108 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Jan. 27, 1912. 
A Protest 
By SYDNEY G. FISHER 
1 WAS sorry to see a statement in Forest and 
Stream from so eminent a person as Mr. 
Kalbfus, of the Pennsylvania Game Com¬ 
mission, recommending an apparently ingenious 
way of poisoning foxes and other vermin or 
predatory animals by means of muskrat carcasses 
impregnated with a deadly drug. Only the pred¬ 
atory animals, he says, will eat the muskrat car¬ 
cass. Your valuable pointer or setter will not 
touch it. He even recommends professional trap¬ 
pers to resort to this poisoning instead of setting 
traps for fur-bearing animals. 
Without stopping to dispute the supposed 
theory that your pointer or setter would be safe, 
I must enter my unqualified protest against the 
whole disgusting and contemptible poisoning 
business, especially when it is recommended in 
a sporting paper and among sportsmen. No real 
sportsman will have anything to do with such 
degradation. 
Too many of us each year lose devoted com¬ 
panions by the sneaking poison scoundrels in 
villages and even in the country, whose spite 
and depravity are aroused against all who pos¬ 
sess valuable bird dogs. If in the second decade 
of the twentieth century we cannot do better 
than to recommend poisoning to the public, our 
boasted advancement is worse than a failure. 
We are going back to the dark ages. Our peo¬ 
ple are bad enough already in exterminating .the 
beautiful animal and bird life of their country, 
and to recommend poisoning to them in public 
print is shameful. 
The motive for it apparently is that by poison¬ 
ing, Mr. Kalbfus thinks, you would get rid 
quickly of all the foxes, weasels and so-called 
vermin, and then you would have an abundance 
of game. Very likely he might want to extend 
the process to the hawks and crows and every¬ 
thing he dislikes. Poisoning, he thinks, wi'l 
bring the millennium to the sportsmen. He will 
never have abundant game until he exterminates 
the vermin. Where are his eyes and observation? 
I can remember the eastern shore of Mary¬ 
land when I was a boy, just after the Civil War, 
and one farm in particular which I still own. 
It swarmed with animal life of all kinds—hawks, 
foxes, all species of vermin, eagles built their 
nests in the trees, and quail and rabbits were 
numerous. On that farm there were regularly 
four coveys of quail; now there is not one, and 
it is even hard to find a rabbit. The hawks and 
foxes have been exterminated along with other 
vermin, but the quail do not come back. It used 
to be a not uncommon sight when you went out 
for a walk to see a fox, and in the midst of the 
foxes and other predatory creatures the quail 
and the rabbits flourished, and had flourished for 
generations before I was born. 
I have had the same experience in more recent 
times in various parts of the South. I have seen 
quail and other game very numerous in the midst 
of hosts of so-called predatory creatures, as in 
Florida for example, and the game remains nu¬ 
merous under these conditions until man, the 
exterminator, comes along. Fle and his methods 
are the only dangers to game. 
Think a minute. If it were true that it is the 
vermin that decreases the game, then there would 
have been no game several hundred years ago, 
when white men first came to this country. The 
predatory creatures, so-called, having had their 
own way unchecked by poisoner or trap, would 
have destroyed all the game. But we know that 
the contrary was true; game was abundant in 
the midst of the predatory creatures. 
Similarly if the theory of vermin exterminating 
the game were true, we would not now be seek¬ 
ing out-of-the-way places for game. I would find 
plenty of game on my own farm where the foxes 
and vermin have been exterminated. But in¬ 
stead of that I spend precious dollars in travel¬ 
ing far away to places where the old conditions 
still exist. 
Those conditions are what the naturalists call 
the balance of nature. The name predatory 
creatures or vermin is a mere phrase, an arti¬ 
ficial distinction. They are all predatory. The 
so-called innocent birds eat the worms, bugs and 
insects by the hundred thousand million. So 
far as destroying numerous individual lives is 
concerned, the birds are the most predatory of 
all. The foxes and other vermin live on mice, 
rats, insects and to a certain extent on the birds. 
The hawks live to a certain extent on birds, but 
more on mice and insects. The squirrels come 
in for their turn even on the birds, and so it 
goes on, or perhaps more properly went on, in 
a complicated interchanging compensating sys¬ 
tem under the old original conditions that pre¬ 
vailed in this country. Those conditions had 
been produced through thousands or hundreds 
of thousands of years of undisturbed nature. 
