Game preserve

“ Game Preserve.—If you live far inland, you can buy at cheap rates a wild mountain or a large tract of wilderness. Around this construct a high fence and stock your purchase with game. All this will require capital, but you will find ample returns for your investment in the rates which you will charge city sportsmen for a day’s sport. These hunters care little for the money if they can have a good day’s sport. After your game preserve becomes well known, through liberal advertising, $25 a day on your investment during the season should be a very modest expectation. ”

“ Any private game "preserve" that is maintained chiefly as a [Page 363] slaughter-ground for wild game, either birds or mammals, may become detrimental to the interests of the people at large. It is not necessarily the duty of any state to provide for the maintenance of private death-traps for the wholesale slaughter of migratory game. ”

“ And if this is done persons who take them are thieves and not merely poachers. A game farm, like a decoy for wild water-fowl, is treated as a trade or business; but a game preserve in which full-grown animals fly or run wild is subject to the ordinary incidents of the law as to animals ferae naturae. ”

“ Even though the sportsmen have taken their toll of the wilds, they have made the laws that have saved a remnant of the game until 1912.
For all that, however, every man who still shoots game is a soldier in the Army of Destruction! There is no blinking that fact. Such men do not stand on the summit with the men who now protect the game and do not shoot at all! The millions of men who do not shoot, and who also do nothing to protect or preserve wild life, do not count! ”

“ Many Eastern sportsmen desire to preserve the game, not especially that they themselves may kill it, but that it shall be preserved; if they desire to kill this game they must and do comply with the laws established by the different States, and pay the license fees. ”

“ The Game Laws are a disgrace to our civilisation, and could not stand twelve months were it not for the overwhelming influence of the landed aristocracy in the Legislature. The practice of game preserving is injurious in that, in addition to the land wasted for the preserve, it frequently prevents proper cultivation of surrounding lands, and demoralises and makes criminals of the agricultural labourers, creating for them a kind and degree of crime which would be otherwise unknown. ”

“ In the early days of America, the founders of our states and territories gave little heed, or none at all, to the preservation of wild life. Even if they thought of that duty, undoubtedly they felt that the game would always last, and that they had no time for such sentimental side issues as the making of game preserves. They were coping with troubles and perplexities of many kinds, and it is not to be wondered at that up to forty years ago, real game protection in America went chiefly by default. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Game of any kind should always be pursued in a fair, manly manner, and given due chance to preserve its life if it is skillful enough to do so. If captured, let it be by the superior skill, sagacity, or endurance of the sportsman, not by traps which close on it as it innocently and unsuspectingly seeks its food. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Probably in another hundred years nature will take care of the problem by wiping them out for us. Meanwhile we game wardens must make the rounds every two years and weed out any of them we can find that have intelligence." He looked up the embankment but did not notice Elf's head, concealed partially by the grass around the concrete marker. "It's an easy job. Any of them we missed seeing this time, we'll probably get next time. In the six or eight visits we make before the intelligent ones can become adults and mate we always find them." ”

“ It is for the owners of land to see that its denizens are properly protected, for the disappearance of big game is an awful warning not to presume on present abundance. Some day we may hope to see the country farmer as [Pg 181] eager to preserve his game as he is now to destroy it. There needs but the pinch of scarcity and the growth of a market value for shooting to turn the present free-and-easy ways into a perhaps too rigorous protective system. ”

“ In America, as in England and on the Continent of Europe, private game preserves are so numerous it is impossible to mention more than a very few of them, unless one devotes a volume to the subject. Probably there are more than five hundred, and no list of them is "up to date" for more than one day, because the number is constantly increasing. ”

“ That is the great curse that to-day rests upon our game. When the nearest game warden is 50 miles away, and big game is only 5 miles away, it is time for that game to take to the tall timber.
But in the West, and East and South, there are many men and women who believe in reasonable conservation, and deplore destruction. We have not by any means reached the point where we can think of stopping in the making of game preserves, or forest preserves. Of the former, we have scarcely begun to make. The majority of the states of our Union know of state game preserves only by hearsay. ”

“ Judging from the rate at which the wild creatures of North America are now being destroyed, fifty years hence there will be no large game left in the United States nor in Canada, outside of rigidly protected game preserves. It is therefore the duty of every good citizen to promote the protection of forests and wild life and the creation of game preserves, while a supply of game remains. Every man who finds pleasure in hunting or fishing should be willing to spend both time and money in active work for the protection of forests, fish and game. ”

“ Very wealthy men can have private game-preserves of their own. But the average man of small or moderate means can enjoy the vigorous pastime of the chase, and indeed can enjoy wild nature, only if there are good general laws, properly enforced, for the preservation of the game and wild life, and if, furthermore, there are big parks or reserves provided for the use of all our people, like those of the Yellowstone, the Yosemite, and the Colorado.
A small herd of bison has been brought to the reserve; it is slowly increasing. ”

