Page 76 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

54 OVR VANISHING WILD LIFE
friends deserve to have their crops destroyed and their forests ravaged. They deserve to pay twenty cents a pound for their cotton when the boll weevil has cut down the normal supply.
It is very desirable that we should now take an inventory of the forces that have been, and to-day are, active in the destruction of our wild birds, mammals, and game fishes. During the past ten years a sufficient quantity of facts and figures has become available to enable us to secure a reasonably full and accurate view of the whole situation. As we pause on our hill-top, and survey the field of carnage, we find that we are reviewing the Army oj Destruction!
Itisindeedamotleyarray. Weseetruesportsmenbesideordinary gunners, game-hogs and meat hunters; handsome setter dogs are mixed up with coyotes, cats, foxes and skunks; and well-gowned women and ladies' maids are jostled by half-naked "poor-white" and black-negro "plume hunters."
Verily, the destruction of wild life makes strange companions.
Let us briefly review the several army corps that together make up thearmyofthedestroyers. Spaceinthisvolumeforbidsanextended noticeofeach. Unfortunatelyitisimpossibletosegregatesomeofthese classes, and number each one, for they merge together too closely for that ; but we can at least describe the several classes that form the great mass of destroyers.
The Gentlemen Sportsmen.—These men are the very bone and sinewofwildlifepreservation. Thesearethemenwhohaveredblood in their veins, who annually hear the red gods calling, who love the earth, themountains,thewoods,thewatersandthesky. Thesearethemento whom "the bag" is a matter of small importance, and to whom "the bag-limit" has only academic interest; because in nine cases out of ten theydonotcaretokillallthatthelawallows. Thetenthandexceptional time is when the bag limit is "one." A gentleman sportsman is a man who protects game, stops shooting when he has "enough"—without reference to the legal bag-limit, and whenever a species is threatened with extinction, he conscientiously refrains from shooting it.
The true sportsmen of the world are the men who once were keen in the stubble or on the trail, but who have been halted by the general slaughterandtheawfuldecreaseofgame. Manyofthem,longbeforea hair has turned gray, have hung up their guns forever, and turned to the camera. Thesearethemenwhoarewillingtohandoutchecks,orto leave their mirth and their employment and go to the firing line at their state Capitols, to lock horns with the bull-headed killers of wild life who recognize no check or limit save the law.
These are the men who have done the most to put upon our statute books the laws that thus far have saved some of our American game from total annihilation, and who (so we firmly believe) will be chiefly instrumental in tightening the lines of protection around the remnant. These are the men who are making and stocking game preserves, public and private, great and small.