Prohibit the Sale of Game Birds. 



How much longer can our game birds be expected to survive with 

 a price set upon their heads? If a man should attempt to cut clown 

 a great tree by snipping off the little twigs with scissors, he would 

 be advised to begin with the axe at the root. In the attempt to pro- 

 tect our game birds we have been clipping away at the little twigs 

 too long. Let us now take up the axe. The laws which have been 

 passed regulating the sale and transportation of game are useful 

 under present conditions, but there is one statutory provision alone 

 Avhich will strike at the root of the evil and check the slaughter of 

 game birds by taking away the incentive for pot hunting, and that 

 is to prohibit the sale of all game birds. 



It would be for the interest of the marketman were this enacted, 

 for he is now constantly hampered by restrictions and harassed by 

 legal requirements. It would not, in the end, injure his business, 

 for he would then sell turkeys, chickens, geese, ducks, pigeons, squabs, 

 guineas and possibly pheasants in place of the game he now sells. 

 Such a law would be better for the farmer and poultry raiser, who 

 would be called upon to supply more domesticated birds to take the 

 place of the wild ones now sold. It would be better for the sportsman, 

 who sees himself prohibited from shooting certain wild fowl and other 

 migrating game birds here in certain months only to have them shot 

 b}f market gunners in other States and sold in our own as well as other 

 markets. Such a law would injure no one except the man who pur- 

 sues birds for a living, the man who kills the goose that lays the golden 

 egg, the man who exterminates the birds. The time is gone by in 

 Massachusetts and in the east when any man should be allovred to 

 live by the killing of birds and game. This killing birds for gold 

 should be stopped for the benefit of the whole people. We should 

 no longer be allowed to exterminate, and thus deprive posterity of its 

 birth-right in the birds and game. 



The market hunter or pot hunter is often a good and worthy citizen, 

 but his day is past and he must adopt some other calling. More 

 than forty States now prohibit the sale of all or a part of their game. 

 Massachusetts should have been among the leaclers in this move- 

 ment. 



Next in importance to the elimination of the market hunter comes 

 the bag limit. Some so-called sportsmen are nearly as destructive 

 as the market hunter, but man}^ who now kill so long as their am- 

 munition lasts would respect a legal limit to the number of birds to 

 be killed in a day or in a season. 



Right of Search. 



The Commissioners on Fisheries and Game and their deputies 

 should be given the power of search without a warrant. This power 

 can be exercised without abuse as it now is in other States. There 

 can be little hope of thorough enforcement of the law until the officers 

 who enforce it have this power. 



The Sanctuary. 



Where all other measures promise only failure there is still one 

 resource left, and that is the setting aside of tracts or reservations 

 of woodland, lake, river or shore within the limits of which all killing 



