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THE GUIDE TO NATURE 



enemy alway seems to me, so much less 

 cruel than our human devices. Since 

 his hunting- instinct has been developed, I 

 notice he has an eye on the birds, but I 

 also Motice he is very bungling and so 

 rarely catches one that the birds do not 

 hesitate to come and nest in my yard 

 and they raise their families in practi- 

 cally absolute safety. And yet my cat 

 is as lithe and active and clever as a 

 cat can very well be. 



Please forgive my harping back to 

 this subject again but I love the birds 

 and the animals. I notice those that 

 come under my observation with won- 

 der and delight, and am convinced that 

 wanton cruelty or killing for the love 

 of killing is either abnormal to them 

 or else acquired by training from their 

 human associates. 



There — am 1 quite and absolutely 

 unfair? To those who think so I can 

 only contend that they do not know 

 animals as T do, have never watched 

 them with the same amount of sym- 

 pathy, nor allowed them to show them- 

 selves in all their native innocence and 

 beauty of character. 



Sincerely yours, 



Jank R. Cathcart. 



Are Outdoor Interests Exclusively 

 Killing? 



By coincidence several magazines de- 

 voted to outdoor life accumulated on 

 my reading table so that one evening 

 recently I examined several in suc- 

 cession. In them was brought to my 

 eyes a broadside of shotguns, rifles 

 and pistols. After reading those mag- 

 azines I felt as if I had been in the 

 armory or into a museum filled with 

 all kinds of apparatus for "playing" 

 and killing fish and shooting four- 

 footed animals. There were rifles 

 and shotguns, rods and nets and 

 barbed instruments and fictitious flies 

 without end, but strange to say I look- 

 ed in vain for one advertisement of a 

 field glass, a camera, a telescope or a 

 pocket microscope. Can it be possible 

 that the great majority of men, and a 

 liberal number of women too, are more 

 interested in killing than in seeing and 

 thinking? Now I am not saying that 

 it is wrong to go fishing for the good 

 reason that it is not. I am not sure 

 but it is permissible to use a rifle or a 

 shotgun at times on certain conditions. 



Only occasionally do I have a desire to 

 use firearms and that is when I see a 

 horde of cats in Sound Beach carrying 

 off young birds from the nest, and oc- 

 casionally one of the parents. But even 

 in that my first impressions may be 

 wrong, because the cat is acting accord- 

 ing to its nature and its instinct, and 

 probably that should not inspire me 

 with a desire to kill the cat because it 

 is killing something else. What I hope 

 to see is an intelligent interest in nature 

 eradicate as much as possible our in- 

 herited savage instincts, through which 

 we find pleasure in torturing the "play- 

 ing" fish or in filling a game bag. I do 

 not like to say that these are wrong 

 because I know many kind-hearted 

 men and women who indulge them- 

 selves in that kind of relation to the out 

 door world, but I do affirm that it is 

 not right for these magazines to make 

 so much of our outdoor life, under a 

 variety of titles, center in a "slaughter 

 of the innocents." 



Coyote Pets. 



Mulino, Oregon. 

 To the Editor: 



While living in South Dakota I had the 

 good fortune to secure at different 

 times a number of baby coyotes or 

 prairie wolves. Although not abun- 

 dant in our locality, they were occa- 

 sionally brought in alive, to show the 

 "town folks" and get the bounty of a 

 dollar or so per head, and by watching 

 my chance I now and then picked up 

 one or two before they were destroyed. 



Some of the puppies were so small 

 that they had to be fed milk with a 

 spoon, and, when they grew larger, ate 

 bread and milk with great relish. 



But as they grew they developed 

 that crafty expression so common to 

 the wolves and foxes. It was some- 

 times concealed under a look of inno- 

 cence but was nevertheless there. I 

 remember of watching one of my pets, 

 then about three months old, lying 

 with chain slack, in the tall weeds out- 

 side his kennel door. A half grown 

 chicken was picking up the crumbs too 

 small for a coyote to notice, but 

 neither did the coyote notice the 

 chicken. Nearer it came, but the pup 

 was looking in another direction, and 

 the foolish bird, becoming bolder, 

 crossed well over the dead line. Sud- 



