eras BOON BoU Lely helen 29 
BOOK REVIEWS 
MUST THEY DIE? THE STRANGE CASE OF THE PRAIRIE DOG AND 
THE BLACK-FOOTED FERRET. By Faith McNulty. $4.95. 96 pages. 1971 
Doubleday and Co., 100 Park Ave., New York 10017. 
It is absolutely incredible, but in this so-called ‘“‘“environmental decade,” the 
U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries of the Department of Interior spends more 
than $7,000,000 annually and employs more than a thousand men to destroy 
wild animals on more than a million acres of western land. This action 
takes place through trapping, gunning and poisoning. 
The justification for these cruel acts is that these wild animals are a 
nuisance to farmers and ranchers: they eat grass and grain, they cause 
holes which can be dangerous to horses, and they eat sheep and other 
animals. The reasoning, therefore, goes that wildlife, which really belongs 
to all the people of the United States, must be exterminated in order to 
protect and preserve the economic positions of the western land barons. 
(Some of them own land in excess of 100,000 acres). The coyote, the Golden 
Eagle, and the Bald Eagle have been victims of this unfortunate program. 
Faith McNulty writes cool but compelling facts, describing the long 
process whereby we have now reached our present crisis: a deaf Congress, 
increased appropriations for extermination purposes, a divided opinion in 
Interior, the economic power of the western range men in congressional 
committees, and the gruesome effect of this total process on small animals 
such as the prairie dog. She also examines the fearsome decline of their 
predator — the seldom-seen Black-footed Ferret. 
One comes away from reading this book enraged at the federal bureau- 
crats who endorse the 1080 program; at the contradiction of Interior officials 
who place the Black-footed Ferret on the department’s “endangered species” 
list while their own program to decimate the Prairie Dog is aiding the 
decline of the Ferret. One feels that the Bureau of Sport Fisheries should 
be called the “U.S. Exterminating Co.,” and that every federal bureaucrat 
should have on his desk the famous motto of Pogo, “We have met the 
enemy and he is us.” One hopes that this book might arouse conservation- 
ists to their pens and typewriters. 
—Raymond Mostek 
SUPERHIGHWAY-SUPERHOAX. By Helen Leavitt. 
Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden City, New York. 
275 pages plus Summary of Highway Legislation, 1916 through 1968, 
Bibliography and Index. 1970. $6.95 
“'..Come 5 p.m. on any weekday, millions of perfectly normal, happy, in- 
telligent Americans become snarling, aggressive, frustrated or defeated 
human beings as they vie for road space with their fellow drivers.” This is 
a sample of Mrs. Leavitt’s prose — brilliant, direct, outspoken, purposeful 
and hard-hitting. 
Comparison with A Q. Mowbray’s 1969 book, “The Road to Ruin,” also 
brilliant and purposeful and hard-hitting, is inevitable. (See Review, De- 
cember 1969 Bulletin.) The aims of both authors are the same. Differences 
seem mainly a matter of scope. Mrs. Leavitt emphasizes disasters to large 
cities wrought by highways, particularly the Interstate Highway System. 
