William T. Hornaday

“ Our vast domains of wooded mountains, hills and valleys lie practically untenanted by big game, save in a few exceptional spots. We lose because we are lawless. We lose because we are too improvident to conserve large forms of wild life unless we are compelled to do so by the stern edict of the law! The law-breakers, the game-hogs, the conscienceless doe-and-fawn slayers are everywhere! Ten per cent of all the grown men now in the United States are to-day poachers, thieves and law-breakers, or else they are liable to become so to-morrow. ”

“ It is undeniable that the welfare and happiness of our own and of all future generations of Americans are at stake in this battle for the preservation of Nature against the selfishness, the ignorance, or the cruelty of her destroyers.
We no longer destroy great works of art. They are treasured, and regarded as of priceless value; but we have yet to attain the state of civilization where the destruction of a glorious work of Nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird, is regarded with equal abhorrence. ”

“ We do not need money with which to "buy votes" or "influence," but money with which to pay workers; to publish things to arouse the American people; to sting sportsmen into action; to hire wardens; to prosecute game-hogs and buy refuges for wild life. If a sufficient amount of money for these purposes cannot be procured, then as sure as the earth continues to revolve, our wild life will pass away, forever.
This is no cause for surprise, or wonder. In this twentieth century money is essential to every great enterprise, whether it be for virtue or mischief. ”

“ To me the most striking fact that stands forth in the story of American wild life one hundred years ago is the wide extent and thoroughness of its distribution. Wide as our country is, and marvelous as it is in the diversity of its climates, its soils, its topography, its flora, its riches and its poverty, Nature gave to each square mile and to each acre a generous quota of wild creatures, according to its ability to maintain living things. No pioneer ever pushed so far, or into regions so difficult or so remote, that he did not find awaiting him a host of birds and beasts. ”

“ Fifth,—To preserve to the future sportsmen of America enough game and fish that they may have at least a taste of the legitimate pursuit of game in the open that has made life so interesting to the sportsmen of to-day.
For any civilized nation to exterminate valuable and interesting species of wild mammals, birds or fishes is more than a disgrace. It is a crime! We have no right, legal, moral or commercial, to exterminate any valuable or interesting species; because none of them belong to us, to exterminate or not, as we please. ”

“ Really, it is to me very strange that gunners never care to save game birds on account of their beauty. One living bob white on a fence is better than a score in a bloody game-bag. A live squirrel in a tree is poetry in motion; but on the table a squirrel is a rodent that tastes as a rat smells. Beside the ocean a flock of sandpipers is needed to complete the beautiful picture; but on the table a sandpiper is beneath contempt. A live deer trotting over a green meadow, waving a triangular white flag, is a sight to thrill any human ganglion ”

“ The old-world owner of a game preserve delights in the annual killing of the surplus game, and we have even heard it whispered that in the Dark Ages there were kings who enjoyed the wholesale slaughter of deer, wild boar, pheasants and grouse. If we may accept as true the history of sport in Europe, there have been men who have loved slaughter with a genuine blood-lust that is quite foreign to the real nature-loving sportsman. ”

“ Forty years ago, a sportsman might have been defined, according to the standards of that period, as a man who hunts wild game for pleasure. Those were the days wherein no one foresaw the wholesale annihilation of species, and there were no wilderness game preserves. In those days, gentlemen shot female hoofed game, trapped bears if they felt like it, killed ten times as much big game as they could use, and no one made any fuss whatever about the waste or extermination of wild life. ”

“ The tide of wild life ebbs and flows under the wire, and beyond a doubt the deer and grouse will quickly find that within it lies absolute safety. There the breeding and rearing of young may go on undisturbed. ”

“ At first the no-sale-of-game bill looked like sheer madness, but no sooner was it fairly launched than supporters came flocking in from every side. All the organizations of sportsmen and friends of wild life combined in one mighty army, the strength of which was irresistible. The real sportsmen of the state quickly realized that the no-sale bill was directly in the interest of legitimate sport. The great mass of people who love wild life, and never kill, were quick to comprehend the far-reaching importance of the measure, and they supported it, with money and enthusiasm. ”

