SECOND ANNUAL REPORT. 91 
pretense of being ‘‘interested in ornithology’’—we submit this 
question : Is it not time to call a halt? Behold the abuse that 
has grown out of your legitimate and proper work. Will vou 
attack it, seriously and at once, and abate it? The legitimate 
study of oology is one thing, but wholesale nest-robbing and bird- 
destruction, in the name of oology, is quite another. 
HUNTING CONTESTS, OR ‘‘ SIDE’’ Hunts.—Of all the influ- 
ences now operating for the destruction of our birds and mam- 
mals, the most outrageous is the so-called ‘‘ side hunt.’’ A side 
hunt may properly be defined as a game of murder, in which a 
body: of particularly brutal (or thoughtless) men, sometimes 
more than a hundred in number, and usually known as a ‘‘ gun 
club,’’ choose sides, arm themselves with guns and an unlimited 
quantity of ammunition, go forth on a given day, and for a fixed 
number of days shoot many kinds of wild creatures, ‘‘ for 
points.’’ At the close of the slaughter, the victims are collected, 
counted according to the ‘‘ points’’ agreed upon for each spe- 
cies, and the side which has accomplished the greatest amount of 
butchery is declared the winner. 
The character of the men who engage in such contests—and 
of course find pleasure in them—may be gauged by the fact that 
they are not above killing barrels of herons, woodpeckers, 
crows, jays, red squirrels, chipmunks azd skunks, and counting 
up the points allotted to each. We have read much of the do- 
ings of savages, and seen a little, but so far as known, the side 
hunt ‘descends a step lower than any hunting operations accred- 
ited to the Digger Indians, Dog-Ribs, Apaches, or any other 
savage tribe, red or black. Organized killing for the mere sake 
of killing—so far as about one-half the results are concerned—is 
a pastime which, when indulged in in a country like ours, ought 
on retrospection to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of any 
self-respecting man. We know of but few of the predatory 
animals that indulge in such practices, those which have come 
under our observation being a few particularly blood-thirsty indi- 
viduals amongst the gray wolf species, the tiger, weasel, skunk 
and sheep-killing dog. Even with these, however, the killers gen- 
erally confine their wholesale operation to victims of a single 
species ; but the side-hunter shoots nearly everything that he 
can discover. 
