Page 56 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

CHAPTER IV
EXTINCT AND NEARLY EXTINCT SPECIES OF MAMMALS
When we pause and consider the years, the generations and the ages that Nature spends in the production of a high vertebrate species, the preservation of such species from extermination should seriously concern us. As a matter of fact, in modern man's wild chase after wealth and pleasure, it is only one person out of every ten thousand who pauses to regard such causes, unless cornered by some protectionist fanatic, held fast and coerced to listen.
We are not discussing the animals of the Pleistocene, or the Eocene, oranyperiodofthefar-distantPast. Wearedealingwithspeciesthat have been ruthlessly, needlessly and wickedly destroyed by man during our own times; species that, had they been given a fair chance, would be alive and well to-day.
In reckless waste of blood and treasure, the nineteenth century has muchforwhichtoanswer. Warsandpillage,fires,earthquakesandvol- canoesareunhappilyunavoidable. Likethepoorofholywrit,wehave themwithusalways. Butthedestructionofanimallifeisihatotally different category from the accidental calamities of life. It is deliberate, cold-blooded, persistent, and in its final stage, criminal! Worst of all, there is no limit to the devilish persistence of the confirmed destroyer, thissideofthetotalextinctionofspecies. Nopolarnightistoocold,no desert inferno is too hot for the man who pursues wild life for commercial purposes. Therhytinahasbeenexterminatedinthefarnorth,theele- phant seals on Kerguelen are being exterminated in the far south, and midway, in the desert mountains of Lower California a fine species of mountain sheep is rapidly being shot into oblivion.
Large Mammals Completely Exterminated
The Arizona Elk, (Cervus merriami). —Right at our very door, under our very noses and as it were only yesterday, a well-defined species ofAmericanelkhasbeentotallyexterminated. Untilrecentlythemoun-
tairs of Arizona and New Mexico were inhabited by a light-colored elk of smaller size than the Wyoming species, whose antlers possessed on each sideonlyonebrowtineinsteadoftwo. Theexacthistoryoftheblotting out of that species has not yet been written, but it seems that its final extinction occurred about 1901. Its extermination was only a routine incident of the devilish general slaughter of American big game that by 1900 had wiped out nearly everything killable over a large portion of the Rocky Mountain region and the Great Plains.