Existing comment:
Looking for Lincoln: Lincoln and Animals:
Treatment of animals in Lincoln's era sometimes reflected rough frontier attitudes. Pioneers saw them as threats to crops, gardens, and livestock; wild game was an important source of food. Lincoln, however, did not share the passion for hunting and fishing common to his generation. Nor did he often participate in such pursuits as cockfighting, gander pulling (wringing the head off a live goose), a cooking wild pigs alive. His stepmother said he generally loved animals and "treated them kindly." Stories illustrating this abound. He once saved a piglet by beating its mother who was trying to eat it. Another time he passed by an old hog mired in prairie mud. Compelled to look back, he seemed to hear it sigh, "There now! my last hope is gone." Guilt-stricken, he returned and freed it. Several lawyers were once riding across the prairie with Lincoln when he astounded (and amused) them by spending the better part of an hour searching for the nest of two baby birds who had been blown out during a windstorm. |