WILD LIFE ' PROTECTION— AN URGENT PROBLEM 



By Ernest P. Walker 

 Assistant Director, National Zooloffical Park 



[With 4 plates] 



When the white man first reached America he found a country 

 generally abound infj in biir ^ame, upland birds, waterfowl, fur 

 bearers, fish, turtles, and fro«;s, which could be used as food or in 

 other ways. It was necessary for him to utilize these and he did 

 so with profit to himself. In his settlement of the country, he 

 destroyed the forests, plowed the prairies, drained the swamps, 

 grazed his stock on the hills to the injury of the forage, and gen- 

 erally greatly depleted the wild stock and restricted the areas avail- 

 able to the wild forms that first made his existence on the continent 

 possible. The condition is essentially the same throughout the world 

 wherever man has settled. Now, man's greatly increased progeny 

 still has the desire for the wild life or its products, but some forms 

 have been exterminated and nearly all have been so far reduced 

 that the supply is far short of the demand. Some people value 

 animal life for itself, others for the recreation of taking it, others 

 for the profit to be derived from it, and others for the beauty or 

 usefulness of its products. 



Some of the depletion and restriction of the habitats has been 

 inevitable, but much has been the result of thoughtlessness and a 

 disregard for the future and can be remedied. The so-called 

 " development of natural resources " has all too often consisted of 

 taking what nature has supplied without providing for a continu- 

 ance of the resource. It has been little less than exploiting or loot- 

 ing and was never development in a true sense. The time lias now 

 arrived when real development work must be carried out if our 

 wild life resources are to be perpetuated in such quantities as to 

 be of material value and benefit to us. 



Not only the United States and its possessions but the remainder 

 of the world has large tracts of so-called " waste land " well adapted 

 to raising different kinds of wild life that are needed by mankind 



'The term "wild life" as herein used refers to all forms of wild verti'bratcs. 



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