Natural bounty

“ The bounty laws have always been a good thing for the trapper as they have helped much towards making his occupation a lucrative one, but, as before explained, it is doubtful if it has ever, in any marked degree, tended to decrease the numbers of predatory animals. ”

“ The history of development in the west gives overwhelming evidence of their weakness. Even when the bounty is offered for reduction of vermin, it is often misapplied. Numerous cases are on record where the bounty became a stimulant to enterprise in raising the very animals to be destroyed. Even rewards for the arrest of criminals seem sometimes to create a body of men who thrive by fostering a criminal class, with a hope of sometime getting a profit from arrests. As a means of stimulating general industry they are too unstable to be satisfactory. ”

“ With every year and every million acres broken up, not only will the need for bounty diminish, but the present mistrustful breed of farmer will be a step nearer to extinction. Shrewd, naturally conservative, and somewhat intolerant of anything so dreamy as a national point of view, they will not live for ever. The up-growing farmer will not be like them, and about the time the need for bounty is vanishing the new farmer will be in possession. ”

“ The old farmer has learned the value of soil analysis, though with reluctance and suspicion, and he has learned to spray his orchards to 227preserve them from pests whose existence he did not suspect. At this moment science is advising him to put a bounty on the head of the turkey buzzard instead of imposing a fine for killing it. ”

“ In most states there is a bounty on wolf and coyote scalps but the raising of them for the purpose of the bounty would not work—the bounty would not be paid if county officials knew from what source they came. ”

“ It is astonishing what a different course of reasoning men often pursue on subjects exactly similar without being able to perceive their own inconsistency. On running over in one's mind some of the acts of the British legislature, how many cases does one find where it has acted on a principle directly the reverse of that on which it established the bounty law; cases which areas vehemently applauded by the common tribe of politicians, as the bounty law itself! ”

“ This is the true state of the bounty upon corn: it certainly and necessarily increases our crops, and can never lessen them but by our own permission.
That, notwithstanding the bounty, there have been, from time to time, years of scarcity, cannot be denied. But who can regulate the seasons? In the dearest years we owe to the bounty that they have not been dearer. We must always suppose part of our ground sown for our own consumption, and part in hope of a foreign sale. ”

“ Our bounty, like a drop of water, disappears when diffused too widely. ”

“ As the Supreme Court of Michigan says, it is a bounty law, and nothing more; a law dictated by public policy and the general good, like a law offering a bounty of fifty cents for the killing of every wolf or other destructive animal. ”

“ What is called a bounty is sometimes no more than a drawback, and consequently is not liable to the same objections as what is properly a bounty. The bounty, for example, upon refined sugar exported, may be considered as a drawback of the duties upon the brown and muscovado sugars, from which it is made. The bounty upon wrought silk exported, a drawback of the duties upon raw and thrown silk imported. ”

“ While I think that the bounty on wildcats and weasel is all right, I do not think a bounty on fox and mink at all necessary. The high price their fur brings will induce the trapper to take all that the bounty would induce him to do, and at a time when the fur will bring more than a great deal of early caught furs would bring, including the bounty. ”

“ But the only effective bounty law must be placed on the game man, in the way of cutting his bag limit of birds for a single day and the season in two, and placing a closed season of five years on deer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Bounties or, as they may equally well be termed, grants are often given, more especially in new countries, for the destruction of beasts of prey; in the United States and some other countries, bounties have been given for tree-planting; France has given bounties to encourage the Newfoundland fisheries. ”

“ I thought it more cruel to permit them to grow tame and gentle, and then suddenly to turn and murder them by thousands, than to give them the fair show that our game has in our forests, to let them be free and as wild as nature made them, and to let the hunter pay for them by the pleasure and work of pursuing them. ”

“ Theoretically, a bounty should be high enough to insure the destruction of at least a majority of the individuals during the first season, but it has already been shown that scarcely a single State has been able to maintain a high rate for more than a few months, and it is evident that the higher the rate, the greater the danger of fraud. ”

“ But the justice of Varnhagen's indictment is perhaps most forcibly illustrated in the time and labor saving contrivances of modern civilization, as contrasted with the enormous waste incident to the evils of life under abnormal circumstances.
The apparent shiftlessness of animals and savages is often due to their confidence in the spontaneous bounty of Nature. Apes will nibble and fling away dozens of wild figs for one they eat, well knowing that the forests will continue to produce millions of similar fruits. ”

“ Nature has furnished him with various means for satisfying this appetite, and yet though she has bestowed on him strength, cunning, agility, and all the necessary requisites for discovering, pursuing, seizing, and devouring his prey, he not unfrequently dies of hunger; for man having become his declared enemy, and put a price upon his head, he is obliged to take refuge in the forests, where the few wild animals he can meet with escape him by the swiftness of their course, and whom he cannot surprise in sufficient quantities to satisfy his rapacity. ”

“ The enemy in his close pursuit finds other prey to satisfy his hunger, like the gold prospector who in his quest may come across non-auriferous minerals which tend to assuage his financial longings; and so an average of destruction is reached, and none alone are compelled to be "confessors" to nature's inexorable rule. ”

