Barbaric hunting

WHENEVER, as now, there is a move to lift the ban on hunting, I am reminded of the words of the great Thomas Hardy as follows: “The prevalence of those sports that consist in the pleasure of watching a fellow creature, weaker and less favoured than ourselves, in its struggles to escape the death agony we mean to inflict by treacherous contrivance, seems to me one of the many convincing proofs that we have not yet emerged from barbarism.”