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
As if to shame the people of Iowa, a curious deer episode is recorded.
In 1885, W.B. Cuppy, of Avoca, Iowa, purchased five deer, and placed
them in a paddock on his 600-acre farm. By 1900 they had increased to 32
head; and then one night some one kindly opened the gate of their
enclosure, and gave them the freedom of the city. Mr. Cuppy made no
effort to capture them, possibly because they decided to annex his farm
as their habitat. When a neighbor led them with a bait of corn to their
owner's door, he declined to impound them, on the ground that it was
unnecessary.
By 1912, those deer had increased to 400, and the portion of this story
that no one will believe is this: they spread all through the suburbs
and hinterland farms of Avoca, and _the people not only failed to
assassinate all of them and eat them, but they actually killed only a
few, protected the rest, and made pets of many!_ Queer people, those men
and boys of Avoca. Nearly everywhere else in the world that I know, that
history would have been ended differently. Here in the East, 90 per cent
of our people are like the Avocans, but the other 10 per cent think only
of slaying and eating, sans mercy, sans decency, sans law. Now the State
of Iowa has taken hold, to capture some of those deer, and set them free
in other portions of the state.
Elsewhere I shall note the quick and thorough success with which the
white-tailed deer has been brought back in Vermont, Massachusetts,
Connecticut, and southern New York.
No state having waste lands covered with brush or timber need be without
the ubiquitous white-tailed deer. Give them a semblance of a fair show,
and they will live and breed with surprising fecundity and persistence.
If you start a park herd with ten does, soon you will have more deer
than you will know how to dispose of, unless you market them under a
Bayne law, duly tagged by the state. In close confinement this species
fares rather poorly. In large preserves it does well, but during the
rutting season the bucks are to be dreaded; and those that develop
aggressive traits should be shot and marketed. This is the only way in
which the deer parks of England are kept safe for unarmed people.
Dr. T.S. Palmer has taken much pains to ascertain the number of deer
killed in the eastern United States. His records, as published in May,
1910, are as follows:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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