Plea for mercy to animals / by James Macauley.

  • James Macaulay
Date:
[1875]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Plea for mercy to animals / by James Macauley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    clown in the lowest of the three tiers of ‘ filet de hocuf,’ where no light enters, and whence a St)'^gian reeking comes. “ Slowly there comes up first the black, frowning head and horns and dull blue eyes and ghastly grinning face of a poor dead bullock, then his pendent legs and his huge carcase. “ To see the owner’s mark on his back they scrape away the slush and grime, then he is swung over the sea, and a stroke of the axe cuts the rope round his horns. Down with a splash falls the vast heavy carcase; and £20 worth of meat floats on a wave or two, then it is engulfed. Another and another, and twenty-two are thus hauled up and cast into the sea, and this, too, on the first day of a very calm passage. What must it be in a storm ? Oh, the roast beef of old England ! ” Captain Stanley, r.n., has called public attention to a scene of gross, but we should hope exceptional, cruelty, witnessed by him in the landing of a cargo of cattle, from a foreign port, at Deptford. The poor brutes, sick, bruised, and faint, were savagely urged on with goads and sticks, in a way which the writer I could only characterise by an allusion to the fiends in Dore’s illustrations of Dante’s “ Inferno.” It ought to be widely known that there are two Acts of Parliament providing against cruelty during transit of animals either by railway or in steamboats: 32 and 33 Yict. c. 70, enforcing supply of food and water ; and 12 and 13 Yict. c. 92, forbidding their improper conveyance. The following are examples of prosecutions taken under these statutes : “ A cattle dealer, of Edinburgh, was summoned at the Oxford Petty Sessions, for having unlawfully neglected to make any request in writing to the London and North-Western Railway Company to supply ten cows with food and water on their transit from Kilmarnock, in Scotland, to Oxford. A second summons charged the defendant with cruelty for con Amy in g
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