“ Roosevelt, an example of the better sportsman, declared: "I love hunting still, but slaughter is abhorrent to me." What really matters is the attitude of the game preserver towards the animal world; he is no true sportsman who regards everything which is not his game as vermin.
Game preservation, the artificial protection afforded to certain selected species, is unbeloved by many naturalists, but they only consider one aspect, the destruction of vermin. ”

“ The desire to kill is instinctive, and, refined under civilizing influences, produces the sportsman. The mere love of killing for the sake of doing so soon palled on people who had any conception of sport. The true theory of sport, whether in playing games or in hunting, necessarily involves the idea of a contest or trial of skill wherein there is a certain element of chance. The rapid destruction of game, consequent upon the easy mastery of nature by man, led in quite early times to the establishment of game preserves and the enactment of laws for the preservation of game. ”

“ Hunted and coursed till far too late in the season, shot and snared all the year round, without a hole or burrow wherein to hide her inconveniently large body, how long will she survive these methods save in the sacred precincts of the large game preserves whose owners—good luck to them!—drive a motor-car through the Ground Game Act? The Hare Preservation Act, the only legislation in her favour at present existant, is not worth the parchment the precious document is written on ”

“ It is also true that in all the regions of the earth that are easily penetrable by civilized man, the wild life is being killed faster than it breeds, and of necessity it is disappearing. This is why the British are now so urgently bestirring themselves to create game preserves in all the countries that they own. ”

“ Now that the best remaining game districts of Africa are rapidly coming under British control, it is a satisfaction to observe that the governing bodies and executive officers are alive to the necessity of preserving the big game from actual extinction. Excepting German East Africa, from Uganda to Cape Colony the game preserves form an almost continuous chain. ”

“ The day of the sportsman in all Africa was in that Golden Age when he, all untrammelled, might stalk the more important fauna, to say nothing of the lesser, as he listed. Now he pays heavy toll, varying with the scarcity of the quarry, and the licences are not the least part of the expenses. Of course the needful preservation of big game should, and inevitably must, lead to good results, since to husband the resources of anything is to accumulate in the long run. But the idea of artificial preservation and legislation seems to knock some of the elemental romance out of hunting. ”

“ It is the duty of every true sportsman, every farmer who owns a gun, and every lover of wild life, to enter into the campaign for the passage of bills absolutely prohibiting all traffic in wild game no matter what its origin. Of course the market hunters, the game-hogs and the game dealers will bitterly oppose them, and hire a lobby to attempt to defeat them. ”

“ Now I think that all who are lovers of the woods and fields should join in a general move to protect this wasteful slaughter of all game and game birds, no matter whether we are the so-called "pot hunter" or the "gentleman sportsman," but none will regret this unreasonable waste of game more than those who are living back in the mountains, where game is most plentiful, when it is gone. ”

“ Unlike shooting, hunting, or yachting, there is no leave to ask, licence to buy, nor costly establishment to support: the game is free and common as the light and air in which it is played,—the poor man's portion: with the poorer classes it originated, played "after hours" on village greens, and thence transplanted to patrician lawns. ”

“ Who will love the forests when they become destitute of wild life, and desolate? —Because stopping the sale of game will help bring back the game birds to us, in a few years. —Because the pace that New York and Massachusetts have set in this matter will render it easier to procure the passage of Bayne laws in other states. —Because those who legitimately desire game for their tables can be supplied from the game farms and preserves that now are coming into existence. ”

“ But wherever the population is sufficiently advanced in intelligence and character, a far preferable and more democratic way of preserving the game is by a system of public preserves, of protected nurseries and breeding-grounds, while the laws define the conditions under which all alike may shoot the game and the restrictions under which all alike must enjoy the privilege. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For considerably more than a century, the States of the American Union have enacted game-protective laws based on the principle that the wild game belongs to the People, and the people's senators, representatives and legislators generally may therefore enact laws for its protection, prescribing the manner in which it may and may not be taken and possessed. ”

“ The preservation of game and of wild life generally—aside from the noxious species—on these reserves is of incalculable benefit to the people as a whole. As the game increases in these national refuges and nurseries it overflows into the surrounding country. ”

“ Gamekeepers lived a precarious life in holes and caves. They were perpetually harried by game and vermin; held fast in steel traps, their toes were nibbled by stoats and martens; and finally, their eyes picked out by owls and kites, they were gibbeted alive on trees, head downwards, until the termination of their martyrdom. In one especially tragic case, a naturalist in spectacles dodged about painfully among the topmost branches of a wood, while a mias underneath, armed with a gun, inflicted on him dreadful wounds. ”