Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Cupv. 
Six Months, $i. 
\ 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JANUARY 21, 1899. 
f VOL. Li I, —No. 3. 
( No. 846 Broapway, New York. 
Cbe forest ana Stream Platform PlanK. 
'^T/te sale of game should be forbidden at all seasons. 
— Forest and Stream, Feb. 3, 1894. 
THE RA TIONAL AND THE INSANE. 
There is one reflection which goes far to ameliorate 
the disgust and indignation excited by such exploits as 
Mr. Frank S. Qaggett reports from Southern CaHfornia; 
and this is that the game score smashers are not represen- 
tative types of the shooters of America as a body. If it 
were otherwise, and a preponderating majority so large 
as to give stamp and character to the whole class were 
made up of these braggart butchers, who are possessed 
by a frenzy of lust for bird blood, no decent and self- 
respecting individual jealous of his good name and the 
regard of his fellows could afford to confess himself a 
sportsman. The. game killer for count is much in evi- 
dence, since what he does is sensational in its nature and 
something which will command newspaper notoriety; but 
for every one of these slaughterers whose exploits are 
heralded in the press there are a thousand gunners mode- 
rate and reasonable in their desires and practices. 
The - difference between the two is the difference 
between the rational and the insane, for the best 
working theory to account for the inordinate game 
slaughterer is that he is acting in a fit of temporary 
mental aberration. How can a man be in his right mind 
and kill 100 quail a day for sport? Or if in his right mind, 
what kind of a mind must he have? How can a man 
claim to be rational who craves to read his name high 
above the rest in a newspaper stor_v of bird butchery? 
If there are gunners whose innate sense of decency, or 
whose regard for the rights and privileges of other peo- 
ple does not call a halt when a reasonable limit of sport 
has been reached, put a legal restriction on the amount of 
game a person may take in a season, a month, a week, or 
a d^y. "But how can we enforce such a law?" "How 
can" you know what a man or a party of men may do in 
the field?" True, a law of this character could not always 
be enforced; it cannot be known how much game is taken 
by those afield, but this the restriction can do, and does 
do, and will do: It cuts off bragging about big scores 
of the game. It says to the insane notorietj^-hunter, you 
shall not kill for record; and as for most of these count 
killers, when you have taken away their opportunity of 
boasting you have taken away with it the motive which 
impels their shooting. 
No individual, nor any class, has license to pursue the 
game in a way or to an extent inconsistent with main- 
taining the normal stock. ^ On this ground and on this 
ground only is established our Platform Plank, to stop 
the sale of game at all times; because experience has 
demonstrated that it is market-hunting which exhausts 
the supply and destroys the parent stock. Against the 
individual market-shooter we have no grievance; so long 
as the system is recognized and legalized, demmciation of 
the individual participant in it is neither reasonable nor 
just. More inimical than the individual market-shooter to 
the interests of the rational sportsman, and so of the com- 
munity at large, is the man who kills for score and to 
brag. The market-hunter who nets 100 quail for market 
is engaged in an enterprise vastly more justifiable than 
that of the shooter who pots 100 birds in a day for no 
better purpose than to outscore his fellow whose count 
is ninety. The exploits of the score shooter, as we have 
suggested, may be accounted ipr on the theory that 
he is temporarily insane; it is certainly no evidence of 
his sanity that on coming in from his record shoot, like 
the horseleach's daughter unsatisfied, he vehemently 
curses the market-hunter, but for whose pot hunting, as 
he calls it, he might have made a bag for the day even 
more prodigious than that achieved. "There are three 
things that are never satisfied," says the sage Agur, "yea, 
four things say not. It is enough." If he were writing 
now he would add a fifth. 
