iot6 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Dec. 26, 1908. 
Game and Fish Laws in New York. 
The address of Chief Game Protector John 
B. Burnham, delivered at the convention of the 
New York Fish, Game and Forest League, is 
printed below: 
It is a great pleasure to one who represents 
the standing army of game protection to meet 
here to-day you gentlemen who are giving so 
much of your time and energy from disin¬ 
terested motives to the same work. You, gen¬ 
tlemen, aid the protectors by your suggestions 
and by your activity in the work of upholding 
and enforcing the game laws and also—and what 
is of yet greater importance—by creating a 
popular sentiment in favor of the laws. The 
game law cannot be most effectively enforced 
without popular sentiment back of it. This can 
be seen in any wild country and by comparing 
the conditions in the wilder sections with the 
conditions in the older and more settled sec¬ 
tions, the necessity of game laws and their en¬ 
forcement in such States as our own becomes 
apparent. 
There are wild sections on the North Ameri¬ 
can continent to-day where the conditions very 
closely resemble those obtaining in this State 
a hundred years ago. There are great sections 
of uninhabited country. Moose, deer, wolves 
and the lesser game abound. The country is 
so sparsely settled that all the people living in 
it could not kill off all the game if they worked 
with no other object in view for 365 days in 
the year. 
In contrast to this, consider conditions in Ver¬ 
mont. Vermont is an old community. Half a 
century ago it was almost as well settled as it 
is at present. Then there was no observance 
of the game laws and no thought of conserving 
the supply for living and future generations. It 
was the old story of the buffalo. By various 
destructive methods the deer of the State were 
exterminated. Hounding, crusting and other 
destructive methods of hunting had done their 
work. In 1865 there were practically no deer 
in the State. 
Somewhere about this time an arrangement 
was made for procuring deer from Essex 
county, New York, and a number of deer were 
liberated by public-spirited Vermonters in Rut¬ 
land county, Vermont. These deer were given 
absolute protection for more than thirty years, 
and when, in 1897, the season was opened for 
hunting them, the entire State had been restocked. 
At the present time deer are killed all over 
Vermont each year during the short open sea¬ 
son and under very close restrictions. A year 
ago the official report showed that a thousand 
bucks had been killed in six days. Considering 
the limited area on which the deer are hunted, 
there is no better hunting in the United States 
to-day than in this old and settled com¬ 
munity. 
In wild countries game laws are not of much 
importance, at least according to our American 
ideas; in settled communities they are. With¬ 
out game propagation and preservation we can 
have no game. On the eve of game extermina¬ 
tion we are waking up to this fact. A wave 
of game law sentiment is sweeping the country. 
The past few years has seen the hunting license 
law become all but universal over the United 
States. We have seen the necessity from eco¬ 
nomic and ethical standpoints of preserving the 
game, and with characteristic American energy 
are taking the necessary steps to preserve our 
supply. 
Here is where the value of the league comes 
in in arousing a popular sentiment. The woods¬ 
man, the bayman, the market hunter, many good 
men resent encroachment on their old rights. 
The man living in the Adirondacks has bred in 
him the feeling that the forest is his and that 
the game laws are an infringement on his in¬ 
alienable right to take game when and how he 
pleases. The bayman can no longer take his 
tribute from the marshes without restrictions. 
Left alone, these men become outlaws. They 
must be educated. There is no finer work to 
be done to-day in the cause of game protection 
than the work which may be done among such 
men in showing them the necessity of game laws 
and their enforcement and in awakening in them 
an interest in game preservation. 
We must realize that the rights of certain 
classes are being interfered with, and that the 
tendency is to still further hamper personal 
liberty as regards the taking of fish and game. 
The human race is propagating faster than the 
races which populate the streams and forests. 
In an article on “Percheron Horses,” printed 
not long ago in Collier’s Weekly, Joseph Medill 
Patterson tells the story of governmental inter¬ 
ference in France with the rights of horse 
breeders, as a result of which the breeders have 
profited incalculably. He tells of the movement 
started in this country, first in Wisconsin and 
afterward in other States, to secure the same 
beneficial results, and he notes the indignation 
caused among the breeders when the laws pro¬ 
hibiting the service of grade stallions first be¬ 
came operative. 
