88 According to Coulson those who engaged in the kill became virtually maddened by it.Footnote 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. A barrister by profession, Coleridge who hated cruelty in all its formsFootnote View all Google Scholar citations Moreover, otters are not hunted by fishermen, but by people whose notions of fun are to go out and kill something.Footnote 62. Sea otters were locally extinct in British Columbian waters in Canada, until a plane containing a romp of otters arrived and set off a population boom with unintended consequences. Otter reintroductions were common during this time. [23] To stress his dissatisfaction, he targets two features specific to the sport, the prolonged duration of the pursuit and spring and summer hunting: To make it pleasant for otters as well as man, otters are hunted not only for a long time, for seven or eight or ten or eleven hours at a stretch, but in spring. 80. The History of the Eastern Counties Otter Hounds, Rod, Pole and Perch: Angling and Otter-hunting Sketches, Putting Animals into Politics: The Labour Party and Hunting in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, A blow to the men in Pink: The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Opposition to Hunting in the Twentieth Century, Tarka the Otter: His Joyful Water-life and Death in the Country of the Two Rivers, The Otter Speared, Portrait of the Earl of Aberdeen's Otterhounds, or the Otter Hunt, http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/laing-art-gallery/collections.html. His argument in the Hunted Otter was driven by quotations from thirty published sources. Each image is accompanied with a caption and a paragraph explaining the scene. The main institutional differences were in their ideals and methods. 43. Newcastle Daily Journal, 29th May 1914, cited at http://www.henrysalt.co.uk/friends/colonel-coulson. The Picture Post styles otter hunting as just another peculiar pastime the notoriously crazy English enjoy in the countryside. My object is only to insure that this Institution shall fulfil the great purpose for which it was founded.Footnote Twenty-five years later, Smith and his colleagues conducted two years of monitoring surveys at 1,200 sites across the state to assess how well the population was doing. Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler: Or the Contemplative Man's Recreation (1653), Chapter 2. WebNo hunting (except waterfowl) during removed only by the user. Should Otters be Hunted?, Madame, 9th September 1905, 515, cited in Cheesman and Cheesman, Diaries of the Crowhurst Otter Hounds, p. 44. 8. The principles of this League echoed those of its predecessor, that it was iniquitous to inflict suffering, either directly or indirectly, upon sentient animals for the purpose of sport.Footnote Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. Perhaps surprisingly, despite four decades of campaigns against the sport, the article does not describe otter hunting as something controversial. 22. An anonymous informant writing in The Humanitarian in August 1908, for instance, questioned the unwomanly conduct of the ladies in the field: The conduct of the women is beyond me to describe. Call a professional pest removal expert 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. Google Scholar. women too seem frenzied with the desire to kill.Footnote He sat on the governing bodies of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the National Canine Defence League, the Cat's Protection League, the Pit-Ponies Protection Society, and the Animals Friend Society.Footnote And as a relatively inexpensive sport, such social changes meant otter hunting had become a less appealing target for them. 65, The League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports was the first organisation to engage directly with otter hunters at otter hunts and the first ever protest against otter hunting appears to have taken place in 1931. 47 . From the late 1890s Coulson had also launched a prolific letter writing campaign against otter hunting in local, regional and national newspapers. 21 The painting was commissioned as a commemorative portrait of his pack of otter hounds by Lord Aberdeen (17841860), then foreign secretary and later to become prime minister. A subsection in the Hunted Otter (1911) entitled Hunted for Seven Hours described the lengthy pursuit of a female otter by the Culmstock Otter Hounds in 1910. The image in question fronted the issue released on 22nd July 1939. In advance of a major test in 1968, the U.S. Atomic Ene The second letter from An Old Fashioned Sportsman denounced otter hunting on sporting grounds and used the Barnstaple cat-worrying case to strengthen his argument: I belong to an old family of Tory sportsman who have been brought up to view with disgust such amusements as involve the fiendish cruelty and worrying of one poor little animal for many hours by a motley crowd of men, women and even children, some armed with spears. He argued that if the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals did not oppose otter hunting then it is quite certain that some similar Society will do so to the utter shame of our Society here.Footnote The first publication solely concerned with exposing the cruelties of otter hunting was Joseph Collinson's 1911 The Hunted Otter, a twenty-four page booklet in Ernest Bell's A. In 1844 Landseer's The Otter Speared polarised opinion about otter hunting which was condemned by many as barbaric. 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. George Greenwood, Chapter 1: The Cruelty of Sport, in Henry Salt, ed., Killing for Sport (1914), p. 6. 46 This may have been because the facts were incomplete or because the figures seemed to speak for themselves. About the Otter, Cruel Sports, June 1928, 73. Demonstrations at a Meet of the Bucks Otter Hounds, Cruel Sports, June 1931, 51. Johnston condemned otter hunting and urged the government to give the mammal legal protection in his 1903 publication British Mammals. The Otter Worry, The Humanitarian, September 1907, 164. 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. Bobcats and otters or their pelts must be delivered to an agent of the Conservation Department for registration or tagging before selling, transferring, tanning or mounting by April 10. The underlying motivation for these very specific criticisms is a much broader belief that all living beings feel pain and suffer. What can look more ridiculous than a middle-aged woman, hurrying along, mile after mile, through wet grass and muddy pools, climbing fences and walls, her clothes sticking to her body and her hair half down her back?Footnote Destruction: The Maritime Fur Trade - Elakha Alliance 7 Offering close proximity and participatory practices of seeing (gazing) and doing (the stickle), any member of an otter hunt could participate in infamous scenes. Prior to the maritime fur trade which began in the late eighteenth century, sea otters ranged from Japan, north through the Aleutian Islands and down the Pacific coast of North America to Baja California (Barabash-Nikiforov 1947). The Humanitarian League's reaction to this case was interesting. 