Your insane count shooter, who gets himself and his 
bag of game, and Hkely enough pictures of both, into the 
newspapers, is a pest to sportsmanship in three ways. He 
kills game that belongs to others, to several, others, to 
many others. He creates the popular fallacy, which nat- 
urally comes from the reading of his exploits, that all 
sportsmen are insane, blood-craving demons. And lastly, 
he is a most embarrassing factor in the fight for game pro- 
tection, for people imagine that he represents the class of 
grown-up male humans in whose behalf we want the game 
protected. 
UNITED STA TES MAILS AND SMUGGLED 
GAME. 
That is a bright suggestion made by Dr. Robert T. 
Morris, to train dogs to smell out the boxes of illicit game 
in railroad freight and express offices. It recalls the story 
of the London cockney who hired a gun and borrowed 
a dog and went out to bag his birds the same as other 
people. The first thing the intelligent canine did, when 
they got into the field, was to point the cockney him- 
self, who had his pockets stuffed with dead birds secured 
at a market stall on the way out, thus providently assuring 
himself of a successful home coming. 
Dr. Morris's game box smelling puppies would have a 
field of usefulness in those North Carolina railroad towns 
where a regular traffic in quail is conducted by mail and 
express agents oh the north-bound trains. There is a 
well-arranged and but partially concealed system by which 
the daily consignments of netted quail are received at the 
station by the employees from the netters, with whom they 
are in league, and taken to Washington and other cities 
for sale at what must be profitable rates. For presumably 
unless there is money in the enterprise these express and 
mail agents would not have hazarded their positions by 
committing a misdemeanor, as they do every time they 
carry the illicit game. Now, is not this a preposterous 
state of aft'airs? Here in North Carolina is a law for- 
bidding the export ot quail, and the United States Su- 
preme Court has declared that such laws are constitu- 
tional and enforceable; and yet agents of the National 
Government clandestinely carry North Carolina game 
right into Washington and dispose of it under the very 
nose of the Supreme Court. 
What can be done abo\it it? Two things. First, let 
Congress enact Senator Proctor's District of Columbia 
game bill into a law that shall close the Washington mar- 
ket in the close season, and so remove the long standing 
disgrace that now exists, of a dumping ground maintained 
at the Nation's capital for the receipt of game unlawfully 
and dishonestly shipped from the constituent States of the 
Union. Second, let the Post Office Department see to it 
that employees who handle the United States mail on 
the railroads of North Carolina shall not also handle 
game birds, which they smuggle out of the State in viola- 
tion of the law. If the Department can find no other war- 
rant for the course suggested, let it act on the principle 
that the individual who is engaged in systematically and 
continuously, for the benefit of his own pocket, violating 
the laws is not a fit person to be entrusted with the cus- 
tody of United States mail matter. If the Department 
inspectors are unable in any other way to discover the 
quail, a capital experiment would be to outfit with a 
corps of intelligent setter puppies, trained in the way Dr. 
Morris suggests. 
SECTION 24q AGAIN, 
Precisely as was to have been expected, an effort is 
making this winter to restore to the New York game law 
the obnoxious Section 249, to permit the sale of game the 
year around; and as before, .those who are advocating 
the provision are going about their business by very 
devious methods. There was "crooked work" in the first 
place, when the section was juggled into the game bill; 
for it has been averred on what may be accepted as good 
authority that the section was never approved by the 
two branches of the Legislature, but was interpolated 
into the bill without authority. Last winter, when the 
question of a repeal was before the game committee, the 
constituted champion to defend the section was Mr, Gil- 
man, of a cold storage concern in this city, who had the 
assurance to tell the commsttee with a straight face that 
New York game dealers never handled any game birds 
received from quarters whence shipment was forbidden. 
It happened that the advocates of the repeal could meet 
this with documentary evidence. They produced from the 
records of Chief Fish and Game Protector Pond's office 
a series of express receipts tra,cing the illicit shipment of 
grouse from a certain point in the State to the city mar- 
ket, by a roundabout route to a point outside the State 
and then back again. This did for Mr. Gilman so ef- 
fectually that nothing was left of his case, and the section 
was repealed. Now, as will be seen from communications 
printed in our cohimns, Mr. Gilman has again appeared 
in advocacy of Section 249, and again with a declaration 
wiiich has not stood the test of investigation. He de- 
clared that Mr. Frank J. Amsden, of Rochester, and Mr. 