The balance was kept up by all preying on one 
another. If we merely reasoned upon that con¬ 
dition, we would say, as people are led to say 
now, that it must end in all being exterminated, 
except one set of the most predatory. But we 
know that was not so, and in dealing with nature 
we must abide by facts and not reason too much. 
We cannot perhaps describe exactly in words 
or give reasons how that balance of nature 
worked, but we know that it resulted in abund¬ 
ance of game in the midst of the so-called pred¬ 
atory birds and animals, just as I used to see it 
as a boy in Maryland, and thousands of others 
are alive who can remember it there and in 
numerous other places. 
There is another fact which is one of com¬ 
mon observation to those of long experience with 
nature. If you disturb the balance of nature by 
attempting to eliminate one of the elements of 
the balance, you never know what may happen. 
You may upset the whole thing, and the evil 
may extend to plants and trees, for they are in¬ 
cluded in the balance. For example, so many 
boys have used five-dollar shotguns on the wood¬ 
peckers that those useful birds are exterminated 
in some localities, and an insect that the wood¬ 
peckers used to destroy has so increased that 
it threatens to exterminate the hickory trees. 
So also in numerous other instances. The Ger¬ 
man Government is making most extraordinary 
efforts to people its forests with birds to save 
and improve the timber. Our own Biological 
Survey at Washington will supply literature on 
these subjects to any citizen who will write for 
it. Now, I can understand that if the so-called 
vermin became excessively numerous, it might be 
advisable to thin them down, as English game- 
keepers sometimes do. But they do not exter¬ 
minate vermin in England, and they have far 
more game than we have. An English sports¬ 
man will often shoot away in a season from two 
thousand to ten thousand shells, and often suf¬ 
fers from gun headache. I shall be greatly 
obliged for information of a place in this coun¬ 
try where you can acquire gun headache. One 
of the great beauties of an English countryside 
is the varied life—hawks, foxes, vermin of all 
sorts. It is as much pleasure and delight to 
watch them and know about them as it is to see 
the game. 
The English people are great conservation¬ 
ists; they preserve all of nature they possibly 
can and teach their people to enjoy it. If you 
exterminate nature, what have you left but a 
dried-up narrow-minded existence. 
We have not yet reached the point in this 
country when it is necessary to thin down preda¬ 
tory creatures. If there are such places they 
must be very rare. I have never seen any of 
them. 
Why the foxes should be poisoned I do not 
understand. In England they are so valuable 
that they make the national sport. In New Eng¬ 
land, and parts of the South, and in one or two 
counties of Pennsylvania, they are highly valued 
for hunting. They are a most interesting and 
beautiful animal, and play an important part, 
natura’ists tell me, in the balance of nature. They 
should be protected and encouraged. 
We have enough to do to teach the American 
people conservation of their resources without 
making poisoners of them. We want to give 
them the spirit of sportsmen and nature lovers 
instead of the sneaking mind that accompanies 
the poisoner. We want to make every citizen an 
instinctive preserver of every fox, hawk, crow 
and everything else, because he loves them and 
wants to study their ways. Then if he goes too 
far and develops the balance of nature too much 
on the predatory side, we can give him instruc¬ 
tions to use his gun or some honorable means 
to thin them down. 
But as it is now, the masses of our people 
throughout the country are terribly inclined to 
regard all nature as their enemy. It is really 
extraordinary the view they take. They want 
to make a desert and call it peace. I have been 
most unpleasantly depressed by them. Last win¬ 
ter in Florida one of them, who had become a 
man of means and should have known better, 
was for cleaning out pretty much all the life 
around him, and the only reason he usually gave 
was, “Oh, it (some bird or animal) is a mean 
kind of thing, anyhow.” This he would apply 
to first one and then another until he included 
about all, even the vultures, which are protected 
by law as useful scavengers. 
I often think that this widespread feeling 
arises from a notion that has gradually grown 
in their minds that these natural things are symp¬ 
toms of poverty, and that their absence will in 
some mysterious way produce wealth; that if 
they wipe out nature entirely, all the land will 
be city building lots at high prices; that the city 
is the standard, and that the more they banish 
nature the more their social positions will im- 
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