The Game Laws
In 1834, Mr. Henry Warburton, in Parliament, denounced the Game Laws as they then existed, in this remarkable illustration:—“I have read in Mariner’s account of the Tonga islands, that there the rats were preserved as game; and, though everybody might eat rats, nobody was allowed to kill them but somebody descended from their gods or their kings. This is the only country and the only case I know of which furnishes anything like a parallel to our game laws.”