By setting this against contemporary instances he insinuates the unchanging attitudes of otter hunters over the centuries. shot but they felt that many otters were preserved for hunting, a shameful blot on our civilisation. He proposed that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals should take its courage in both hands and accept his amendment: That it be an instruction from this General Meeting of Subscribers of the RSPCA to the Committee, forthwith to secure its presentation to Parliament, the object of which shall be to make otter hunting illegal..Footnote The main institutional differences were in their ideals and methods. 79. Staged at Colchester's North Railway Station, on this occasion members of the Colchester Working Group were the chief agitators and the Eastern Counties Otter Hounds the agitated. WebThe feeding habits of otters vary greatly depending on species, location, and time of year or season. 76, There is a real sense that women should have had the emotional authority to know better.Footnote . 18, The first published call for the protection of otters came from Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston (18581927) who has been described as one of the main instigators of the scramble for Africa on the ground and considered himself a naturalist above all else.Footnote A high proportion of the League were women. A key criticism was of the voyeurism of watching the otter die. WebIn 1741, Russians began hunting sea otters. Leeds Women Protest at an Otter Hunt, Cruel Sports, August 1935, 59. In 1923 he diverted his attention to blood sports. He is remembered today for his monumental two-volume Comparative Study of the Bantu and Semi-Bantu Languages (191921); for his natural history collections now held at Kew, the British Museum, and London Zoo; and for his identification of the okapi (Okapi johnstoni) in the Congo in 1901.Footnote Finally the author of the original article, J. C. Bristow-Noble, responded resentfully that On behalf of some of these daughters of Eve, I have now to state that it is of their opinion that the quarry, as is frequently the case, should always be allowed to escape. 35. 23. 70. On 4th April 1928, for instance, several daily newspapers reported that an otter had been stoned to death by fifty working men in Workington. Allen, Daniel, The Hunted Otter in Britain, 18301939, in Middleton, K. and Pooley, S., eds, Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination (Cambridge, 2013)Google Scholar; Men, women and children could all actively participate together in this sport. . Diana Donald argues, however, that the resulting canvas, six and a half feet high, had no precedent in British sporting art in the way it combined archaic pageantry and brutal actuality with the hunter twisting the spear so the otter does not immediately fall to the hounds. He followed the Cheriton Otter Hounds from 1924 and subscribed to Records of the Cheriton Otter Hounds produced by William Rogers, Master, in 1925. Nothing daunted, she returned at nightfall to the yard and once more endeavoured to free her cub, but with no better result than before. With no sportsmen involved, the incident gained universal condemnation from otter hunters, members of the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports and the general public. . Figure 1. of the hunting fraternity. 41. . Cruel Sports magazine readily employed this strategy. . WebWhich of the following critical values should the scientist use for the chi-square analysis of the data? This act of individual defiance was, however, soon silenced by the laughter of the unreceptive audience. Ernest Bell, The RSPCA, The Animals Friend (1906), 169170; Reverend Joseph Stratton, The Abdication of the R.S.P.C.A., The Humanitarian, August 1906, 59. This approval generated considerable adverse reactions and increased press coverage. 66. Captain T. W. Sheppard, Decadence of Otter Hunting, The Field, 20th October 1906, 658. British Sporting Art, Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle. women too seem frenzied with the desire to kill.Footnote Ernest Bell, Cat Worrying, pp. 22. 16586Google Scholar; to gratify the anglers craze.Footnote The League established a special department to deal with Sports in 1895. By the mid-1960s, Amchitka Island was being used a site for nuclear testing, which eventually killed many sea otters in the area. during the fur hunting period in the 18th and 19th centuries. Vivisection, the slaughter of animals for food, the fur and feather fashion trade, and blood sports were all targeted.Footnote The image in question fronted the issue released on 22nd July 1939. The League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports, Annual Report (London, 1931), 34. 71. and Pain, too, like fun, is a word of many meanings and it is not surprising, perhaps, that for many people the two things are synonymous. . Ernest Bell, The Barnstaple Cat-Worrying Case, The Animals Friend (1906), 43. WebThe otters were then protected by the international fur seal treaty, which banned sea otter hunting. of compassion, love, gentleness, and universal benevolence, the Humanitarian League clearly set itself apart from other reform oriented bodies. 71. Mackenzie, John M., The Empire of Nature (Manchester, 1988), p. 33 44 The exposure was made all the more effective by the contradictory responses from the otter hunters involved. Walter Cheesman and Mildred Cheesman, Diaries of the Crowhurst Otter Hounds, 1904, Unpublished, East Sussex Record Office, Reference AMS5788/3/1, p. 3. 52. These snaps, which had been taken by otter hunters, were lifted from local newspapers then republished with evocative captions. He met his future wife Ida Hibbert at an otter hunt, and proposed to her at a hunt ball. Colonies were discovered around Alaska's Aleutian Islands and Prince William Sound in the 1930s. . 