THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



190 



more than 200,000 acres in Colorado has recently posted 

 its land to forbid the killing of coyotes and taken as strong 

 a stand on the whole matter. "We ranchers in the vicinity 

 of Toponas, Colorado . . . are also opposed to the w^ide- 

 spread destruction of weasels, hawks, eagles, skunks, 

 foxes and other predatory animals. . . . The reason for 

 this attitude is that for ten years or so we have watched 

 the steady increase of mice, gophers, moles, rabbits and 

 other rodents. Now we are at a point where these animals 

 take up one-third of our hay crop. ... What with govern- 

 ment hunters and government poison . . . the coyote 

 is nearly extinct in our part of the state. Foxes and bobcats 

 have succumbed to the chain-killing poisons, etc. . . . 

 This spring rodents have even killed sagebrush and quak- 

 ing aspen trees . . . serious erosion is taking place.'* 



Yet at last report the government was still setting cya- 

 nide gas guns and developing the "chain-poisoning" tech- 

 nique which involves killing animals with a poison that 

 renders their carcasses deadly to the scavengers which eat 

 them. And in Arizona the bounty on mountain lions con- 

 tinues. 



Moralists often blame races and nations because they 

 have never learned how to live and let live. In our time 

 we seem to have been increasingly aware how persistently 

 and brutally groups of men undertake to eliminate one 

 another. But it is not only the members of his own kind 

 that man seems to want to push off the earth. When he 

 moves in, nearly everything else suffers from his intrusion 

 — sometimes because he wants the space they occupy and 

 the food they eat, but often simply because when he sees 