“ A Rocky Mountain without a grizzly bear is like a tissue-paper rose.
The bag limit on the big game of British Columbia is at least twice too liberal,—five deer, two elk, two moose (one in Kootenay County) , three caribou and three goats. There is no necessity for such wasteful liberality. Few sportsmen go to British Columbia for the sake of a large lot of animals. I know many men who have been there to hunt, and the great majority cared more for the scenery and the wild romance of camping out in ground mountains than for blood and trophies. ”

“ Now, as a matter of fact, a sportsman with a one-hundred-dollar Fox gun in his hands, a two-hundred-dollar dog at his heels and five one-hundred-dollar bills in his pocket has no more "right" to kill a covey of quail on Long Island than my milkman has to elect that it shall be let alone for the pleasure of his children! The time has come when the people who don't shoot must do one of two things:
They must demonstrate the fact that they have rights in the wild creatures, and demand their recognition, or See the killable game all swept off the continent by the Army of Destruction. ”

“ How has it come to pass that Maryland lacks more good wild-life laws than any other state in the Union except North Carolina? Of the really fundamental protective laws, embracing the list that to every self-respecting state seems indispensable, Maryland has almost none save certain bag-limit laws! Otherwise, the state is wide open! It is indeed high time that she should abandon her present attitude of hostility to wild life, and become a good neighbor. She should do what is fair and right about the protection of the migratory game and bird life that annually passes twice through her territory! ”

“ In these days of game destruction, when our country from Nome to Key West is reeking with the blood of slaughtered wild creatures, it is a privilege and a pleasure to be a citizen of a state which has thoroughly cleaned house, and done well nigh the utmost that any state can do to clear her bad record, and give all her wild creatures a fair chance to survive. The people of the Empire State literally can point with pride to the list of things accomplished in the discharge of good-citizenship toward the remnant of wild life, and toward the future generations of New Yorkers. ”

“ To-day, the thing that stares me in the face every waking hour, like a grisly spectre with bloody fang and claw, is the extermination of species. To me, that is a horrible thing. It is wholesale murder, no less. It is capital crime, and a black disgrace to the races of civilized mankind. I say "civilized mankind," because savages don't do it! ”

“ It is natural for an awkward and blundering wing-shot to love the deadliest gun, in order that he may make as good a bag as an expert shot can make with a double-barreled gun. It is natural for the hunter who does not care a rap about the extermination of species to love the gun that will enable him to kill up to the bag limit, every time he takes the field. It is natural for men who don't think, or who think in circles, to say "so long as I observe the lawful bag limit, what difference does it make what kind of a gun I use?" ”

“ If the zoologist cares to know, then I will tell him that to-day the wild life of the world can be saved by law, but not by sentiment alone! You cannot "educate" a poacher, a game-hog, a market-gunner, a milliner or a vain and foolish woman of fashion. All these must be curbed and controlled by law. Game refuges alone will not save the wild life! All species of birds, mammals and game fishes of North America must have more thorough and far-reaching protection than they now have.
Do not always take your cue from the sportsmen, especially regarding the enactment of long close seasons! ”

“ The more the game-hogs are displeased, the better for the game! The game-hogs form a very small and very insignificant minority of the whole People. Why please one man at the expense of ninety-nine others? The game of a state belongs to The People as a whole, not to the gunners alone. The great, patient,—and sometimes sleepy,—majority has vested rights in it, and it is for it to say how it shall and shall not be killed. Heretofore the gunning minority has been dictating the game laws of America, and the result is—progressive extermination. ”

“ I count it as rather strange that American and English sportsmen have hunted and shot for a century, and until 1908 formulated practically nothing to establish and define the ethics of shooting game. Here and there, a few unwritten principles have been evolved, and have become fixed by common consent; but the total number of these is very few. Perhaps this has been for the reason that every free and independent sportsman prefers to be a law unto himself. Is it not doubly strange, however, that even down to the present year the term "sportsmen" never has been defined by a sportsman! ”

