Report of Missouri Farmers' Week. 109 



if they are fortunate enough to have a covey of quail grow upon 

 their land will not only permit, but invite some friend to come 

 out in the fall and shoot them. The man goes out with a spike- 

 tailed dog and a double-barreled gun, finds the birds and follows 

 to a finish. Or, if one or two of them do escape, he goes home 

 and cusses for a week because he did not get them all. This is 

 a short-sighted policy on the part of the farmer whose best 

 friends these birds are. 



Experts in the Department of Agriculture have estimated, 

 after years of careful study, that each adult quail is worth 

 twenty-five dollars a year to the farmer on whose land it lives. 

 When a quail is cooked and served on a table it weighs about four 

 ounces, and the man who eats it is eating meat that is worth 

 six dollars and twenty-five cents an ounce. Can you farmers 

 afford to feed the gourmands on meat at that price, and espe- 

 cially when you don't get a penny for it? 



We are trying to get all states that have quail to enact laws 

 to stop the killing of them at all times, and the same in regard 

 to prairie chickens. The sportsmen of this country have had 

 their day; they have almost exterminated all game birds. Ninety 

 per cent and the other ten per cent will soon go unless you stop 

 all shooting. Make the shooters put away their guns for at 

 least five years and give the birds a chance to come back. There 

 are ten million shotguns at work in this country. There are in 

 round numbers one hundred million people in the United States, 

 and we claim that the other ninety million people should now 

 rise up and assert their property rights in these birds and permit 

 them to live. 



A man who has studied the ruffed grouse in domestication 

 and in its wild state for years has arrived at the conclusion that 

 each one of those birds eats two and one-half bushels of bugs 

 each summer. Yet there are men all over the country who 

 want to kill all they can find of them. They want three months 

 of open season each year and no bag limit. They want to kill 

 ten or fifteen a day all through the open season. I have heard 

 men complain bitterly that they were not allowed to kill more 

 than five or ten ruffed grouse a day. A man, as I said in the 

 beginning, can have a great deal more fun photographing birds 

 than he can in shooting them, and he has the satisfaction after- 

 wards of knowing that the birds he shot at with his camera are 

 still alive, enjoying themselves, and fulfilling the end for which 

 God placed them on the earth. 