18. Joseph Collinson argued that a deplorable feature of this sport is that its followers include all sorts and conditions of people: ministers of religion with their wives, young men and young women, sometimes even boys and girls. At least 23 million Amazonian animals, including the otters, were hunted for their hides from 1904 to 1969. 78. He reported that in certain otter hunting regions such as Wales, Devonshire, and Sussex, the otter was being rapidly extinguished by the actions of unreflecting, red-faced, well-meaning, church going, rate-paying persons on the plea that it eats salmon or trout. It also shows just how much the mere thought of otter hunting could unsettle an individual. Google Scholar. In the latter, the fox has some chance of escape but in the former the otter's chances of escape are clearly much less. Stephen Coleridge was the second son of Lord Chief Justice of England, John Duke Coleridge, and great nephew of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It has many meanings and perhaps I misconstrue it? Colonel W. Lisle B. Coulson, The Otter Worry, in Henry Salt, ed., British Blood Sports: Let us go out and kill something (1901), pp. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. He uses heavy irony to get his point across: Fun is a curious word. . In a series of vignettes, Bates fondly describes the rivers, the creatures, the trees, the flowers, the buildings and the people that make up the watery landscape. was fully aware of the power of publicity and as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals did not oppose blood sports, this proposal was a radical move. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 1906 Annual Report (1906), p. 127. . On rare occasions women were singled out for criticism during this period: Why the educated, rich, or the uneducated for the matter of that, have nothing better of more edifying to do with their time is beyond one's comprehension. They might be horrified if you suggested that they wished the otter any harm. This carry on as normal sentiment was initially broadly endorsed, but could not be sustained by all. 9, In this paper we consider the ways campaigns against otter hunting were carried out in the period 1900 to 1939. 73. Bates wrote a regular column, Country Life, in The Spectator, and two volumes of nature essays, Through the Woods (1936) and Down the River (1937). It also shows that people other than animal welfarists and sportsmen were concerned with the hunted otter. In order to share these principles with the public, the League adopted a strategy that involved open meetings, lobbying of influential individuals, letter writing campaigns to newspapers and magazines and the production of pamphlets, monthly journals and other scholarly publications.Footnote Consequently everyone can watch, and most do watch, the end and people collect from far and near and watch in cold blood for minutes together the frantic death-agony of the brave little animal who has never done injury to anyone assembled. 70 In his opinion everyone had a right to enjoy this animal in its natural surroundings, not just otter hunters. Sea otter conservation began in the early 20th century, when the sea otter was nearly extinct due to large-scale commercial hunting. The sea otter was once abundant in a wide arc across the North Pacific ocean, from northern Japan to Alaska to Mexico. But model men would find pleasure neither in torturing, nor annihilating any of them.Footnote 79. This in a sense gave the League the moral high ground. Master of Crowhurst Otter Hounds, Picture Post, 22nd July 1939, Volume 4, Number 3. Second, he felt that as he had bought the cats they were his own property and third, he argued that it was less cruel to use a cat than a badger as worrying the latter badly injured the dogs.Footnote 53, To show that this practice was not a thing of the past, Collinson then lifted more recent examples from the May 1906 Animals Friend: An otter, after being worried for four hours, gave birth to two cubs, and was afterwards hunted for two hours more before she was killed. Otter hunting presents to him a picturesque scene, with the scarlet-coated, white-breeched men armed with spears, with shaggy hounds, and the landscape set with great marsh marigolds. 87. Donald, Diana, Picturing Animals in Britain 17501850 (New Haven and London, 2007), pp. Now, Dr. Estes said, more than 90 percent of those otters are gone. In just a few decades, this bustling civilization has withered into a ghost town. You can travel down 10 miles of coastline and never see an animal, he said. The loss is more than cosmetic. In the Aleutians delicate seascape, otters hold the entire ecosystem together. 13. 5. It may be outlawed, yet in 1977 one single New York dealer smuggled, amongst many other furs, the skins of 15,470 neotropical and 271 giant otters into the country (Eltringham 1984). . 7. Some inhuman wretch: Animal Maiming and the Ambivalent Relationship between Rural Workers and Animals, Rural History, 25 (2014), 13360CrossRefGoogle Scholar. 50 55. That year, some conservation measures were established, but unregulated killing resumed in 1867, when the U.S. purchased Alaska. For campaigners, the killing of indefensible cubs and protective mothers was the antithesis of fair play, sportsmanship and manliness. 