“ In a country where any and every individual can rise and bluster, "I'm-just-as-good-as-you-are," and bellow for his "rights" as a "tax-payer," there is no stopping the millions who kill whenever there is an open season. And to many Americans, no right is dearer than the right to kill the game which by even the commonest law of equity belongs, not to the shooter exclusively, but partly to two thousand other persons who don't shoot at all!
Unless we come to an "About, face!" in quick time, all our big game outside the preserves is doomed to sure and quick extermination. ”

“ Here is a question that I would like to put before every hunter of game in America:
In view of the alarming scarcity of game, in view of the impending extermination of species by legal hunting, can any high-minded sportsman, can any good citizen either sell a machine shot-gun or use one in hunting?
A gentleman is incapable of taking an unfair advantage of any wild creature; therefore a gentleman cannot use punt guns for ducks, dynamite for game fish, or automatic or pump guns in bird-shooting. ”

“ The least shade of gray in the shadow of the creek bank he distinguished at once as a rabbit, a glinting flash from a tree top he knew instantly as being caused by the slight movement of a hidden squirrel, and the quiver of a single stem of sedge grass told him of a bevy of birds hiding in the depths. The pot-hunting negro has all the skill of the Indian, has more industry in his loafing, and kills without pity and without restraint. ”

“ Who has not heard the story of the bears of the Yellowstone Park,—how black bears and grizzlies stalk out of the woods, every day, to the garbage dumping-ground; how black bears actually have come into the hotels for food, without breaking the truce, and how the grizzlies boldly raid the grub-wagons and cook-tents of campers, taking just what they please, because they know that no man dares to shoot them! Indeed, those raiding bears long ago became a public nuisance, and many of them have been caught in steel box-traps and shipped to zoological gardens, in order to get them out of the way. ”

“ In all this, however, there would be no cause for regret if the wild life of our continent were not in such a grievous state. If we felt no conscience burden for those who come after us, we would not care where the millions go; but since things are as they are, it is heartbreaking to see the cause of wild-life protection actually starving, or at the best subsisting only on financial husks and crumbs, while less important causes literally flounder in surplus wealth. ”

“ 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." ”

“ The first fact that strikes us in the face is the impending fate of the great Indian rhinoceros, an animal as wonderful as the Titanothere or the Megatherium. It is like a gift handed down to us straight out of the Pleistocene age, a million years back. The British paleontologists to-day marvel at Elephas ganesa, and by great labor dig his bones out of the Sewalik rocks, but what one of them all has yet made a move to save Rhinoceros indicus from the quick extermination that soon will be his portion unless he is accorded perpetual and real protection from the assaults of man? ”

“ In Italy, linnets and sparrows are "game"; and so is everything else that wears feathers! Italy is a continuous slaughtering-ground for the migratory birds of Europe, and as such it is an international nuisance and a pest. The way passerine birds are killed and eaten in that country is a disgrace to the government of Italy, and a standing reproach to the throne. Even kings and parliaments have no right in moral or international law to permit year after year the wholesale slaughter of birds of passage of species that no civilized man has a right to kill. ”

“ Five hundred years hence, when the greed and rapacity of "civilized" man has completed the loot and ruin of the continent of North America, the white-tailed deer will be the last species of our big game to be exterminated. Its mental traits, its size, its color and its habits all combine to render it the most persistent of our large animals, and the best fitted to survive. It neither bawls nor bugles to attract its enemies, it can not be called to a sportsman, like the moose, and it sticks to its timber with rare and commendable closeness. ”

“ When any small bird becomes so scarce that the bag limit needs to be cut down to five, as it now is for the above in Wisconsin, it is time to stop for ten years, before it is too late. Wisconsin should immediately busy herself about the creation of bird and game preserves. For goodness sake, Wisconsin, stop killing squirrels as "game!" You ought to know better—and you do! Leave that form of barbarism for the Benighted States. And pass a law shutting out the machine guns. They are a disgrace to our country, and a scourge to our game. Continually are they leading good men astray. ”

