No. e. DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE. 545 



and probably died. The acceptance of the opinions of thousands of 

 men who know these facts b}^ experience would be wise and expedient 

 in framing these laws. In our county (Clinton), 161 bucks were 

 killed last season and the number of hunters was six or seven hun- 

 dred, estimated, or a hunter for every thousand acres of the area 

 of the county. In 1910, the number killed was 140, and the excess of 

 last year's sport due, not to the fact that there were more bucks 

 in the county, but to the tracking snow that coutiuue-d almost through 

 the entire fifteen days of the season; and the season of 1910 was 

 not so favored, and had the smaller number of deer slain. I have 

 talked with scores of hunters, probably with hundreds, and know 

 the trend of opinion of all classes of men who seek sport of this 

 kind in the woods, and nineteen out of twenty are positive in the 

 opinion that the most wise, just and effective law would provide 

 for the killing of one deer by each hunter, regardless of the sex 

 thereof, leaving the hunter to secure either a buck or doe as the 

 opportunity axforded. This A'iew I have derived from hundreds of men 

 and ranging from twenty to seventy-five or eighty years of age. More- 

 over, it does not seem to them that the section that requires a hunter 

 to see the horns before shooting at a de.er is in any sense, or least- 

 wise only in a limited way, a protection to the life of those who are 

 in the woods in the hunting season, but that the many sad acci- 

 dents were formerly due to carelessness and to the excitable state 

 of mind of certain persons who lack self-control and nerve; and 

 that later the hunters have learned to be more upon their guard and 

 self-restraint and wear caps or clothing that will at once distinguish 

 them from deer or other animals. Sad experience has taught more 

 care and forethought, so that accidents or shooting into the bush at 

 some indefinable object are almost certainly averted, simply by the 

 schooling that has been experienced. Any man that would shoot 

 an indistinct object in the bush upon a nervous impulse would not 

 be so deliberate in any emergency, as to look first whether it has 

 horns or not, and such persons should be barred from hunting under 

 any and all circumstances. Three years ago I noticed some bear 

 tracks in the snow in a remote part of West Keating township, in 

 my own county, and as a bear had been shot a few days before, 

 within a short distance of these tracks, by hunters to whom I showed 

 his "signs," in the snow and near a spring, I got a Winchester from 

 one of my men, then prospecting in that locality, and standing in 

 a small natural clearing where many tracks appeared, I noticed, just 

 beyond, the brush shaken b}' some object moving therein, and with 

 a slight nervous tremor, but a self imposed injunction to "hold on 

 quaker" and be cool, I waited for the object to appear in the clear- 

 ing with a determination to kill a bear; but, very soon one of my 

 men with dinner pail in hand and returning to camp half an hour 

 early emerged from the brush. I didn't shoot but severely rebuked him 

 for not being a bear. Now, what would have been the result if I 

 had fired into the oak brush two or three times? Probably, I would 

 have killed a man for whom I had a very kindly friendship. More- 

 over, the theory that the present law is effective towards the preser- 

 vation and increase or propagation of deer is erroneous as avowed 

 by all the hunters, with one or two exceptions, with whom I have con- 

 versed on this subject; inasmuch as all claim and affirm most posi- 



35— G— 1911 