“ The bounty is so indirect, that the poor fisherman loses sight of it. It is paid to such persons, in such places, and at such periods, as to disappoint its good effects; passing through so many hands, and paying so many profits to each, it is almost absorbed. The encouragement, too, is greatest in successful years, when least needed; and is least in bad fishing seasons, when it is most needed. It is a very perplexed, embarrassing regulation to the officers of Government and to the exporter ”

“ It varies in-door with out-door work, and so lightens it. It prevents their being cut off from the teachings of Nature. Nature teaches those who solicit her bounty in many ways. They discover on what conditions she rewards those who solicit that bounty with knowledge and importunity. They are brought to conform their practice and their feelings to those conditions; to take into [Pg 168] consideration the chances that attend their best directed efforts; and to bear the little disappointments, as well as to rejoice over the little successes, incidental to the cultivation of the soil. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No doubt but that these states look upon the hundreds of thousands of dollars put into the pockets of their citizens through the trapper and his products, the same as they would upon equal amount of money brought into their respective commonwealths through any other industry. I believe it would have been well to have had a bounty of $2.00 on a wild cat, and 50 cents or $1.00 on a weasel, and the same on hawks. ”

“ When a nation allows any one kind of natural resource to be squandered it must suffer a real, positive loss; yet substitutes of another kind can generally be found. But when wild life is squandered it does not go elsewhere, like squandered money ”

“ There are, indeed, brute destroyers, beasts and birds and insects of prey—all animal life feeds upon, and, of course, destroys other life,—but this destruction is balanced by compensations. It is, in fact, the very means by which the existence of one tribe of animals or of vegetables is secured against being smothered by the encroachments of another; and the reproductive powers of species, which serve as the food of others, are always proportioned to the demand they are destined to supply. Man pursues his victims with reckless destructiveness ”

“ And in open glades, where for some reason or other the forest fails, tall grasses and other aspiring herbs run up apace towards the free air of heaven. Elsewhere, creepers struggle up to the sun over the stems and branches of stronger bushes or trees, which they often choke and starve by monopolizing at last all the available carbon and sunlight. And so throughout; the struggle for life goes on just as ceaselessly and truly among these unconscious combatants as among the lions and tigers of the tropical jungle, or among the human serfs of the overstocked market. ”

“ When the stream of life, through some favoring condition, breaks through its natural checks and bounds, and inundates and destroys whole provinces of other forms, as when the locusts, the [237] forest-worms, the boll-weevil, the currant-worm, the potato beetle, unduly multiply and devastate fields and forests and the farmer's crops, what do we witness but Nature's sheer excess and intemperance? Life as we usually see it is the result of a complex system of checks and counter-checks. The carnivorous animals are a check on the herbivorous; the hawks and owls are a check on the birds and fowls ”

“ He may in greed of competition extirpate the game of the forest, the fishes of the sea. He may destroy the exquisite balance of nature, by shooting down or entrapping the sweet birds of the air, till his vines and his harvests are devastated by the insects on which they feed. ”

“ A striking example of law-making defeating its own purpose is furnished in India, where a bounty offered for killing poisonous serpents has led the natives to breed the reptiles as a source of income. ”

“ The author further shows that while bounty legislation has existed in the United States for two centuries and a half, has called for an enormous expenditure, and has been thoroughly tested in most of the States and Territories, bounties have not resulted in the extermination of a single species, and have failed even in the island of Bermuda, which has an area of less than twenty square miles. The larger animals are gradually becoming rare, but it is through the growth of settlement rather than by the operation of bounties ”

“ On the other hand, to-day we deplore the loss of many fine animals, some of which have perished from unknown causes, or from natural changes in their environment; the remainder, alas! have been directly harried out of existence by man, either for food—for the sake of the paltry commercial value of their skins or carcases—or (still less excusably) in sheer wasteful wanton destruction, the hunters killing for killing's sake. ”

“ The Address ended with a plea for conservation, and pointed out that the only class of people who could possibly be benefitted under present conditions were those who were ready to destroy both the capital and interest of any natural resources for the sake of snatching a big and immediate, but really criminal, profit. ”

“ Advocates of the bounty system seem to think that almost any species can be exterminated in a short time if the premiums are only high enough. Extermination, however, is not a question of months, but of years, and it is a mistake to suppose that it can be accomplished rapidly except under extraordinary circumstances, as in the case of the buffalo and the fur seal. ”

“ Man has won out, and might is right, as since the dawn of creation; but to the onlooker, to the lover of nature and the animal world it is a terrible, a hopeless thing.
One cannot at present leave the tourist line of travel in the East without at once encountering evidence of the wholesale direct slaughter of wild life, or its no less certain extermination by the elimination of the haunts and the food plants of the various beasts and birds. ”

“ The increase of one harmless species may result, through the drain upon food supplies, never an unlimited commodity in nature, in the destruction of many other plants and animals upon which other creatures depend. Nature has laws which are not to be tampered with. ”

“ If these hunters were savages armed only with bows and arrows, then the wild creatures would have a chance for their lives. Besides, savages do not kill for sport, nor do they purposely destroy Nature's most valuable gifts to them.
The forest that has been cut down will grow again. The soil that has been made poor will, if let alone, sometime become fertile again. But those species of birds, animals, and fish which we have completely destroyed will never be restored to us. ”