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
THE GENTLEMEN SPORTSMEN.--These men are the very bone and sinew of wild
life preservation. These are the men who have red blood in their veins,
who annually hear the red gods calling, who love the earth, the
mountains, the woods, the waters and the sky. These are the men to whom
"the bag" is a matter of small importance, and to whom "the bag-limit"
has only academic interest; because in nine cases out of ten they do not
care to kill all that the law allows. The tenth and exceptional time is
when the bag limit is "one." A gentleman sportsman is a man who protects
game, stops shooting when he has "enough"--without reference to the
legal bag-limit, and whenever a species is threatened with extinction,
he conscientiously refrains from shooting it.
The true sportsmen of the world are the men who once were keen in the
stubble or on the trail, but who have been halted by the general
slaughter and the awful decrease of game. Many of them, long before a
hair has turned gray, have hung up their guns forever, and turned to the
camera. These are the men who are willing to hand out checks, or to
leave their mirth and their employment and go to the firing line at
their state capitols, to lock horns with the bull-headed killers of wild
life who recognize no check or limit save the law.
These are the men who have done the most to put upon our statute books
the laws that thus far have saved some of our American game from total
annihilation, and who (so we firmly believe) will be chiefly
instrumental in tightening the lines of protection around the remnant.
These are the men who are making and stocking game preserves, public and
private, great and small.
[Illustration:
THE REGULAR ARMY OF DESTRUCTION, WAITING FOR THE FIRST OF OCTOBER
Each Year 2,642,274 Well-Armed Men Take the Field Against the Remnant
of Wild Birds and Mammals In the United States.
Drawn by Dan Beard]
If you wish to know some of these men, I will tell you where to find a
goodly number of them; and when you find them, you will also find that
they are men you would enjoy camping with! Look in the membership lists
of the Boone and Crockett Club, Camp-Fire Club of America, the Lewis and
Clark Club of Pittsburgh, the New York State League, the Shikar Club of
London, the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the
British Empire, the Massachusetts Fish and Game Protective Association,
the Springfield (Mass.) Sportsmen's Association, the Camp-Fire Clubs of
Detroit and Chicago, and the North American Fish and Game Protective
Association.
There are other bodies of sportsmen that I would like to name, were
space available, but to set down here a complete list is quite
impossible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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