In addition to the hunters themselves, they are assisted by thousands of expert guides, thousands of horses, thousands of dogs, hundreds of automobiles and hundreds of thousands of tents. Each big-game hunter has an experienced guide who knows the haunts and habits of the game, the best feeding grounds, the best trails, and everything else that will aid the hunter in taking the game at a disadvantage and destroying it. The big-game rifles are of the highest power, the longest range, the greatest accuracy and the best repeating mechanism that modern inventive genius can produce. It is said that in Wyoming the Maxim silencer is now being used. England has produced a weapon of a new type, called "the scatter rifle," which is intended for use on ducks. The best binoculars are used in searching out the game, and horses carry the hunters and guides as near as possible to the game. For bears, baits are freely used, and in the pursuit of pumas, dogs are employed to the limit of the available supply. The deadliness of the automobile in hunting already is so apparent that North Dakota has wisely and justly forbidden their use by law, (1911). The swift machine enables city gunmen to penetrate game regions they could not reach with horses, and hunt through from four to six localities per day, instead of one only, as formerly. The use of automobiles in hunting should be everywhere prohibited. Every appliance and assistance that money can buy, the modern sportsman secures to help him against the game. The game is beset during its breeding season by various wild enemies,--foxes, cats, wolves, pumas, lynxes, eagles, and many other predatory species. The only help that it receives is in the form of an annual close season--_which thus far has saved in America only a few local moose, white-tailed deer and a few game birds, from steady and sure extermination_. _The bag limits on which vast reliance is placed to preserve the wild game, are a fraud, a delusion and a snare_! The few local exceptions only prove the generality of the rule. In every state, without one single exception, the bag limits are far too high, and the laws are of deadly liberality. In many states, the bag limit laws on birds are an absolute dead letter. Fancy the 125 wardens of New York enforcing the bag-limit laws on 150,000 gunners! It is this horrible condition that is enabling the licensed army of destruction to get in its deadly work on the game, all over the world. In America, the over-liberality of the laws are to blame for two-thirds of the carnival of slaughter, and the successful evasions of the law are responsible for the other third. [Illustration: TWO GUNNERS OF KANSAS CITY Who Believe in Killing all That the Law Allows. They are not so Much to Blame as the System That Permits Such Slaughter. (Note the Pump Guns)] [Illustration: WHY THE SANDHILL CRANE IS BECOMING EXTINCT Nineteen of Them Killed as "Game" by Three Gunners. Note the Machine Gun.]