Page 258 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

236 OUR VANISHING WILD LIFE
•dollars or more. There are millions of acres of rocky, brush-covered mountains and hills, wholly unsuited to agriculture, or even horticulture. There are other millions of acres of arid plains and arboreal deserts, on which nothing but thirst-proof animals can live and thrive. The South contains vast pine forests and cypress swamps, millions of acres of them, of which the average northerner knows less than nothing.
We can not stop long enough to look it up, but from the green color on our national map that betokens the forest reserves, and from our own personal knowledge of the deserts, swamps, barrens and rocks that we have seen, we make the estimate that fully one-third of the total area of the United States is incapable of supporting the husbandman who depends for his existence upon tillage of the soil. People may talk and write about "dry farming" all they please, but I wish to observe that from Dry- FarmingtoSuccessisalongshot,withmanylimbsintheway. Whenit rains sufficiently, dry farming is a success ; but otherwise it is not ; and we heartily wish it were otherwise.
The logical conclusion of our land that is utterly unfit for agri ulture is a great area of land available for occupancy by valuable wild animals. Every year the people of the United States are wasting uncountable mil- lions of pounds of venison, because we are neglecting our opportunities forproducingitpracticallywithoutcost. Imagineforamomentbestow- ing upon land owners the ability to stock with white-tailed and Indian sambar deer all the wild lands of the United States that are suitable for those species, and permitting only bucks over one year of age to be shot. With the does even reasonably protected, the numerical results in annual pounds of good edible flesh fairly challenges the imagination.
About six years ago, Mr. C. C. Worthington's deer, in his fenced park at Shawnee-on-Delaware, Pennsylvania, became so numerous and so burdensome that he opened his fences and permitted about one thousand head to go free.
We are losing each year a very large and valuable asset in the intan- gible form of a million hardy deer that we might have raised but did not Our vast domains of wooded mountains, hills and valleys lie practically untenanted by big game, save in a few exceptional spots. We lose be- causewearelawless. Welosebecausewearetooimprovidenttoconserve large forms of wild life unless we are compelled to do so by the stern edict of the law! The law-breakers, the game-hogs, the conscienceless doe- and-fawn slayers are everywhere! Ten per cent of all the grown men now in the United States are to-day poachers, thieves and law-breakers, or else they are liable to become so to-morrow. If you doubt it, try risking your new umbrella unprotected in the next mixed company of one hundred men that you encounter, in such a situation that it will be easy to "get away" with it.
We could raise two million deer each year on our empty wild lands; but without fences it would take half a million real game-wardens, on -duty from dawn until dark, to protect them from destructive slaughter.
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