I4O ECONOMIC MAMMALOGY 



game, within reasonable and proper limits, but no one has a right 

 wastefully or needlessly to destroy any of them. A very small percent- 

 age of the people hunt, yet the laws concerning game birds and mam- 

 mals have always been mostly dictated by and their enforcement placed 

 in the hands of the men who hunt. The millions who wish to see deer 

 and other game running wild and do not care to kill any of them, have 

 seldom had a voice in the matter. 



It is said that civilized man is more destructive than the savage, but 

 that may be merely because his inventions have increased his powers 

 for destruction, while commerce has provided stronger motives for 

 the exercise of that power. The savage, with simple needs and tastes 

 and with primitive weapons, usually killed only enough to provide him 

 with food, raiment and shelter of very simple sorts. He could use no 

 more, had no market for the surplus, and the exertion of getting game 

 with his primitive weapons was sufficient to deter him. Civilized man, 

 with the arteries of commerce and the development of more luxuriant 

 taste, could easily dispose of his surplus for cash with which to buy 

 the luxuries he craved, and his weapons made it easy for him to obtain 

 a much greater supply of game and furs that he himself could use. 

 Hence the slaughter began. 



Nevertheless, savages, as well as enlightened people, have been 

 known, when the lust for blood possessed them, to ruthlessly destroy 

 large numbers of animals, many more than they could in any way dis- 

 pose of, leaving the carcasses to putrify and foul the air about them. 

 Most of the carnivorous mammals kill only that they may eat, but some 

 individuals kill far beyond their power of disposal. Thus sheep-killing 

 dogs often kill a considerable number of sheep in a single night and eat 

 none. Weasels and minks go on killing sprees and destroy a number of 

 chickens in a single raid. Other examples are not wanting. 



Man's destruction of wild life began with the dawn of human life. 

 He sought the flesh of mammals for food, the skins for raiment and 

 later for shelter, the bones and horns for tools, the fat for his crude 

 lamp, the ivory of mammoths for his primitive art. But in a primitive 

 state, when few in numbers, armed with crude weapons, the toll he 

 took was perhaps no greater than that of the sabre-toothed tiger or 

 other large beasts of prey. It was not until the human race had greatly 

 increased in numbers and reached an advanced state of civilization, 

 within the past century or so, that his depredations began to get really 

 serious and to threaten the very existence of many species. In North 



