THE GAME BREEDER 



121 



Sports like Kaiser Wilhelm and the 

 heroic (?) chinless Crown Prince, the 

 champion game-hogs oj the world, en- 

 joy that kind of hunting. White man, 

 the great civilizer. cannot produce a wil- 

 derness nor a real forest unless he lets 

 it entirely alone. 



The wilderness wants none (;t lii.s 

 Kultur. 



Toms Kuertz, 

 Conservationist. 



[This appeal to prejudice indicates that yon 

 don't know what is going on in America. Let 

 us take you to a club quite near New York, 

 where sportsmen for $15 per year shoot w;ild 

 quail and rabbits. The farmers are well 

 pleased to have them do so because they pay 

 fci the use of the land. If you will glance 

 at the portrait of a fine old English wild- 

 fowler, or market gunner, in my book, "Our 

 Wold Fowl and Waders,'' you will see the 

 genial face of a poor but freeman who sup- 

 ports his family by shooting wild ducks in a 

 land where wild fowlers have as much freedom 

 as the sea fisherman, who provides the codfish 

 balls you no doubt have for breakfast, has. 



The Game Breeder seems often to be mis- 

 understood as often it is misrepresented. We 

 favor the production and sale of game for 

 food on game farms and preserves because, 

 as you admit, no state game department safely 

 can permit any shooting by a vast army of 

 guns if there be no production. 



Our preference in the matter' of shooting 

 is for wild bred game, quail and grouse es- 

 pecially. We prefer ,the shooting of wild 

 ducks on public waters to the shooting of 

 ducks reared on game farms. The reason 

 why the last named are not as good as they 

 should be is that restrictive laws prevent the 

 taking of birds for breeding purposes. 



We would like to have you visit sonic of 

 the quail clubs in which we are interested. 

 You would never imagine you were on a game 

 farm or preserve. In some places, however, 

 the quail are fully as abundant, year after 

 year, as they should be. This is because they 

 are properly looked after and kept sufficiently 

 plentiful to afford a lot of shooting and a 

 lot of food. Freedom would seem to require, 

 however, that those who want an abundance of 

 pheasants and ducks on places where there is 

 no game should have the birds and shoot and 

 eat and sell them. The fact that they will 

 soon send cheap food to market is a suffi- 

 cient excuse to grant them the right to pro- 

 duce it without danger of being .arrested. 

 There are people who find it pays to chop 

 off the heads of chickens and tame ducks 

 raised in barnyards and to send the food to 

 market. To be consistent you should berate 

 these people as "fowl-hogs" if they have 

 many and denounce them for the slaughter. 

 We have opposed the killing of game in this 

 fashion, "otherwise than by shooting," as 

 some "fool laws" have it, because we believe 



the incentive to produce the food abundantly 

 is thus destroyed and the incentive to health 

 giving exercise in the country also is de- 

 stroyed. We have had many good days with 

 the buffalo on the Western plains when we 

 kept an eye out for the noble Red Man to 

 whom you refer, in order to see that he did 

 not pot us while we were potting the bison. 

 We have had many good days on the prairie 

 with the grouse and many good days in Ohio 

 with the quail and we know full well that 

 the times have changed. No one seems to 

 want buffaloes on the farms. There are 

 plenty for sale to fully satisfy the demand. 

 Still the "where are the buffalo" people con- 

 tinue to collect hundreds of thousands of 

 dollars in the effort to save the game by se- 

 curing a few more game laws. 



We are perfectly fair. We will not oppose 

 a thousand more laws if they can be so writ- 

 ten as to make it appear that nothing in the 

 proposed enactments shall apply to game pro- 

 duced wild or tame by industry, so long as it 

 remains within the boundaries of the farms 

 owned or leased by the producers. We are 

 opposed to enactments which prohibit a food 

 producing industry. 



We have old fashioned ideas about sport. 

 We prefer to go out, as we do, and ramble 

 over waste lands and marshes which are un- 

 posted and on farms where we can shoot with 

 the permission of their owners. We are 

 fully aware that if we are to shoot without 

 exterminating the game it must be looked 

 after properly ; and the reason why we can go 

 out and shoot quail quite near New York is 

 that many clubs with small dues keep some 

 quail for breeding purposes. We shall go out 

 next Friday and shoot quail on unposted land 

 where the birds are not preserved by any one 

 and the reason they are there is we liberated 

 a good lot of quail a few years ago on a club 

 ground where they were protected. The 

 shooting of many thousands of pheasants on 

 the big places produces some shooting on 

 places which are not posted. A man told us 

 he was prejudiced against us for posting 

 .some land where a big lot of pheasants later 

 were shot. He had been in the habit of ex- 

 terminating the quail on this land and only 

 four were left by actual count. The first sea- 

 son after we started he shot 30 pheasants 

 outside of our fence and said he had not 

 found so many quail in 20 years as he found 

 in places quite near his house which are open 

 to the public. It so happened the quail bred 

 largely outside of our ground. Possibly we 

 had too many pheasants. 



Your prejudice against shooting hand 

 reared game is based on an ignorance of the 

 subject. The shooting at pheasants and ducks 

 passing overhead is far more difTicult than tin- 

 shooting of quail over dogs and th? shootiuR 

 of ducks settling to decoys are. We pro- 

 duced one year 2,500 ducks about an artificial 

 pond. Many guns shot safely at this place 

 which relieved the shooting on puWic waters 

 'o the extent of the nunii)cr of guns en- 

 gaged — about an hundred. 



