Page 194 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

172 OUR VANISHING WILD LIFE
By 1912, those deer had increased to 400, and the portion of this story that no one will believe is this: they spread all through the suburbs and hinterland farms of Avoca, and the people not only failed to assas- sinate all of them and eat them, but they actually killed only a few, protected the rest, and made pets of many! Queer people, those men and boys of Avoca. Nearly everywhere else in the world that I know, that history would have been ended differently. Here in the East, 90 per cent of our people are like the Avocans, but the other 10 per cent think only of slayingandeating,sansmercy,sansdecency,sanslaw. NowtheState of Iowa has taken hold, to capture some of those deer, and set them free in other portions of the state.
Elsewhere I shall note the quick and thorough success with which the white-tailed deer has been brought back in Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and southern New York.
No state having waste lands covered with brush or timber need be without the ubiquitous white-tailed deer. Give them a semblance of a fair show, and they will live and breed with surprising fecundity and persistence. If you start a park herd with ten does, soon you will have more deer than you will know how to dispose of, unless you market them under a Bayne law, duly tagged by the state. In close confinement this speciesfaresratherpoorly. Inlargepreservesitdoeswell,butduring the rutting season the bucks are to be dreaded; and those that develop aggressivetraitsshouldbeshotandmarketed. Thisistheonlywayin which the deer parks of England are kept safe for unarmed people.
Dr. T. S. Palmer has taken much pains to ascertain the number of deer killed in the eastern United States. His records, as published in May, 1910, are as follows:
State