THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR BIRDS AND MAMMALS: 
A REPORT ON THE RESULTS OF AN INQUIRY. 
By WILLIAM T. HORNADAY. 
Unless man is willing to accept a place in the list of predatory 
animals which have no other thought than the wolfish instinct to 
slay every living species save their own, he is bound by the un- 
written laws of civilization to protect from annihilation the beasts 
and birds that still beautify the earth, and still make it inter- 
esting. 
The only way to save our birds and mammals from annihi- 
lation is to arouse an active national sentiment in favor of their 
preservation. During all these years of destruction—in the 
course of which the state of Florida, once marvellously rich in 
bird life, has been swept almost as clean of birds as is the Colo- 
rado desert—we have witnessed the strange spectacle of all 
our zoologists (save a very few) wholly engrossed in their studies, 
and leaving to the sportsmen the task of law-making and game 
preservation. Worse than that, there are those who will even 
accuse the oologists of setting a pace for the juvenile army of 
nest-robbers that now takes the field every spring. The orni- 
thologists of Massachusetts and of New York, anda few of the 
active members of the American Ornithologists’ Union and the 
Audubon Society, really have taken a hand in the enactment of 
laws for the protection of birds generally. Doubtless others will 
do likewise ; but there is no escape from the hard fact that, asa 
body, our ornithologists and mammalogists, our scientific mu- 
seums, the professors of natural history in our higher institutions 
of learning,—in fact, the very men most deeply interested in the 
preservation of our fauna,—have been strangely, almost fatally, 
apathetic regarding the existence of the creatures they claim to 
love. Their love of natural history has been so great that in the 
intensity of their studies, and in the increase of their ‘‘ material’’ 
for purposes of study, they have not noticed the carnage going 
on around them ! 
