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Having seen a sheep eat raw mntton chops,* I
am not prepared to assert the absolute impossibility
of a starved sparrow swallowing a caterpillar, or a
tiger eating a baked potato on an emergency; but
that such food is unnatural to these animals is
unquestionable.
Farmers understand this, and their
indiscriminate destruction of small birds is as mythical as
the feeding of sparrows upon caterpillars. No
farmer or farm labourer wilfully kills a swallow.
The nests of these birds are scrupulously respected,
simply because the farmer understands their habits,
and justly classes them amongst his insectivorous
friends. To slay a swallow or a robin is justly
regarded as murder and sacrilege, and the old
rhyme of “ Who killed Cock Robin ? ” fairly
expresses the popular discriminative estimation of this
useful thin-billed bird, as compared with the rural
hatred of the thick-billed seed-cracking,
pea-shelling, blossom - nipping, cherry-stealing, sparrow.
The farmer kills sparrows for the same reason as
he kills rats and mice, and our laws prohibiting
the use of poisoned wheat for this purpose are as
* I allude to a sheep that was reared from pet lambhood by a butcher
iu Jerrnyn Street, and that followed the butcher’s men like a dog through
the streets of London. The education of this animal had been so
perverted that it ate raw mutton and beef—would even steal dainty morsels
of its fellow-creatures’ ribs when hungry.
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