Page 78 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

56 OUR VANISHING WILD LIFE
If you wish to know some of these men, I will tell you where to find a goodly number of them; and when you find them, you will also find that they are men you would enjoy camping with ! Look in the member- ship lists of the Boone and Crockett Club, Camp-Fire Club of America, the Lewis and Clark Club of Pittsburgh, the New York State League, the Shikar Club of London, the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the British Empire, the Massachusetts Fish and Game Pro- tective Association, the Springfield (Mass.) Sportsmen's Association, the Camp-Fire Clubs of Detroit and Chicago, and the North American Fish and Game Protective Association.
There are other bodies of sportsmen that I would like to name, were space available, but to set down here a complete list is quite impossible.
The best and the most of the game-protective laws now in force iri the United States and Canada were brought into existence through the ini- tiativeandeffortsoftherealsportsmenofthosetwonations. Butfor their activity, exerted on the right side, the settled portion of North America would to-day be an utterly gameless land ! Even though the sportsmen have taken their toll of the wilds, they have made the laws that have saved a remnant of the game until 1912.
For all that, however, every man who still shoots game is a soldier in the Army of Destruction ! There is no blinking that fact. Such men do not stand on the summit with the men who now protect the game and do not shoot at all! The millions of men who do not shoot, and who also do nothing to protect or preserve wild life, do not count ! In this warfare they are merely ciphers in front of the real figures.
The Gunners, Who Kill to the Limit.—Out of the enormous mass of men who annually take up arms against the remnant of wild life, and dre called " sportsmen^" I believe that only one out of every 500 conscientiously stops shooting when game becomes scarce, and extinction is impending. All of the others feel that it is right and proper to kill allthegamethattheycankilluptothelegalbaglimit. Itisthereasoning of Shylock:
"Justice demands it, and the law doth give it!"
Especially is this true of the men who pay their one dollar per year for a resident hunting license, and feel that in doing so they have done a
great Big Thing!
This is a very deadly frame of mind. Ethically it is entirely wrong;
and at least two million men and boys who shoot American game must be shown that it is wrong! This is the spirit of Extermination, clothed in the robes of Law and Justice.
Whenever and wherever game birds are so scarce that a good shot who hunts hard during a day in the fields finds only three or four birds, he should stop shooting at once, and devote his mind and energies to the prob- lemofbringingbackthegame! Itisstrangethatconditionsdonotmake this duty clear to every conscientious citizen.
The Shylock spirit which prompts a man to kill all that "the law allows" is a terrible scourge to the wild life of America, and to the world