Robt. B. Lawrence, of this city, both of whom last year 
opposed Section 249, had been converted from their for- 
mer position and are now in sympathy with the endeavor 
to restore the provision to operation. Mr. Amsden is an 
ex-President of the New York Game, Fish and Forest 
League, and Mr. Lawrence is Secretary of the New York 
(City) Society for the Protection of Game. Naturally, 
both are indignant at Mr. Gilman's misrepresentation of 
their true attitude, and they have sent us the disclaimers 
which we print to-day, and thus by documentary evidence 
demonstrate the character of Mr. Gilman's assertions as 
effectively as his statements before the committee last 
year were rebutted by the documentary evidence supplied 
by Protector Pond. 
The incident is not regrettable if if shall have served 
to enlighten the Legislature as to the actual value 
they may attribute to what Mr. Gilman may have to 
offer respecting the proposed re-enactment of Section 249. 
Meanwhile it 'behooves the citizens of this State to watch 
their interests and to maintain the law as it stands now. 
SNAP SHOTS. 
Although the war with Spain is over, yet many reminders 
of it — some pleasant, but most of them sad — come to us 
from time to time. Among the pleasant ones are the fre- 
quent notices which appear in the newspapers recounting 
brave deeds and good service performed by readers of 
FoKEST and Stream and writers for it, while the sad 
ones tell of death and wounds received by others whose 
faces or names are familiar to us and to our readers. 
One of these newspaper mentions, recently read, telling 
of the return from Manila of the well-known Astor Bat- 
tery, says that all the members of the Battery are on 
their way home, except six men who have died and Ser- 
geant Harry L. Burdick, who is in hospital in Manila 
with typhoid fever. Sergeant Burdick, it will be remem- 
bered, was the writer of an interesting sketch of wdiite 
goat hunting which appeared in the Forest and Stream 
Jubilee number last June, illustrated by a photograph from 
life of a white goat on the face of a cliff— a most striking 
piece of work. 
The Maine Commissioners' report On the game inter- 
ests demands careful reading by all who visit those hunt- 
ing grounds, and by all who are interested in the progress 
of the day in methods and expedients of game preserva- 
tion. Whatever may be individual opinion respecting the 
licensed guide system, the length of game seasons, the 
taxation of big game hunters and other schemes, actual 
or proposed, it must be conceded that Maine is to-day do- 
ing a great work for the game supply of the country at 
large by her earnest and progressive enterprise in this 
direction. On most of these topics discussed in the re- 
port we give the views of Mr, Carleton and his asso= 
ciates practically in full 
The discussion of the Lacey bird bill in Congress took 
an unexpected turn the other day, when Mr. Cannon, of 
Illinois, spoke in opposition to the measure from the stand- 
point of economy, and of a recognition of the proper 
jurisdiction of the National Government and that of the 
individual States. Mr. Cannon was unquestionably right, 
and all he required in order to have made out a good 
argument was fuller information on the subject. Had he 
been properly equipped by previous preparation to present 
his side of the question, he might have adduced arguments 
for which it would have been hard to find answers. 
The late Robert R. McBurney, who was for thirty-six 
years General Secretary of the Young Men's Christian 
Association in this city, was a collector of Walton's An- 
gler, of whjqh he possessed some very rare early editions, 
and it is interesting to note that one of his eulogists, at a. 
memorial se.mQ.e held last Sunday, went to Walton for a 
characterization of his subject in these words: "Izaak 
Walton said that a companion that was cheerful was pure 
gold. I am sure he would have enjoyed the companion- 
ship of Robert McBurney." 
