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

The Will and Its Responsibilities 61
extinction of their species. He even maintains that fox hunting is good for
the preservation of the foxes, who would suffer more from the combination
of neglect and the pressure of civilization than they do now from the
dogs and guns. Even in the midst of describing his horror at the killing
frenzy of much sport, he admits that he admires the skill of the marksman
and is even fascinated by shooting “because killing by craft from a distance
is a power that makes a man divine rather than human.” He warns the
humanitarians among his readers to beware of self-righteousness and selfdeceit:
do not “pretend that war does not interest and excite you more than
printing, or that the thought of bringing down a springing tiger with a
well-aimed shot does not interest you more than the thought of cleaning
your teeth.”
And then he turns it all around. Having absolved the sportsman of all
charges of cruelty, barbarity, and ferocity, he makes us realize that the very
normality of the killing sports and the casualness of the killers is the most
horrible indictment that can be made against them. Their activity dehumanizes
both them and us.
To have one’s fellow-feeling corrupted and perverted into a lust for
cruelty and murder is hideous; but to have no fellow-feeling at all is
to be something less than even a murderer. The man who sees red is
more complete than the man who is blind. . . . To kill as the poacher
does, to sell or eat the victim, is at least to behave passionately. To kill
in gratification of a lust for death is at least to behave villainously.
Reason, passion, and villainy are all human. But to kill, being all the
time quite a good sort of fellow, merely to pass away the time when
there are a dozen harmless ways of doing it equally available, is to
behave like an idiot or a silly imitative sheep. (Preface to Killing for
Sport 925–41)
It is a remarkable essay. Humanitarians as well as sportsmen are called to
conscience. To many of the humanitarian idealists who first read it, it must
have been bewildering or maddening. If it made any of them think of the
opening of the seventh chapter of Matthew, it did some good; but it was
clearly intended for the sportsmen, and it is doubtful that many have read
it. They would have expected to be castigated and vilified, and no one invites
abuse. Instead, they would have been asked, in a spirit of fellow feeling,
to examine their own souls. That would surely have been a beneficial
experience, whether or not they gave up the sport of killing as a result.
There is no more solid, thorough, or unanswerable foundation for the