
LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET
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PREFACE
By BERNARD SHAW
Sport is a
difficult subject to deal with honestly. It is easy for
the humanitarian to moralize against it; and any fool on
its side can gush about its glorious breezy pleasures
and the virtues it nourishes. But neither the
moralizings nor the gushings are supported by facts:
indeed they are mostly violently contradicted by them.
Sportsmen are not crueller than other people.
Humanitarians are not more humane than other people. The
pleasures of sport are fatigues and hardships: nobody
gets out of bed before sunrise on a drizzling wintry
morning and rides off into darkness, cold, and rain,
either for luxury or thirst for the blood of a fox cub.
The humanitarian and the sportsman are often the
self-same person drawing altogether unaccountable lines
between pheasants and pigeons, between hares and foxes,
between tame stags from the cart and wild ones from the
heather, between lobsters or paté de foie gras
and beefsteaks: above all, between man and the lower
animals; for....................... |
