Page 265 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

GAME AND AGRICULTURE; DEER AS FOOD 243
now are choking many of the streams of Louisiana and Mississippi. The antelopes were to be accHmatized as a food supply for the people at large.
This measure well illustrates the prevailing disposition of the American people to-day,—-to ignore and destroy their own valuable natural stock of wild birds and mammals, and when they have completed their war of extermination, reach out to foreign countries for foreign species. In- stead of preserving the deer of the South, the South reaches out for the utterly impossible antelopes of Africa, and the preposterous hippopota- mus. TheNorthjoyouslyexterminatesherquailandruffedgrouse,and goestoEuropefortheHungarianpartridge. Thatpartridgeisafailure here, and I am heartily glad oj it, on the ground that the exterminators of our native species do not deserve success in their efforts to displace our finest native species with others from abroad.
The hippo-antelope proposition is a climax of absurdity, in proposing the replacing of valuable native game with impossible foreign species.