“It is merely another skirmish in the fight 
that is going on all over the white man’s world,” 
says Mr. Patterson, in commenting on this in¬ 
fringement on personal liberty. “The world is 
filling up, getting crowded. Elbow room is less 
than it was, and the people can no longer be so 
free with their elbows as they used to be, even 
though they are their elbows.” We must not 
dodge the issue. Game laws are oppressive in 
certain quarters. We must show the people tem¬ 
porarily injured that the result in good will 
much more than outweigh the present hardship. 
In America there are no classes and there must 
be no class sentiment in game laws. No law is 
worth anything which is not enacted for the 
greatest good of the greatest number. 
The commission realizes the necessity not only 
of game protection, but of its propagation and 
preservation as well. Commissioner Whipple 
last winter endeavored to secure an appropria¬ 
tion for a State game farm. Deer are now 
being cared for in the winter, and many which 
would otherwise die are being tided over the 
period of starvation. Last summer wild hay 
was cut and stacked on marshes all through the 
Adirondack section in neighborhoods where deer 
are accustomed to yard. This hay was cocked 
in small stacks on poles cribbed above the 
ground, and a small quantity of salt was placed 
in each stack at the time of cutting, so that the 
heating of the hay would disseminate the brine 
through the stack. Deer will not eat Hurds 
grass, but experiment has proved that they will 
relish and subsist on wild hay put up in this 
manner. In this way many deer that would 
otherwise certainly perish of starvation are 
being carried over the winter. Every man 
familiar with the woods knows that under pres¬ 
ent conditions the axe of the lumberman and 
fire have destroyed the balance between the sup¬ 
ply of summer and winter feed for the deer, and 
that in many instances while the summer feed 
has been increased, the winter feed has been 
completely destroyed. 
The commission also realizes that owing to 
the unprecedented drouth of the past summer 
and the consequent drying up of streams and 
annihilation of the trout supply in many sec¬ 
tions, a greater demand than ever will be made 
next spring for fish for stocking purposes. The 
largest supply of eggs ever obtained has been 
laid in to meet this emergency. Sportsmen all 
over the State should send in their trout appli¬ 
cations early and they should make a special 
effort personally to see that the depleted streams 
are restocked. 
The commission needs tools to work with. It 
needs more money. It needs fast power boats 
for Long Island, for the St. Lawrence, and for 
the inland lakes of the State. It needs more 
men. New York has only one protector per 
hundred thousand of population. In some of 
the large cities there is one policeman for every 
five hundred of population, and this despite the 
fact that a much larger percentage of the people 
will violate the game laws relatively to the per¬ 
centage which violates the penal statutes. 
The commission is doing good work with the 
force it has. Last year out of 797 cases tried 
for violation of the fish and game law, only 
thirty-eight were lost. The regular protectors 
for this class of violations collected $41,597 in 
penalties. In addition to this $2,895 was re " 
ceived in penalties as the result of the work 
performed by fish and game clubs and the special 
protectors. The force has been organized on 
a business basis. The State has been divided 
into districts, and an assistant chief protector 
or an acting assistant chief protector put in 
charge of each. These assistant chiefs super¬ 
vise the work in the field, and come in direct 
touch with the protectors of their divisions. 
They organize the protectors for raids, look 
after the direction of their work, and advise 
them in the prosecution of their cases. 
Once each month the assistant chiefs meet at 
Albany, and the work of the previous month is 
gone over, and plans laid for the immediate 
future. The work of the protectors is analyzed, 
and each protector is given a rating. Partly 
as a result of this system the men are doing 
more work than ever before in the history of 
the commission. The average time devoted to 
fish and game protection by the entire force dur¬ 
ing the past six months has been upward of 
twenty-six days per month for every protector 
on the force. 
The protectors as a whole are a splendid class 
of men. Through weeding out the inefficient 
men, the personnel has been greatly improved. 
I know of nowhere to-day a finer set of men 
engaged in the work of game protection. They 
are intelligent, hard-working and resolute men 
who have devoted their lives to a hard and in 
many respects thankless task, and the best of 
them are kept for no other reason than for 
their love of the work and their interest in the 
cause of game protection. 
