“By what perversity are we, in general, impelled to destroy animals whose coöperation is so much to our advantage? Nearly all our helpers are persecuted. Their good will must be indomitable to make them bear our ill treatment and not forsake our dwellings and fields, never to return. The bat rids us of a host of enemies, and is nevertheless under the ban; the mole clears the soil of vermin, and is likewise proscribed; the hedge-hog wages war on vipers and cut-worms, and it too is an outlaw; the owl and various other night birds are accomplished rat-hunters, and they also are in disfavor; the adder, toad, and lizard feed on the ravagers of our crops, and all the while we hold them in abhorrence. They are ugly, we say, and without further reason we kill them. But, blind slayers, the day will come when you will perceive that you have been sacrificing your own defenders to an irrational repugnance. You complain of rats, but you nail the owl to your door and let its body dry in the sun as a hideous trophy; you cry out against cut-worms, but you crush the mole every time your spade turns one up; you disembowel the hedge-hog and set your dogs on him just for fun; you bewail the ravages of moth and worm in your granaries, but if the bat falls into your clutches it is seldom that you show him any mercy. Your complaints go up to heaven, but all these willing helpers of yours you treat as creatures accursed. Blind fools that you are, filled with an insane desire to kill! “Insect-eating birds are of immense importance to agriculture. They divide among themselves the work to be done in field and hedge, meadow and garden, forest and orchard, and wage unceasing warfare on every species of vermin, a terrible tribe that would destroy our crops were not more vigilant guardians than we continually on the watch—guardians of far greater adroitness, of sharper eyesight, of more lasting patience in their endless quest, and having nothing else to do. I am not exaggerating, my little friends; without insect-eating birds famine would decimate us. Who then, unless he be an idiot with a mania for destruction, would dare touch the nests of birds that enliven the country with their plumage and deliver us from the devouring scourge of insects? But there are, nevertheless, bloodthirsty gamins who, if they can manage to elude the school-master and play truant, find it a joyous pastime to climb trees and explore hedges in order to rob birds’ nests and slaughter the young. These good-for-nothings are under the surveillance of the rural guard and liable to the utmost rigors of the law, to the end that our crops may still be protected by the birds and that our fields and orchards may continue to yield sheaves of grain and baskets of fruit.