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THE GAME BREEDER 



T*J5 Game Breeder 



Published Monthly 



Edited by DWIGHT W. HUNTINGTON 



NEW YORK, JANUARY, 1919. 

 TERMS: 



10 Cents a Copy— $1.00 a year in Advance. 



Postage free to all subscribers in the United States. 

 To All ForeignCountriesand Canada, $1.25. 



The Game Conservation Society, Inc. 

 publishers, 150 nassau st., new york 



D. W. Huntington, President, 



F. R. Peixotto, Treasurer, 



J. C. Huntington, Secretary. 

 E. Dayton, Advertising Manager. 

 Telephone, Beekman 3685. 



EXPERIMENTS WITH GAME. 



Our knowledge of how to have game 

 and how to look after it properly is com- 

 paratively limited since before the "more 

 game and fewer game laws" movement 

 was started few people in America had 

 any game or knew anything about how 

 to increase its numbers by scientific 

 game breeding. 



Many English and Scotch game keep- 

 ers have demonstrated how easy it is to 

 hand-rear large numbers of pheasants 

 and wild ducks in America. Other 

 game keepers who have handled our 

 quail in a large way have bred these 

 birds in a wild state successfully just as 

 partridges are bred wild in protected 

 fields in the older countries, where stock 

 birds and eggs are abundant, easily pro- 

 cured and comparatively cheap. 



Experiments with wild turkeys made 

 by members of the Game Conservation 

 Society at a number of places indicate 

 that although the American wild turkey 

 is classed by the Ornithologists as a 

 pheasant — the largest in the world — it 

 is not advisable to attempt to rear wild 

 turkeys with common barn yard hens as 

 foster mothers since the young turkeys 

 do not thrive with common fowls as the 

 young pheasants do. Young turkeys are 

 known to thrive nicely with turkey 

 mothers wild or tame and the larger the 

 range given to the young birds the better. 



The experiments made by the Game 

 Conservation Society during the lastr 

 year with American game birds were 

 confined to quail and turkeys, since it 

 was impossible to get any grouse. 



PREVENTIVE LAWS. 



Often we have quoted the naturalist, 

 Dr. R. W. Shufeldt, who wrote that he 

 was opposed to laws which protected the 

 game off the face of the earth. 



We formed the opinion long ago that 

 a bag limit law permitting many guns to 

 take a very few birds per gun in a sea- 

 son would prove fully as disastrous to 

 upland game birds as the bag limit law 

 which permitted a smaller, number of 

 guns to take a larger number of game 

 birds. 



The additional check to the increase of 

 the species practically is the same. All 

 real naturalists agree that additional 

 checks to increase (shooting for exam- 

 ple) cause a rapid diminution of the 

 numbers of the species just as a removal 

 of some of the checks to increase (ver- 

 min for example) cause a rapid increase 

 in the numbers of the species. 



Bag limit laws when applied to game 

 breeders are worse than legal absurdities. 

 Such laws plainly prevent a food produc- 

 ing industry, since anyone who breeds a 

 thousand quail or grouse or pheasants on 

 his farm or game ranch at some expense 

 will quickly go out of business if he be 

 arrested and fined for shooting more than 

 three or some other small number of 

 birds in a season or for selling the food. 



Laws prohibiting the sale of game, 

 alive and dead, and game eggs evidently 

 are as fatal as bag limit laws are to a 

 food producing industry especially suit- 

 able to the American farms. Grouse and 

 quail, since the birds are said to eat some 

 insects and weed seeds and are beneficial 

 and not harmful to agriculture, should 

 be produced abundantly. It is absurd to 

 say to farmers and sportsmen that these 

 birds are beneficial and therefore you 

 must not make them profitably plentiful. 

 It is equally absurd to say to the farmers 

 you may rear foreign pheasants for profit 

 which may, possibly in some cases, be 



