THE PRESERVATION OF GAME 175 



glory of his park, and he tolerated the otter in his osier 

 beds, and the badger in his sand-hills. The arch-enemy 

 of wild birds was the non-resident shooting tenant, and, 

 worse still, the syndicate hateful word and hateful 

 thing of shooting tenants. The shooting tenant had 

 hardly any bowels of compassion; the syndicate had none 

 at all. They valued the land chiefly or wholly according 

 to the number of head of game; and dividing the entire 

 animal world into game and vermin, bade the game- 

 keeper, in the words of King Lear, ' Kill, kill, kill !' " 



On the shooting tenant's " big day " the unskilled guests 

 blaze away, maim, and seldom kill; they snatch the gun 

 from their loader, loose off, and snatch again, while around 

 them lie the wounded, struggling victims of their slipshod 

 shots, if we may use that term. When the drive ends the 

 puffed- up host strides between the rows of slain like an 

 Eastern potentate after a victory. Sport has degenerated 

 into massacre; the butcher deserves the chastisement we 

 mete to the lad who slays the harmless toad. How 

 different from the other type ! Roosevelt, an example 

 of the better sportsman, declared: " I love hunting still, 

 but slaughter is abhorrent to me." What really matters 

 is the attitude of the game preserver towards the animal 

 world; he is no true sportsman who regards everything 

 which is not his game as vermin. 



Game preservation, the artificial protection afforded 

 to certain selected species, is unbeloved by many natural- 

 ists, but they only consider one aspect, the destruction 

 of vermin. To provide a plentiful head of game it is 

 essential to hedge the favoured bird or mammal with 

 safeguards, to give it seclusion and security from its 

 natural foes, to protect it from those circumstances which 

 would normally reduce its numbers to the limit allowed 

 by nature. An introduced species seldom if ever finds 

 a groove exactly to fit; if food is plentiful and enemies 



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