Animals and anaesthetics

OF interest even to the faraway New Zealand blackblocker is a private Bill now before the House of Commons and past its second reading — ‘‘a Bill compelling use of an anaesthetic in all operations on animals, including docking of tails’’. If docking of tails is in the Bill, there are other farmyard processes that cannot logically be kept out,— ‘‘operations’’ on lambs and calves and foals and piglings. The backblocker knows all about ‘‘operations’’, and the city dweller who doesn’t understand the

difference between a ewe and a wether may be spared the telling.

Suffice it to say that should this form of humanitarianism, or animalitarianism, spread,— as it may, the British Government having ‘‘accepted the principle of the Bill’’ — there is trouble ahead.

The New Zealand backblocker will need to be a skilled anaesthetist. Docking of tails and the like is the smallest part. It will not be lawful to kill a sheep except under an anaesthetic, nor wring the neck of a fowl, much less trap a rabbit. Killing is certainly an ‘‘operation’’, and there is a reason to believe that killing is usually attended with pain. Indeed, one is compelled to reflect (with the prohibitionist) how badly the world is made. We have ‘‘Nature red in tooth and claw’’, and ‘‘The lions roaring after their prey do seek their meat from God.’’ A mad world, my masters, — mad and bad; and chiefly mad in thinking to cure its badness by Act of Parliament. — Civis.