THIRD BIENNIAL STATEMENT 55 



could be so lawless, and so generally glory it it! The story 

 is told, briefly but well, by Commissioner Pratt, as follows : 



EXTRACTS FROM THE ANNUAL REPORT OF THE 

 CONSERVATION COMMISSION, 1918 



Enforcement of the Deer Laivs : — Apparently authen- 

 tic reports of wholesale violations of the deer laws in 

 the Adirondacks caused the Commission to detail a 

 number of protectors upon secret service work in the 

 season of 1917 and again in 1918. The carefully sub- 

 stantiated evidence of conditions in the deer forests, 

 turned in by these men, is nothing short of astounding. 

 No good will come from blinking the facts. Practically 

 every possible violation of the deer law was encoun- 

 tered by the protectors, and not once, but repeatedly. 



The most regrettable fact brought out in the entire 

 investigation was the determination on the part of 

 large numbers of hunters to shoot anything that they 

 saw, regardless of sex or age, and to shoot as much as 

 they could, regardless of the bag limit. If one killed 

 more than his legal number of deer, he divided with 

 others, while if one killed an illegal deer, either doe or 

 fawn, he skinned it and took the meat. Dogs were in 

 common use in camp after camp, and whole deer and 

 parts of them were continually bought and sold. An 

 analysis of the violations thus reveals that they were 

 due not to dissatisfaction with any one law, but to gen- 

 eral contempt for the Conservation Law per se. The 

 protectors were all required to report whether the hunt- 

 ers in the camps to which they were assigned operated 

 on the general plan of killing practically anything that 

 they saw, and more than two-thirds of the protectors 

 answered this question in the affirmative. The result of 

 this determination is shown in 101 deer that came with- 

 in the protectors' immediate knowledge. 46 were bucks, 

 44 were does, and 11 were fawns of both sexes. It was a 

 matter of great interest in one camp that one man had 

 killed eight does in the season, while another at the 

 same camp, by a singular coincidence, had killed eight 

 bucks. 



The Commission wishes particularly to point out that 

 the violations of the deer law involve no particular class 

 or locality more than another. Men of all walks of life 



