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
Since that great fight was won, Texas has been a partly reformed state,
at times quite jealous of her bird life; but still she tolerates spring
shooting and has not made adequate close seasons for her waterfowl;
which is wrong. To-day, the people of Texas do not need to be told that
forty-three species of birds feed on the cotton boll weevil; for they
know it.
On the whole, and for a southern state, the wild-life laws of Texas are
in fairly good shape. On account of the absence of game-scourge markets,
a Bayne law is not so imperatively necessary there as in certain other
states. All the game of the state is protected from sale.
We do assert, however, that if robins are slaughtered as F.L. Crow, the
former Atlantan asserts, all robin shooting should be forever stopped;
that the pinnated grouse should be given a seven-year close season, and
that doves should be taken off the list of game birds and perpetually
protected, both for economic and sentimental reasons, and also because
the too weak and confiding dove is not a "game" bird for red-blooded
men.
Texas should enact without delay a law providing close seasons for
ducks, geese and other waterfowl;
A law prohibiting spring shooting, and
A provision reducing the limit on deer to two bucks a season.
UTAH:
The laws of Utah are far from being up to the requirements of the
present hour. One strange thing has happened in Utah.
When I spent a week in Salt Lake City in 1888, and devoted some time to
inquiring into game conditions, the laws of the state were very bad. At
the mouth of Bear River, ducks were being slaughtered for the markets by
the tens of thousands. The cold-blooded, wide open and utterly shameless
way in which it was being done, right at the doors of Salt Lake City,
was appalling.
At the same time, the law permitted the slaughter of _spotted fawns_. I
saw a huge drygoods box filled to the top with the flat skins of
slaughtered innocents, _260 in number_, that a rascal had collected and
was offering at fifty cents each. In reply to a question as to their
use, he said: "I tink de sportsmen like 'em for to make vests oud of."
He lived at Rawlins, Wyo.
After a long and somnolent period, during which hundreds of thousands of
ducks, geese, brant and other birds had been slaughtered for market at
the Bear River shambles and elsewhere, the state awoke sufficiently to
abate a portion of the disgrace by passing a bag-limit law (1897).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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