288 REPORT OF ONTARIO GAME No. 52 



guard that can be devised by the state for the protection of human 

 life in the woods, for almost all the hunting accidents, which on this 

 continent are so lamentably numerouB as to be almost a public scandal, 

 occur through snapshooting at a moving object whose nature, even, 

 cannot be discerned. 



That such a law would be viewed b}^ many in this Province as a 

 disagreeable innovation is probable ; but it must be remembered that all 

 innovations, from the umbrella to the telegraph, have met with opposi- 

 tion at the hand's of a prejudiced populace, and time and again has it 

 been proved that the popular prejudice will disappear with extraordi- 

 nary rapidity if the innovation or measure is intrinsically good and 

 worthy of popular approbation. 



Considering this question to be of great importance, your Commis- 

 sioner feels no hesitation in quoting at some length from the reports of 

 the various fish and game commissions and wardens in the United 

 States, where conditions are, perhaps, even more critical in respect to 

 deer than they are in this Province, and where the men in touch with 

 the conditions can speak from experience of an actual application of 

 such a law. 



The Chief Game Protector to the Game Commissioners of the State 

 of Pennsylvania writes in his report of 1908 : 



" When the bill proposing to limit the killing of deer to a male deer 

 with horns, and which afterwards became law, was first introduced, I 

 was opposed to the measure. * * * j thought that if a measure of 

 this kind became law it would be very apt to result in trouble to many 

 men who otherwise intended to be honest; that because of the thick 

 underbrush found in the deer territory, the high bracken and rough 

 country, it would be almost impossible to determine the sex of a deer 

 until the deer had been killed. I preferred the making of an absolutely 

 closed season for deer, if protection to that extent was found to be neces- 

 sary, and I at once began a canvass of the Senate and the House of Rep- 

 resentatives relative to these matters. I also consulted sportsmen and 

 other men who were in the habit of going into the woods during tlie 

 deer season regarding their thought on the subject, and found that, 

 almost without exception, the bird hunters, the rabbit huniers, the 

 lumbermen, the land-owners, and the people generally who desired to 

 go into the Avoods during the last two weeks of November, including 

 many deer hunters, favoured the passage of this measure. They argued 

 that they, as citizens of this commonwealth, had just as much right to 

 be in the woods at that time as had the deer hunter, and that, under the 

 then existing law, there w^as not one moment of all that time that the 

 life of any one of them was safe. They claimed that they, as human 

 beings, were just as much entitled to protection as were the deer. I 

 found from statistics gathered by the Biological Survey at Washing- 

 ton, D.C., that forty-eight men had been killed and one hundred and 

 four wounded within the United States by deer hunters during the 



