Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and PreservationHornaday, William T. (William Temple)
History
Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation
Hornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Game-laws -- United States; Wildlife conservation -- United States
In Utah, the big-horn species is probably quite extinct. In Arizona,
there are a few very small bands, very widely scattered. They are in the
Santa Catalina Mountains, the Grand Canyon country, the Gila Range, and
the Quitovaquita Mountains, near Sonoyta. But who can protect from
slaughter those Arizona sheep? Absolutely no one! They are too few and
too widely scattered for the game wardens to keep in touch with them.
The "prospectors" have them entirely at their mercy, and the world well
knows what prospectors' "mercy" to edible big game looks like on the
ground. It leads straight to the frying-pan, the coyotes and the
vultures.
The Lower California peninsula contains about five hundred mountain
sheep, without the slightest protection save low, desert mountains, heat
and thirst. But that is no real protection whatever. Those sheep are too
fine to be butchered the way they have been, and now are being
butchered. In 1908 I strongly called the attention of the Mexican
Government to the situation; and the Departmento de Fomento secured the
issue of an executive order forbidding the hunting of any big game in
Lower California without the written authority of the government. I am
sure, however, that owing to the political and military upheaval it
never stopped the slaughter of sheep. In such easy mountains as those of
Lower California, it is a simple matter to exterminate quickly all the
mountain sheep that they possess. The time for President Madero and his
cabinet to inaugurate serious protective measures has fully arrived.
Both British Columbia and Alberta have even yet fine herds of big-horn,
and we can count three large game preserves in which they are protected.
They are Goat Mountain Park (East Kootenay district, between the Elk and
Bull Rivers); the Rocky Mountains Park, near Banff, and Waterton Lakes
Park, in the southwestern corner of Alberta.
In view of the number of men who desire to hunt them, the bag limit on
big-horn rams in British Columbia and Alberta still is too liberal, by
half. One ram per year for one man is _quite enough_; quite as much so
as one moose is the limit everywhere. To-day "a big, old ram" is
regarded by sportsmen as a much more desirable and creditable trophy
than a moose; because moose-killing is easy, and the bagging of an old
mountain ram in real mountains requires five times as much effort and
skill.
The splendid high and rugged mountains of British Columbia and Alberta
form an ideal home for the big-horn (and mountain goat), and it would be
an international calamity for that region to be denuded of its splendid
big game. With resolute intent and judicial treatment that region can
remain a rich and valuable hunting ground for five hundred years to
come. Under falsely "liberal" laws, it can be shot into a state of
complete desolation within ten years, or even less.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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