“ There is no time to depend upon the academic "education" of the public by the seductive illustrated lecture on birds, or the article about the habits of mammals. Those methods are all well enough in their places, but we must not depend upon them in emergencies like the present, for they do not pass laws or arrest lawbreakers. Give the public all of that material that you can supply, and the more the better, but for heaven's sake do not depend upon the spread of bird-lore "education" to stop the work of the game-hogs! ”

“ All laws that permit the killing of game for the market, and the sale of it afterward, are class legislation of the worst sort. They permit a hundred men selfishly to slaughter for their own pockets the game that rightfully belongs to a hundred thousand men and boys who shoot for the legitimate recreation that such field sports afford. Will any of the sportsmen of America "stand for" this until the game is all gone?
The people who pay big prices for game in the hotels and restaurants of our big cities are not men who need that game as food. ”

“ Here is an inexorable law of Nature, to which there are no exceptions:
No wild species of bird, mammal, reptile or fish can withstand exploitation for commercial purposes.
The men who pursue wild creatures for the money or other value there is in them, never give up. They work at slaughter when other men are enjoying life, or are asleep. If they are persistent, no species on which they fix the Evil Eye escapes extermination at their hands. ”

“ Fully ten per cent of the human race consists of people who will lie, steal, throw rubbish in parks, and destroy forests and wild life whenever and wherever they can do so without being stopped by a policemen and a club. These are hard words, but they are absolutely true. From ten per cent (or more) of the human race, the high moral instinct which is honest without compulsion is absent. The things that seemingly decent citizens,—men posing as gentlemen,—will do to wild game when they secure great chances to slaughter, are appalling. ”

“ In working with large bodies of bird-shooting sportsmen I have steadily—and also painfully—been impressed by their intentness on. killing, and by the fact that they seek to preserve game only to kill it! Who ever saw a bird-shooter rise in a convention and advocate the preservation of any species of game bird on account of its beauty or its esthetic interest alive? I never did; and I have sat in many conventions of sportsmen. All the talk is of open seasons, bag limits and killing rights. The man who has the hardihood to stand up and propose a five-year close season has "a hard row to hoe." ”

“ The principles of wild-life protection and encouragement are now so firmly established as to leave little room for argument regarding their value. When they are set forth before the people of any given state, the only question is of willingness to do the right thing; of duty or a defiance of duty; of good citizenship or the reign of selfishness. Men who do not wish to do their duty purposely befog great issues by noisy talk and tiresome academic discussions of trivial details; and such men are the curse and scourge of reform movements. ”

“ The logical conclusion of our land that is utterly unfit for agriculture is a great area of land available for occupancy by valuable wild animals. Every year the people of the United States are wasting uncountable millions of pounds of venison, because we are neglecting our opportunities for producing it practically without cost. Imagine for a moment bestowing upon land owners the ability to stock with white-tailed and Indian sambar deer all the wild lands of the United States that are suitable for those species, and permitting only bucks over one year of age to be shot. ”

“ From the trackless jungles of New Guinea, round the world both ways to the snow-capped peaks of the Andes, no unprotected bird is safe. The humming-birds of Brazil, the egrets of the world at large, the rare birds of paradise, the toucan, the eagle, the condor and the emu, all are being exterminated to swell the annual profits of the millinery trade. The case is far more serious than the world at large knows, or even suspects. But for the profits, the birds would be safe; and no unprotected wild species can long escape the hounds of Commerce. ”

“ Beyond question, we are exterminating our finest species of mammals, birds and fishes according to law!
I am appalled by the mass of evidence proving that throughout the entire United States and Canada, in every state and province, the existing legal system for the preservation of wild life is fatally defective. There is not a single state in our country from which the killable game is not being rapidly and persistently shot to death, legally or illegally, very much more rapidly than it is breeding, with extermination for the most of it close in sight. ”