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 Malayana there are some jungles so dense, so tangled with lianas and
so thorny with Livistonias and rattan that nothing larger than a cat can
make way through them. There are thousands of square miles so boggy, so
swampy, so dark, gloomy and mosquito-ridden that all men fear them and
avoid them, and in them rubber culture must be impossible. In those
silent places the gaur, the rhino, the Malay sambar, the clouded leopard
and the orang-utan surely are measurably safe from the game-bags and
market gunners of the shooting world. It is good to think that there is
an equatorial belt of jungle clear around the world, in Central and
South America as well as in the old World, in which there will be little
extermination in our day, except of birds for the feather market. But
the open plains, open mountains, and open forests of Asia and
Australasia are in different case. Eventually they will be "shot out."
China, all save Yunnan and western Mongolia, is now horribly barren of
wild life. Can it ever be brought back? We think it can not. The
millions of population are too many; and except in the great forest
tracts, the spread of modern firearms will make an end of the game.
Already the pheasants are being swept out of China for the London
market, and extinction is staring several species in the face. On the
whole, the pheasants of the Old World are being hit hard by the
rubber-planting craze. Mr. Beebe declares that owing to the inrush of
aggressive capital, the haunts of many species of pheasants are being
denuded of all their natural cover, and some mountain species that are
limited to small areas are practically certain to be exterminated at an
early date.
DESTRUCTION OF ANIMALS FOR FUR.--In the far North, only the interior of
Kamchatka seems to be safe from the iron heel of the skin-hunter. A
glance at the list of furs sold in London last year reveals one or two
things that are disquieting. The total catch of furs for the year 1911
is enormous,--considering the great scarcity of wild life on two
continents. Incidentally it must be remembered that every trapper
carries a gun, and in studying the fur list one needs no help in trying
to imagine the havoc wrought with firearms on the edible wild life of
the regions that contributed all that fur. I have been told by trappers
that as a class, trappers are great killers of game.
In order that the reader may know by means of definite figures the
extent to which the world is being raked and combed for fur-bearing
animals, we append below a statement copied from the _Fur News Magazine_
for November, 1912, of the sales of the largest London fur house during
the past two years.
With varying emotions we call attention to the wombat of Australia,
3,841; grebe, 51,261, and house cat, 92,407. Very nearly all the totals
of Lampson & Co. for each species are much lower for the sales of 1912
than for those of 1911. Is this fact significant of a steady decline?
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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