Page 256 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

—
;
CHAPTER XXIV
GAME AND AGRICULTURE; AND DEER AS A FOOD SUPPLY
As a state and county asset, the white-tailed deer contains possi- bilities that as yet seem to be ignored by the American people as a whole. It is quite time to consider that persistent, prolific and toothsome animal.
The proposition that large herds of horned game can not becomingly roam at will over farms and vineyards worth one hundred dollars per acre, affords little room for argument. Generally speaking, there is but one country in the world that breaks this well-nigh universal rule; and that country is India. On the plains between and adjacent to the Ganges and the Jumna, for two thousand years herds of black-buck, or sasin ante- lope, have roamed over cultivated fields so thickly garnished with human beings that to-day the rifle-shooting sportsman stands in hourly peril of bagging a five-hundred-rupee native every time he fires at an antelope.
Wherever rich agricultural lands exist, the big game must give way, Jrofn those lands. To-day the bison could not survive in Iowa, eastern Nebraska or eastern Kansas, any longer than a Shawnee Indian would lastontheBowery. Itwasforedoomedthattheelk,deer,bearandwild turkey should vanish from the rich farming regions of the East and the
middle West.
To-day in British East Africa lions are being hunted with dogs and
shot wholesale, because they are a pest to the settlers and to the surviving herds of big game. At the same time, the settlers who are striving to wrest the fertile plains of B. E. A. from the domain of savagery declare that the African buffalo, the zebra, the kongoni and the elephant are public nuisances that must be suppressed by the rifle.
Even the most ardent friend of wild life must admit that when a settler has laboriously fenced his fields, and plowed and sowed, only to have his whole crop ruined in one night by a herd of fence-breaking zebras, the event is sufficient to abrade the nerves of the party most in interest. WhileItakenostockinstoriesofdozensof"rogue"elephants that require treatment with the rifle, and of grown men being imperiled by savage gazelles, we admit that there are times when wild animals can makenuisancesofthemselves. Letusconsiderthatsubjectnow.
Wild Animal Nuisances.—Complaints have come to me, at various times, of great destruction of lambs by eagles ; of trout by blue herons of crops (on Long Island) by deer; of pears destroyed by birds, and of valuable park trees by beavers that chop down trees not wisely but too well. I do not, however, include in this category any cherries eaten by robins, or orioles, or jays; for they are of too small importance to con- sider in this court.