The game laws of North Carolina form a droll crazy-quilt of local and state measures, effective and ineffective. In 1909, a total of 77 local game laws were enacted, and only two of state-wide application. During the ten years ending in 1910, a total of 316 game laws were enacted! She sedulously endeavors to protect her quail, which do not migrate, but in Currituck County she persistently maintains the bloodiest slaughter-pen for waterfowl that exists anywhere on the Atlantic Coast. There is no bag limit on waterfowl, and unlimited spring shooting. So far as waterfowl are concerned, conditions could hardly be worse, except by the use of punt guns. Doves, larks and robins are shot and eaten as "game" from November 1 to March 1! Twenty-one counties have local restrictions on the sale of game, but the state at large has only one,—on quail.
The market gunners of Currituck Sound are a scourge and a pest to the wild-fowl life of the Atlantic Coast. For their own money profit, they slaughter by wholesale the birds that annually fly through twenty-two states. It is quite useless to suggest anything to North Carolina in modern game laws. As long as a killable bird remains, she will not stop the slaughter. Her standing reply is "It brings a lot of money into Currituck County; and the people want the money." Even the members of the sportsmen's clubs can shoot wild fowl in Currituck County, quite without limit; and I am told that the privilege often is abused. Quite recently I heard of a member of one of the clubs who shot 164 ducks and geese in two days!
Apparently any suggestions made to North Carolina would not be treated seriously, especially if they would tend really to elevate the sport of game shooting, or better protect the game. There is, however, a melancholy interest attached to the framing of good game laws, whether they ever are likely to be adopted or not. Here is the duty of North Carolina:
It is quite wrong for the people of North Carolina to hold grudges against northern members of the ducking clubs of Currituck for the passage of the Bayne law. They had nothing whatever to do with it, and I can say this because I was in a position which enabled me to know.
North Dakota:In 1911, this sovereign state enacted a law prohibiting the use of automobiles in hunting wild-fowl; also rifles. North Dakota was the first state to recognize officially the fact that the use of automobiles in hunting is a serious menace to some forms of wild life. Beyond all question, the machines do indeed bring an extra number of birds within reach of the gun! They increase the annual slaughter; and it is right and necessary to prohibit by law their use in hunting game of any kind.
In Putman County, New York, I have seen them in action. A load of three or four gunners is whirled up to a likely mountain-side for ruffed grouse, and presently the banging begins. After an hour or so spent in combing out the birds, the hunters jump in, whirl away in a dust-cloud to another spot two miles away, and "bang-bang-bang" again. After that, a third locality; and so on, covering six or eight times the territory that a man in a buggy, or on foot, could possibly shoot over in the same time!
North Dakota has done well, in the passage of that act. On certain other matters, she is not so sound.
For instance:
It is to the credit of the state that antelope are absolutely protected until 1920, and an unlimited close season has been accorded the quail, dove and swan.
Ohio:I think that Ohio comes the nearest of all the states to being gameless. With but slight exceptions her laws are about as correct as those of most other states, but the desire to "kill" is so strong, and the majority of her gunners are so thoroughly selfish about their "rights" that the game has ruthlessly been swept away according to law! Ohio is a striking example of the deplorable results of legalized slaughter. The spirit of Ohio is like that of North Carolina. Her "sportsmen" will not have an automatic gun law! Oh, no! "Limit the bag, shorten the season, and the gun won't matter!"
To-day, the visible game supply of Ohio does not amount to anything; and when the last game bird of that state falls before the greediest shooter, we shall say, "A gameless state is just what you deserve!"
It is useless to make any suggestions to Ohio. Her shooting Shylocks want the last pound of flesh from wild life, and I think they will get it very soon. Ohio is in the area of barren states. The seed stock has been too thoroughly destroyed to be recuperated. I think that Ohio's last noteworthy exploit in lawmaking for the preservation (!) of her game was in 1904, when she put all her shore birds into the list of killable game, and bravely prohibited the shooting of doves on the ground! Great is Ohio in game conservation!
Oklahoma:For a state so young, the wild-life laws of Oklahoma are in admirable shape; but it is reasonably certain that there, as elsewhere, the game is being killed much faster than it is breeding. The new commonwealth must arouse, and screw up the brakes much tighter.
Recently, an observing friend told me that on a trip of 250 miles westward from Lawton and back again, watching sharply for game all the way, he saw only five pinnated grouse! And this in a good season for "prairie chickens."
