Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador: Supplement to an Address Presented by Lt.-Colonel William Wood, F.R.S.C. Before the Second Annual Meeting of the Commission of Conservation in January, 1911Wood, William
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Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador: Supplement to an Address Presented by Lt.-Colonel William Wood, F.R.S.C. Before the Second Annual Meeting of the Commission of Conservation in January, 1911
This is only one of the many reasons why a special effort should be
made to bring a knowledge of the laws home to everyone in the areas
affected, including the areas crossed by the lines of migration.
The language should be unmistakeably plain. Every form of wild life
should be included, as wholly, seasonally, locally or otherwise
protected, or as not protected, or as exterminable, with penalties and
rewards mentioned in each case. All animals should be called by their
scientific, English, French, and special local names, to prevent the
possibility of mistake or excuse. Every man, resident or not, who uses
rod, gun, rifle, net or snare, afloat or ashore, should be obliged to
take out a license, even in cases where it might be given gratis; and
his receipt for it should contain his own acknowledgment that he has a
copy of the laws, which he thoroughly understands. Particular clauses
should be devoted to rapacious dealers who get collecting permits as
scientific men, to poison, to shooting from power boats or with swivel
guns, to that most diabolical engine of all murderers--the Maxim
silencer,--to hounding and crusting, to egging and nefarious pluming,
to illegal netting and cod-trapping, and last, but emphatically not
least, to any and every form of wanton cruelty. The next step may be
to provide against the misuse of aeroplanes.
I believe it would be well worth while, from every point of view, to
publish the laws, or at all events a digest of them, in all the
principal papers. Even educated people know little enough; and no one,
even down the coast, at the trading posts, or in Newfoundland, should
have the chance of pleading ignorance. "We don't know no law here"
ought to be an impossible saying two years hence. And we might
remember that the Newfoundlanders who chiefly use it are really no
worse than others, and quite as amenable to good laws impartially
enforced. They have seen the necessity of laws at home, after
depleting their salmon rivers, deer runs and seal floes to the danger
point. And there is no reason to suppose that an excellent population
in so many ways would be any harder to deal with in this one than the
hordes of poachers and sham sportsmen much nearer home.
Of course, everything ultimately turns on the enforcement of the laws.
And I still think that two naturalists and twenty men afloat and the
same number ashore, with double these numbers when Hudson bay and the
Arctic are included, would be enough to patrol Labrador
satisfactorily, if they were in touch with local and leasehold wardens
and with foresters, if the telegraph was used only on their side, if
they and the general inspector were all of the right kind, and if the
whole service was vigorously backed up at headquarters. Two fast motor
cruisers and suitable means of making the land force also as mobile as
possible are _sine qua non_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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