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The Lust to Kill 
By C. O. DECKER 
PRIMITIVE MAN of necessity taught himself to kill for food and for body cov- 
erings such animals and fowl as were known to him and he was able to con- 
quer. The successful killers of game and the successful killers in war be- 
came the Great Hunters and Great Leaders in their tribes and were looked 
up to and honored accordingly. 
Through the thousands of years, that desire or compulsion to kill became 
so imbedded in man’s nature that it still survives after centuries of our so- 
called civilization. It came to the surface in the incident reported by R. Lee 
Sharpe. He met a little boy trudging along a country road with a rifle over 
his shoulder. “What are you hunting, buddy?” he asked. And the boy re- 
plied, “Dunno, Sir. I ain’t seen it yet.” 
The changes which followed man’s growing of grain and domestication 
of cattle, sheep, and swine and the various fowls have done away with the 
necessity of hunting and killing for food, but the lust to kill etill nersists 
and has resulted in the extermination of the passenger pigeon and the 
heath hen, nearly so of the prairie chicken, woodcock, and jack snipe, and 
dangerous depletion of the once enormous flocks of waterfowl. 
The State Natural History survey made a study of the expense incurred 
by duck hunters and found that the average cost per duck shot during one 
season was $7.25, an entirely unreasonable price to pay as a source of food, 
and only understandable when considered as “sport,” a somewhat more eu- 
phemistic expression than the ‘“‘lust to kill.”” The use of live pigeons for tar- 
gets in trap shooting has long been banned as cruel. Are our ducks less val- 
uable than pigeons that we permit them to be shot as “sport”? when they are 
no longer needed as food? 
A rather well known writer recently described the plight of some Cana- 
dian farmers when flocks of ducks descended upon their grain fields. The 
farmers were obliged to keep someone watching to frighten the birds away 
and were permitted to kill them at any time when they were damaging the 
crop. This writer was bemoaning the fact that he could not go up there and 
hire out to shoot the ducks that came in to feed. Can you imagine a plainer 
display of the lust to kill? 
This desire is more widespread than most of us realize. Fish and Wild- 
life records show that Illinois is second only to California in sales of duck 
stamps, and the percentage of birds taken from the estimated number using 
the Mississippi flyway is greater than that from any other flyway. 
All of the states surrounding Illinois have taken the mourning dove, first 
cousin to the passenger pigeon, off the game bird list. The open season here 
often finds the mourning dove with young still in the nest, and killing of 
the parent birds means the death of those young. Suggestions that we fol- 
low the example of our neighbor states have been made, but the pleas that 
these birds be kept available for “sport” still prevail, thus proving that the 
primitive urge is still strong. How many more centuries do you suppose it 
will take to educate this out of ourselves? 