Oklahoma is wise in giving long protection to her quail, and "wild pigeon," and such protection should be made equally effective in the case of the dove. She is wise in rigidly enforcing her law against the exportation of game.
The Wichita National Bison herd, near Cache, now contains forty head of bison, all in good condition. The nucleus herd consisted of fifteen head presented by the New York Zoological Society in 1907.
Oregon:The results of the efforts that have been made by Oregon to provide special laws for each individual shooter are painful to contemplate. Like North Carolina, Oregon has attempted the impossible task of pleasing everybody, and at the same time protecting her wild life. The two propositions can be blended together about as easily as asphalt and water. The individual shooter desires laws that will permit him to shoot—when he pleases, where he pleases, and what he pleases! If you meet those conditions all over a great state, then it is time to bid farewell to the game; for it surely is doomed.
No, decidedly no! Do not attempt to pass game laws that will "please everybody." 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.
As a game protecting state, Pennsylvania is a close second to New York and Massachusetts. She protects all native game from sale; she has the courage to prohibit aliens from owning guns; she bars out automatic shot-guns in hunting; she makes refuges for deer, and feeds her quail in winter, and she permits the killing of no female deer, or fawns with horns less than three inches in length. Her splendid State Game Commission is fighting hard for a hunter's license law, and will win the fight for it at the next session of the legislature (1913).
But there are certain things that Pennsylvania should do:
It is strange to see one of the oldest of the states lagging in game protection, far behind such new states as New Mexico and Oklahoma; but South Carolina does lag. It is time for her to consider her position, and reform.
South Dakota:Unless South Dakota wishes to repeat the folly of such states as Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri and Ohio, she needs to be up and doing. If her people want a gameless state, except for migratory waterfowl, all they need do is to slumber on, and they surely will have it. Why wait until greedy sportsmen have killed the last game bird of the state before seriously taking the matter in hand? In one act, all the shortcomings of the present laws can be corrected.
South Dakota needs no Bayne law, because she prohibits at all times the sale or exportation of all wild game.
Tennessee:In wild life protection, Tennessee has much to do. She made her start late in life, and what she needs to do is to draft with care and enact with cheerful alacrity certain necessary amendments.
We notice that there are open seasons for blackbirds, robins, doves and squirrels! It seems incredible; but it is true.
Behold the blackbird as a "game" bird, with a lawful open season from September 1 to January 1. Consider its stately carriage, its rapid flight on the wing, its running and hiding powers when attacked. As a test of marksmanship, as the real thing for the expert wing shot, is it not great? Will not any self-respecting dog be proud to point or retrieve them? And what flesh for the table!
Fancy an able-bodied sportsman going out in a fifty-dollar hunting suit, carrying a fifteen-dollar gun behind a seven-dollar dog, and returning with a glorious bag of twenty-five blackbirds! Or robins! Or doves! Proud indeed, would we be to belong (which we don't) to a club of "sportsmen" who go out shooting blackbirds, and robins, and foolish little doves, as "game!" "Game" indeed, are those birds,—for little lads of seven who do not know better; but not for boys of twelve who have in their veins any inheritance of sporting blood. (I am proud of the fact that at twelve years of age,—and ever so keen to "go hunting,"—I knew without being told that squirrels and doves were not real "game" for real boys.)
The killers of doves, squirrels, blackbirds and robins belong in the same class as the sparrow-and-linnet-killing Italians of Venice, Milan and Turin, and in that company we will leave them.
Tennessee needs:
I remember well when the great battle was fought in Texas by the gallant men and women of the State Audubon Society, to compel the people of Texas to learn the economic value to agriculture and cotton of the insectivorous birds. The name of the splendid Brigadier-General who led the Army of the Defense was Capt. M.B. Davis. That was in 1903.
Since that great fight was won, Texas has been a partly reformed state, at times quite jealous of her bird life; but still she tolerates spring shooting and has not made adequate close seasons for her waterfowl; which is wrong. To-day, the people of Texas do not need to be told that forty-three species of birds feed on the cotton boll weevil; for they know it.
On the whole, and for a southern state, the wild-life laws of Texas are in fairly good shape. On account of the absence of game-scourge markets, a Bayne law is not so imperatively necessary there as in certain other states. All the game of the state is protected from sale.
We do assert, however, that if robins are slaughtered as F.L. Crow, the former Atlantan asserts, all robin shooting should be forever stopped; that the pinnated grouse should be given a seven-year close season, and that doves should be taken off the list of game birds and perpetually protected, both for economic and sentimental reasons, and also because the too weak and confiding dove is not a "game" bird for red-blooded men.
