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A bounty on cats, foxes, crows, hawks, owls, English spar- 
rows, weasels and skunks would be very expensive to the 
State. Pennsylvania paid out during one year not less than 
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for bounties on birds 
and mammals. Montana paid out within six months in 1887 
more than fifty thousand dollars in bounties for ground squir- 
rels and prairie dogs. As at that time these animals had 
not decreased perceptibly, a special session of the Legisla- 
ture was called to repeal the law, lest it bankrupt the State. 
While the effect of bounty laws, in general, is bad, the 
practical operation of laws directed at particular species is 
certainly vicious. We may regard a bounty on the heads 
of cats as impracticable, for obvious reasons, not the least 
among which might be the encouragement of a new indus- 
try, — the raising of kittens for the bounty. A bounty on 
cats, foxes, weasels and skunks would encourage trapping, 
which is already exterminating some of the smaller fur- 
bearing animals. The experience of States which have 
placed bounties on the head of the English sparrow has not 
been encouraging. These acts are said to have resulted in 
a slight decrease of the sparrows, and the destruction of 
great numbers of native birds killed and ignorantly offered 
for bounty. To put a bounty on the head of the sparrow is 
practically equivalent to offering a bounty on all our native 
sparrows, many of the warblers, the thrushes, wrens and a 
few other species. Anything that at a distance looks like 
a sparrow would be killed, and probably in most cases the 
bounty would be paid, unless a competent naturalist could be 
appointed in each town or county seat to identify the heads. 
If we offer a bounty on the crow, most of our native 
crows which do the mischief probably will escape, and the 
bounty will be paid mainly on birds that come from the 
north in winter. The difficulty of killing crows in the sum- 
mer prevents many being taken at that time. Most of the 
crows that summer here probably go south in winter, their 
places being taken here by crows from farther north. It is 
at this time that crows are most readily killed, either by 
baiting or at their roosts ; and therefore most of the crows 
offered for bounty would be winter birds which never do any 
injury here, while the guilty ones would escape. 