88. feel thankful that the Masters of the various packs of otter hounds do not share this opinion.Footnote In 2010 a painting normally considered too upsetting for modern tastes which while impressive was also undeniably gruesome was displayed at an exhibition of British sporting art at the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle. The national profile of otter hunting was raised in July 1905 when the press reported an incident that became known as the Barnstaple cat-worrying case. WebSea otters were hunted to near extinction during the maritime fur trade of the 1700s and 1800s. When the otter reached temporary sanctuary in a holt twenty men got on to the bank and endeavoured by jumping and other means to force the earth down into the unfortunate animal's hiding place until worn out by fatigue and fright surrounded by men and dogs the otter became as easy prey to its enemies. One of the main reasons Bates spoke out against otter hunting was that he felt that a small minority had reduced his chances of seeing the otter. Spurious Sports Sport with an Otter, The Humanitarian, October 1906, 75. 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. Having been allowed bail, the pair's charges were later revised on appeal to a five pound fine, on the understanding that Bell gave a donation of one hundred pounds to the North Devon Infirmary. The letter argued that no reasonable excuse can be found for such conduct, misnamed sport which was morally wrong and barbaric. .but an essential portion of any intelligible system of ethics or social science.Footnote 71. In Alaska, 467 sea otters were translo-cated to several locations from 1965 to 1969. Joseph Collinson, The Hunted Otter (1911), p. 19. 2. In 1901 Coulson had written that: Some of the clergy revel in it the very men who pose afterwards as the expounders of high morality.Footnote Moreover, the intimacy of otter hunting meant that not only are they present at these infamous scenes, but, like the huntsmen, are worked up to the wildest pitch of excitement and moreover join in the final worry and the performance of the obsequies, when the spoils of the chase are distributed.Footnote Some inhuman wretch: Animal Maiming and the Ambivalent Relationship between Rural Workers and Animals, Rural History, 25 (2014), 13360CrossRefGoogle 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. Although in the book he admits this was partly due to the animal's nocturnal behaviour, in the shortened leaflet the omission of the introductory paragraph made otter hunting the prime reason for his misfortune. confined to otter hunting, they also tried to divide the hunting fraternity by distinguishing the sporting conduct of otter hunters from fox hunters, stag hunters and hare hunters: If the sporting set consider it unsporting to hunt some animals in the breeding season, why does this not apply to otters?Footnote A high proportion of the League were women. The sea otter population has rebounded to nearly three thousand individuals Otter Bates wanted to reclaim the otter from this minority for the British public. Afterwards everyone who took part in the orgy was probably ashamed of himself. . He reported that around 450 otters were killed every year which meant that in my short life of thirty years. They might be horrified if you suggested that they wished the otter any harm. 51. 45 Salt, Henry, Seventy Years Among Savages (London, 1921) p. 141 This was the month when the Barnstaple cat-worrying case was in the public eye. Mr Rose of the Eastern Counties Otter Hounds described the proposed Bill as most unfair and ridiculous and argued that otter hunting was grossly misrepresented: Long spiked poles are never used for the purposes suggested, but for assisting followers across ditches, rivers and fences. The League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports based itself on the radical elements of the Humanitarian League. 49 40, As a result of the Humanitarian League's campaigning, by 1906 otter hunting had become an issue of public debate. of compassion, love, gentleness, and universal benevolence, the Humanitarian League clearly set itself apart from other reform oriented bodies. A selection of letters was then published under the title, Should Otters Be Hunted? The first letter, by Reverend Joseph Stratton, argued that men were judged in relation to their treatment of animals. 61 Coulson thought hare hunting was crueller than otter hunting because the hare was timid defenceless and nervous, whereas the otter was a gallant little animal which died after a long hard-fought battle.Footnote WebAll the otters that are in there might leave to get away from the smell. 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 67 This paper examines the arguments and methods used in different anti-otter hunting campaigns 19001939 by organisations such as the Humanitarian League, the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports and the National Association for the Abolition of Cruel Sports. An incredibly vile sport: Campaigns against Otter 11. The Trust recently secured the first ongoing class licence to capture and transport live Eurasian otters trapped in well-fenced fisheries in England. Hunting is a good excuse for a hard day's exercise. 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. On occasions deer-hunters hunted and killed hinds-in-calf. . 27 Leeds Women Protest at an Otter Hunt, Cruel Sports, August 1935. 8 When Oregon and the federal government removed families from the area more than 150 years ago, Peter Hatch said, sea otters were still present. Google Scholar. In the case of an organised hunt, the followers deliberately engage in a series of barbaric acts, skilfully camouflaged by all the trappings of an elaborate ritual. Indeed, Coulson, Collinson and other campaigners believed that the kill had ill effects on the mental well-being of every person involved. 90. 59. By 2016, over 4,000 river otters had been translocated to 23 states. In these terms, if fishermen, as the only people with a genuine grievance against otters, did not feel the need to hunt and kill them on the grounds of revenge, then the animal was not a pest. Inside there is a six page pictorial feature, Hunting the Otter, written by Douglas Macdonald Hastings. Hostname: page-component-75b8448494-knlg2 Instead, it focussed on one man, Mr Sidney Varndell. 60. Moore-Colyer, R. J., Feathered Women and Persecuted Birds: The Struggle against the Plumage Trade, c. 18601922, Rural History, 11 (2000), 5773 He had been influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and was a keen member of the Vegetarian Society and the Humanitarian League and after 1893 devoted much time and money to administration and fund-raising for three main reform causes: vegetarianism, humanitarianism, and animal welfare.