The laws of Utah are far from being up to the requirements of the present hour. One strange thing has happened in Utah.
When I spent a week in Salt Lake City in 1888, and devoted some time to inquiring into game conditions, the laws of the state were very bad. At the mouth of Bear River, ducks were being slaughtered for the markets by the tens of thousands. The cold-blooded, wide open and utterly shameless way in which it was being done, right at the doors of Salt Lake City, was appalling.
At the same time, the law permitted the slaughter of spotted fawns. I saw a huge drygoods box filled to the top with the flat skins of slaughtered innocents, 260 in number, that a rascal had collected and was offering at fifty cents each. In reply to a question as to their use, he said: "I tink de sportsmen like 'em for to make vests oud of." He lived at Rawlins, Wyo.
After a long and somnolent period, during which hundreds of thousands of ducks, geese, brant and other birds had been slaughtered for market at the Bear River shambles and elsewhere, the state awoke sufficiently to abate a portion of the disgrace by passing a bag-limit law (1897).
And then came Nature's punishment upon Utah for that duck slaughter. The ducks of Great Salt Lake became afflicted with a terrible epidemic disease (intestinal coccidiosis) which swept off thousands, and stopped the use of Utah ducks as food! It was a "duck plague," no less. It has prevailed for three years, and has not yet by any means been stamped out. It seems to be due to the fact that countless thousands of ducks have been feeding on the exposed alluvial flats at the mouth of the creek that drains off the sewage of Salt Lake City. The conditions are said to be terrible.
To-day, Utah is so nearly destitute of big game that the subject is hardly worthy of mention. Of her upland game birds, only a fraction remains, and as her laws stand to-day, she is destined to become in the near future a gameless state. In a dry region like this, the wild life always hangs on by a slender thread, and it is easy to exterminate it!
If Utah proposes to save even a remnant of her wild life for posterity, she must be up and doing.
Vermont:In view of all conditions, it must be stated that the game laws of Vermont are, with but slight exceptions, in good condition. It is a pleasure to see that there is no spring shooting; that there is no "open" season of slaughter for the moose, caribou, wood-duck, swan, upland plover, dove or rail; that no buck deer with antlers less than three inches long may be killed; and that there is a law under which damages by deer to growing crops may be assessed and paid for by the county in which they occur. Moreover, if there is to be any killing of game, her bag limits are not extravagant. All the game protected by the state is immune from sale for food purposes, but preserve-reared game may legally be sold. We recommend the following new measures:
Vermont's great success in introducing and colonizing deer is both interesting and valuable. Fifty years ago, she had no wild deer, because the species had been practically exterminated. In 1875, thirteen deer were imported from the Adirondacks and set free in the mountains. The increase has been enormous. In 1909 the number of deer killed for the year was about 5,311, which was possible without adversely affecting the herds. It is a striking object-lesson in restoring the white-tailed deer to its own, and it will be found more fully described in chapter XXIV.
Virginia:Virginia is far below the position that she should occupy in wild-life conservation. To set her house in order, and come up to the level of the states that have been born during the past twenty years, she must bestir herself in these ways:
She should adopt at once a comprehensive code of game laws, and clean her house in one siege, instead of fiddling and fussing with all these matters one by one, through a series of ten long, weary years. The time for puttering with game protection has gone by. It is now time to make short cuts to comprehensive results, and save the game before it is too late.
Washington:The state of Washington still flatters herself that she has all kinds of big game to kill,—moose, antelope, goat, sheep, caribou and deer. Evidently this is on the theory that so long as a species is not extinct, it is "legal" and right to pursue it with rifles during a specified "open season."
The people of Washington need to be told that conditions have greatly changed, and it is now high time to put on the brakes. It is time for them to realize that if they wait any longer for the sportsmen to take the initiative in securing the enactment of really adequate preservation laws, all their big game will be dead before those laws are born! Every man shrinks from cutting off his own pet privilege.
Some of the game laws of Washington are up to date; and her big-game laws look all right to the unaided eye, but are not. Her bird laws are a chaotic jumble of local exceptions and special privileges. As a net result of all her shortcomings, the remnant of a once fine fauna of big game and feathered game is surely being exterminated according to law. A few local exceptions will not disprove the general truthfulness of this assertion.
