Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

60 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
The vivisector’s ideals are a most effective bulwark against his own conscience.
Nowhere, however, can one find a better picture of a realist as moral
persuader than in the preface Shaw wrote for Killing for Sport, edited by
his friend Henry S. Salt. Shaw begins by acknowledging his difficulties:
“Sport is a difficult subject to deal with honestly. It is easy for the humanitarian
to moralize against; 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 fact: indeed they are mostly
violently contradicted by them. Humanitarians are not more humane than
other people.” Thus the first point: When the issue is values, it is irrelevant
to argue from “facts.” Indeed, on the point of ferocity, sportsmen are not in
the same league with the humanitarians. “I know many sportsmen; and
none of them are ferocious. I know several humanitarians; and they are all
ferocious. No book of sport breathes such a wrathful spirit as this book of
humanity. No sportsman wants to kill the fox or the pheasant as I want to
kill him when I see him doing it.” So much for the cruelty of the sportsman.
Shaw goes out of his way not to be vituperative (after having cheerfully
admitted the murderous passion which the killing of animals inspires
in him): “Therefore let no sportsman who reads these pages accuse me of
hypocrisy, or of claiming to be a more amiable person than he. And let him
excuse me, if he will be so good, for beginning with an attempt to describe
how I feel about sport.” And he thus starts to explain, in as objective a
manner as possible, the utterly subjective and sentimental nature of his
attitudes. After mentioning, with impelling feeling, his revulsion at the
description of a dog being shot for food during an Arctic expedition, he
hastens to add that it “was necessary to shoot the dog: I should have shot it
myself under the same circumstances.” It was the callous attitude to that
exigency that so appalled him. It is a matter, essentially, of “fellow feeling,”
which, he is quick to add, is an emotion beyond all reason and comprehension
in its inconsistencies. Fellow feeling for animals means essentially
that you treat them as you would other men and women rather than as
you might a machine; you might hate them as well as love them.
Then he returns to attacking the rationalizations, not of the sportsman
but of the humanitarian. You cannot simply say that one must not kill
one’s fellow creatures, as killing is necessary: the farmer must kill the rodent
or he loses his livelihood, and if “you hold the life of a mosquito
sacred, malaria and yellow fever will not return the compliment.” Our
very existence entails not merely the death of other animals but the actual