152 WILD LIFE PROTECTION FUND 



ethics, to give the game the slightest show to escape you. 

 Any high-power rifle (and now nearly all are that) will kill 

 a deer, an elk, or a grizzly bear at 400 yards, and farther if 

 the hunter is sufficiently lucky or expert. 



In a recently published book on big-game hunting in 

 Africa, the author-hunter describes an attack on a leopard, 

 with a Mannlicher rifle fitted with a telescopic sight and a 

 Maxim silencer. The distance (measured) was 675 yeards. 

 Three shots were fired. The leopard heard no sound! The 

 first shot threw up dust under the animal. The second hit 

 a front leg; but the leopard had no idea of the source of 

 the hurt, and did not think of running away. The third 

 shot was fatal. Between the long-range rifle, the telescope, 

 and the silencer, the animal was robbed of every chance for 

 the detection of the hunter, and of escape. It might as well 

 have been shot with a cannon and shrapnel. 



Have any states in our country legislated against the 

 sale and use of the silencer ? Yes ; New York. It was done 

 because of the undetected killing of men in New York City 

 by the use of that death-dealing device. How the devil must 

 have laughed when a patent was granted for the silencer! 

 Each state will wait until a certain number of its citizens 

 have been assassinated by it, and then they will legislate 

 against its sale and use ; but not until then. It is the Amer- 

 ican way to await the call of Calamity before we rise and 

 act. 



Possibly this world will endure until man, the meanest 

 and deadliest of all the predatory animals, will have pro- 

 gressed upward in ethics to the height that the majority 

 really will desire to give the wild creatures a square deal. 

 That time may indeed come; but long, long before it does, 

 the game of this earth, great and small, will be dead and 

 gone, — everywhere outside the hard-and-fast game sanctu- 

 aries, and their immediate environs. 



I regard it as absolutely certain that fifty years from 

 now there will be no large game to be shot anywhere in the 

 United States or in Southern Canada, outside the regions 

 that surround the game sanctuaries, national and state. 