Ten years ago a few men in Seattle resented the idea of outside co-operation in the protection of Washington game. They said they were abundantly able to take care of it; but the march of events has proven that they overestimated their capacity. To-day the wild-life laws of that state are only half baked. Come what may to me, I shall set down without malice the things that the great and admirable State of Washington should do to set her house in order. It is not good for the resourceful and progressive men of the Great Northwest to be clear behind the times in these matters.
Stop local game legislation, and enact a code of laws covering the entire state, uniformly. County legislation is twenty years behind the times!
Considering the fact that West Virginia contains no plague-spot city for the consumption of commercial wild game, that the sale of all game is prohibited at all times, and the game of the state may not be exported for sale elsewhere, the wild life of West Virginia is reasonably secure from the market gunner,—if an adequate salaried warden force is provided. Without such a force her game must continue to be destroyed in the future as in the past to supply the markets of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. The deer law is excellent, and the non-game birds, and the dove and wood-duck are perpetually protected.
One fly in the ointment is—spring shooting; which for ducks, geese and brant continues from September 1 to April 20. Unfortunately the law enacted in 1875 against spring shooting has been repealed, and so has the resident hunting license law (1911).
In view of the impossibility of imagining a good reason for the repeal of a good law, we recommend:
In spite of the fierce fight made in 1910-11 by the saloon-element game-shooters of Milwaukee for the control of the wild-life situation, and the repeal of the best protective laws of the state, the Army of Defense once more defeated the Allied Destroyers, and drove them off the field. Once more it was proven that when The People are aroused, they are abundantly able to send the steam roller over the enemies of wild life.
Alphabetically, Wisconsin may come near the end of the roll-call; but by downright merit in protection, she comes mighty close to the head of the list of states. Her slate of "Work to be done" is particularly clean; and she has our most distinguished admiration. Her force of game wardens is not a political-machine force. It amounts to something. The men who get within it undergo successfully a civil service examination that certainly separates the sheep from the goats. For particulars address Dr. T.S. Palmer, Department of Agriculture, Washington.
According to the standards that have been dragging along previous to this moment, Wisconsin has a good series of game laws. But the hour for a Reformation of ideas and principles has struck. We heard it first in April, 1911. The wild life of America must not be exterminated according to law, contrary to law, or in the absence of law! Wisconsin must take a fresh grip on her game situation, or it will get away from her, after all.
The State of Wyoming once had a magnificent heritage of game. It embraced the Rocky Mountain species, and also those of the great plains. First and last, the state has worked hard to protect her wild life, and hold the killing of it down to a decent basis.
As far back as 1889, I met on the Shoshone River a very wide-awake warden, actually "on his job," who was maintained by a body of private citizens headed by Col. Pickett and known as the Northern Wyoming Game Protective Association. And even then we saw that the laws were too liberal for the game. In one man's cold-storage dug-out we saw enough sheep, deer and elk meat to subsist a company of hungry dragoons, all killed and possessed according to law.
In the protection of her mountain game, Wyoming has had a hard task. In the Yellowstone Park between 1889 and 1894, the poachers for the taxidermists of Livingston and elsewhere slaughtered 270 bison out of 300; and Howell was the only man caught. England can protect game in far-distant mountains and wildernesses; but America can not,—or at least we don't! With us, men living in remote places who find wild game about them say "To h--- with the law!" They kill on the sly, in season and out of season, females and males; and the average local jury simply will not convict the average settler who is accused of such a trifling indiscretion as killing game out of season when he "needs the meat."
And so, with laws in full force protecting females, the volume of big game steadily disappears, everywhere west of the Alleghanies where the law permits big-game hunting! An interesting chapter might be written on game exterminated according to law.
The deadly defects in the protection of western big game are:
From Farmers' Bulletin No. 510, U-S. Dept. of Agriculture
STATES AND PROVINCES WHICH REQUIRE RESIDENTS TO OBTAIN HUNTING LICENSES, 1912
In Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma and Rhode Island an additional fee of 10 to 20 cents is charged for issuing the license.
Inclosed names indicate States which permit residents to hunt on their own land without license. Nova Scotia has a $5 resident license and exempts landowners.
Note that many of the States adopt the French method of exempting landowners, while some, particularly in the West follow the English method of requiring everyone who hunts to obtain a license.
Elsewhere there appears a statement regarding the elk of Jackson Hole, and the efforts made and being made to save them. At this point we are interested in the game of Wyoming as a whole.