No. 4.] DECREASE OF BIRDS. 519 



Suggestions regarding the Enactment and Enforcement of 

 Legislation against Excessive Hunting and Shooting. 



Twenty-five correspondents urge the enforcement of the 

 laws now on the statute books as the sovereign remedy for 

 all ills now apparent. These statutes are certainly wise in 

 the main, but some of them are not sustained by public sen- 

 timent, and therefore are not respected. Such is the law 

 forbidding Sunday fishing. Sunday hunting also is quite 

 freely indulged in, in localities where the deputies of the 

 Fish and Game Commission are not at hand to enforce the 

 law. Local authorities do little to enforce the game laws. 

 Legislatures, while giving fish and game commissions full 

 authority to enforce the law, usually hamper its enforcement 

 by granting inadequate appropriations ; so that such commis- 

 sions are obliged to depend much on the services of unpaid 

 officers, who can devote comparatively little time to their 

 ungracious and thankless task. Notwithstanding this handi- 

 cap, the officers of the Massachusetts Fish and Game Com- 

 mission secured fifty-five arrests in 1904 for infractions of 

 the Sunday law. The fines paid amounted to six hundred 

 and ten dollars, and only nine cases were discharged or filed. 



Notwithstanding the fact that the Massachusetts commis- 

 sioners have been very efficient, and are now enforcing the 

 law better than ever before, fifty-eight persons report that 

 the laws are either indifferently enforced, or not enforced at 

 all, in their sections ; fifty-seven , however, report that they 

 are well enforced : thirty-two say " fairly well ;" and nine- 

 teen "as well as possible under the circumstances." Some 

 report that the laws are "respected" in many of the country 

 towns. The farming population of Massachusetts is gen- 

 erally a law-abiding class ; but the laws would be better 

 respected if better known. If every farmer in the Com- 

 monwealth could have mailed to him a printed copy of the 

 bird and game laws, there would be fewer infractions of 

 these statutes by the rural population. Probably not one 

 person in ten knows these laws. All hope of an} r better 

 enforcement of the bird laws by this commission lies in the 

 direction of making the force of wardens larger and more 



