Page 296 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

—"
274 OUR VANISHING WILD LIFE
By all means, have an "open season" on the Colorado big-horn and the British Columbia elk. It will "do them good." The excitement of ram slaughter will be good for the females, will it not ? Of course, they willbreedfasterafterthat,—withallthebigramsdead. Any"surplus wild life is a public nuisance, and should promptly be shot to pieces.
In Colorado there is some desire that Estes Park should be acquired as a national park, and maintained by the government; but the strong reasonsforthishavenotyetappeared. Asyetwehavenotheardany reason why the State of Colorado should not herself take it and make of itastateparkandgamepreserve. Ifdone,itcouldbeofferedasapartial atonement for her wastefulness in throwing away her inheritance of grand game.
Colorado has work to do in the preservation of her remnant of bird life. In several respects she is behind the times. The present is no time to hesitate, or to ask the gunners what they wish to have done about new lawsforthesavingoftheremnantofgame. Thedictatesofcommon sense are plain, and inexorable. Let the lawmakers do their whole duty by the remnant of wild life, whether the game killers like it or not.
The Curse oj Domestic Sheep Upon Game and Cattle.—Much has been said in print and out of print regarding the extent to which domestic sheep have destroyed the cattle ranges and incidentally many game ranges of the West; but the half hath not been told. The American people as a whole do not realize that the domestic sheep has driven the domestic steer from the free grass of the wild West, with the same speed and thoroughness with which the buffalo-hunters of the 70's and 80's swept away the bison. I have seen hundreds of thousands of acres of what once were beautiful and fertile cattle-grazing lands in Montana, that has been left by grazing sheep herds looking precisely as if the groundhadbeenshavenwithrazorsandthensandpapered. Thesheep have driven out the cattle, and the price of beef has gone up accord- ingly. Neither cattle, horses nor wild game can find food on ground that has been grazed over by sheep.
The following is the testimony of a reliable eye witness, Mr. Dillon Wallace, and the full text appears in his book, ''Saddle and Camp in the Rockies," (page 169):
Domestic sheep and sheep herders are the greatest enemies of the antelope, as well as of other game animals and birds- in the regions where herders take their flocks. The ranges over which domestic sheep pasture are denuded of forage and stripped of all growth, and antelope will not remain upon a range where sheep have been.
Thus the sheep, sweeping clean all before them and leaving the ranges over which they pass unproductive, for several succeeding seasons, of pasturage for either wild or domestic animals, together with the destructive shepherds, are the worst enemies at present of Utah's wild game, particularly of antelope, sage hens, and grouse.
In Iron county, which has already become an extensive sheep region, settlers teU us that before the advent of sheep, grass grew so luxuriously that a yearling calf lying in it could not be seen. Not only has the grass here been eaten, but the roots tramped out and killed by the hoofs of thousands upon thousands of sheep, and now wide areas, where not long since grass was so plentiful, are as bare and desolate as sand-piles.