2956Google Scholar; hasContentIssue false, Copyright Cambridge University Press 2016. We can gain an insight into the exact message they were trying to make from the letter which was handed to the master, Sir Maurice Bromley-Wilson, and followers: The Leeds branch of the League for Prohibition of Cruel Sports has organised this protest against otter-hunting to indicate that there is a growing public feeling against this and other so-called sports. Bates wrote this chapter on the basis that he liked otters but, despite living within a mile of a river valley, had never seen one in the wild. Figure 2. The most important organisation calling for the protection of otters in the Edwardian period was the Humanitarian League, founded in 1891 by Henry Salt, who published his pamphlet Humanitarianism in the same year. Newcastle Daily Journal, 29th May 1914, cited at http://www.henrysalt.co.uk/friends/colonel-coulson. Google Scholar. Still, if I am ruled out of order I will resume my seat. 36, The third, by Lady Florence Dixie, took the opportunity to publicise the Humanitarian League's work on blood sports. In fact, this member felt that the latter was worse than the former: In the one case a crowd of men became infected with a sudden attack of blood lust, and were carried away by the excitement of the moment to the temporary exclusion of all feelings of humanity. Otter-hunting is cowardly and unmanly; Otters are hunted by people who should know better; Otter hunting is a relic of barbarism; Otters are hunted in the breeding season which is despicable were just some of the truths blazoned on boards that day. Kean, Hilda, The Smooth Cool Men of Science: The Feminist and Socialist Response to Vivisection, History Workshop Journal (1995), 40:1, 1638 For Bates, such suffering could not be enjoyable for the sufferer and should not be enjoyable for onlookers. Google Scholar. . The Monarch of the Glen: Landseer in the Highlands (Edinburgh, 2005)Google Scholar. Sydney Barthropp, Master of the Eastern Counties Otter Hounds, died fighting in France in 1914, which led to their disbandment soon after. 34. My object is only to insure that this Institution shall fulfil the great purpose for which it was founded.Footnote Reflecting on the period, W. H. Rogers of the Cheriton Otter Hounds wrote: Some doubts were expressed as to the propriety of hunting while so many poor fellows were being killed and wounded in the trenches, but the view prevailed that if the Hunt was once dropped it would be very difficult to restart it, and that those who were away would wish us to keep things going against their return.Footnote These kinds of demonstrations continued throughout the 1930s. By Zulma Cary. 45. During peak hunting years, during the mid-1800s, according to harvest records that Larson presented, between 1804 and 1807 nearly 15,000 sea otters were killed. Humanitarian, April 1918, 100, cited by 50. Collinson had previously led the Humanitarian League's campaign against flogging and was described by Henry Salt as a young north-countryman, self-taught, and full of native readiness and ingenuity, who at an early age had developed a passion for humanitarian journalism.Footnote 64. But in the early 2000s, their numbers exploded: From 2002 to 2011, the sea-otter population more Some of the recurring questions included: Have we reached such a pitch of humaneness in our treatment of wild animals that no further legislation is desired? and What made it more desirable for individuals, rather than Societies, to promote such legislation? These questions got no response from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the putative otter hunting bill became for many just another means to criticise its inadequacy and hypocrisy. Large numbers of sea cows occurred in the Commander Islands at the time of their discovery by Europeans in 1741. Raymond, Graham Rogers, W. H., Records of the Cheriton Otter Hounds (Taunton, 1925), p. 225 young and thoughtful. Sport and the Otter, Cruel Sports, June 1929, 812; this had first appeared in The Western Mail, 1st June 1929. 20 Observing sea otters and kelp beds on Amchitka both onshore and during scuba dives led Estes to question the links between them. Google Scholar. 33. He saw that miserable little animal was pursued by men with large poles with spikes in their heads, men who would put on a tall hat and go to Church on Sundays, while women disgracing their sex stood by and lent their countenance and encouragement to the brutal proceedings. He reported that around 450 otters were killed every year which meant that in my short life of thirty years. Bell was sentenced to one month's imprisonment with hard labour and John Church, the Hunt's Whip, received half that sentence. In 1929, there was a picture of a middle-aged woman and a teenage girl being blooded by the Joint Masters of the Wye Valley Otter Hounds in front of a crowd of smiling spectators. . 42. (Cheers.) He wanted society to step back and reconsider the moral distinction between wild and domestic animals. And as to the women, they evidently have no sense of shame, or pity, for the torture these poor little creatures undergo.Footnote Has data issue: false Alongside the overall decrease of otter hunts and otter hunters was the dramatic reduction of advertised meets and reports in the national and regional press. The Guardian reported that the grisly content of the painting was the reason why it was taken off permanent display by its owners the Laing Gallery in Newcastle.Footnote By planting a seed of doubt into the minds of readers over the accuracy of hunting reports, it also implied that otter hunters could not be trusted. 13. Demonstration at a Meet of the Bucks Otter Hounds, Cruel Sports, June 1931. The Humanitarian League was dissolved in 1919, and the main organisation to campaign against otter hunting became the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports, founded in 1924. As to the quickness of the kill, campaigners pointed to the duration of separate hunts as evidence to the contrary. Williamson, Henry, Tarka the Otter: His Joyful Water-life and Death in the Country of the Two Rivers (London, 1927)Google Scholar; The latter formed a pack of Otter Hounds in Llandinam, Wales, bearing his name in 1906. In February 1918 the Representation of the People Act gave all women over the age of thirty the right to vote. As with the Barnstaple cat-worrying case of 1905, attention was redirected from the actual killing to the animal in question. A sanctuary was created in Amchitka Island, whose sea otter population grew to outstrip its supply of prey. The object of this society was to create a sound public opinion on the destruction of wild animals throughout the British Empire, especially Africa, and establish game reserves.Footnote What humbugs we are!Footnote . Another aspect of otter hunting that attracted critical attention was the type of people involved and the behaviour it induced. During the period 1969-72, 89 sea otters were translo-cated to British Columbia; 59 otters were released in Washington in 1969-70. A part of this pamphlet, which included this quotation, was reprinted in Cruel Sports magazine in 1929. In other words, if the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals did not introduce a bill, then the Humanitarian League would do so. The otter hunters involved had been using cats in a specially constructed wooden tunnel to train their young terriers to bolt otters. Big game hunter Sir Henry Seton-Karr and otter hunter Mr David Davies, Member of Parliament, were among its sixty-one ordinary members.Footnote What are perhaps more interesting are his reasons for wanting to preserve the otter. Resting upon his well-notched otter pole and fully clad in hunting attire, he gazes into the distance. A fortnight after this event, on 13th May 1931, the second reported demonstration against otter hunting generated a rather more hostile response. WebThe otters were then protected by the international fur seal treaty, which banned sea otter hunting. This weekly magazine, first published on 1st October 1938, was a pioneering outlet for British photojournalism. . 84. 75 The sea otter population has rebounded to nearly three thousand individuals This was the month when the Barnstaple cat-worrying case was in the public eye. When interviewed by the Oxford Times, Mrs Chapman explained We went to Islip because we thought we ought to make a special protest against otter-hunting. Google Scholar. 47. Downing, Graham, The Hounds of Spring. 80. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. 40, As a result of the Humanitarian League's campaigning, by 1906 otter hunting had become an issue of public debate. Total loading time: 0 [After a pause.] 42. 82 Ormond, Richard, Sir Edwin Landseer (London, 1981), pp. Considering Johnston's establishment position and his enthusiasm for hunting in the Empire, this was a powerful request. 1823. [23] See 37, The first malpractice to be exposed in otter hunting itself was an incident that occurred on the River Tweed on 6th July 1907. Cruel Sports illustrated this incident with a photograph headed Burning the Truth! According to the League's Report for 1931, the demonstration at Colchester resulted in a local ban being placed on the hounds.Footnote He did however come to the conclusion that their conduct had been reprehensible.Footnote His letter writing campaign against rabbit-coursing on Sundays in Surrey led to its prohibition in 1924. Summer hunting across rugged river valleys offered strenuous physical exertion in the sun, whilst facilitating a picnic and a paddle. To reinforce this point Bates goes on to outline the enjoyable aspects of the sport. George Greenwood, Chapter 1: The Cruelty of Sport, in Henry Salt, ed., Killing for Sport (1914), p. 6. 31 Coulson later complained that clergy, more generally, did little to criticise otter hunting: Seldom do we hear from the pulpit any protests against acts of cowardice and cruelty that would shame savages. The photograph was taken by Felix Man, who had been an active photojournalist since 1929, had emigrated from Germany to London in 1934 and was chief photographer for Picture Post from 1938 to 1945.Footnote 2. The otter is as good an excuse as the next one; and, after all, the beast usually escapes.Footnote For Bell, the only difference between an otter and a cat was their legal status. He declared that Coleridge was entirely out of order in discussing this matter now, adding that he was not speaking of the merits of the subject, but only say it is out of order now. Coleridge replied that: If at your Annual meeting such a motion as that is out of order, then I say this great Society will stultify itself if it does not hear me. Justice for the Animals, Otter-Hunting, Cruel Sports, October 1929, 128. . 73 Holding an extreme and uncompromising policy, it developed more dynamic methods in an attempt to gain both publicity and prohibition. 12. 3.84. After retiring from the army he devoted much of his time to lecturing in schools across the country about the fair treatment of animals. Covering two pages (812), it was retitled Sport and the Otter.. 52. were extirpated. Perhaps surprisingly, despite four decades of campaigns against the sport, the article does not describe otter hunting as something controversial. Moore-Colyer, R. J., Feathered Women and Persecuted Birds: The Struggle against the Plumage Trade, c. 18601922, Rural History, 11 (2000), 5773 Hunting Otters with firearms was once common in the early twentieth century, but many preferred to trap them. The scientist built a tube that was divided by an.
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