CONSERVATION'S DEBT TO SPORTSMEN BY JOHN B. BURNHAM It was the hunters and fishermen who first learned to love the charm of God's unspoiled handicraft and who, reveling in the poignancy of wild beauty, taught others the same joy. More than a hundred years before the discovery of America that good sportsman Count Gaston de Foix wrote to prove that "the life of no man that useth gentle game and disport is less displeasable unto God than the life of a perfect and skilful hunter, or from which more good cometh". He shows how the hunter is saved from the seven deadly sins, and he paints this lovely word picture of dawn to prove that "hunters live in this world more joyfully than other men". "For," says he, "when the hunter riseth in the morning and he sees a sweet and fair morn and clear weather and bright, and he heareth the song of the small birds, which sing so sweetly with great melody and full of love, each in its own language in the best wise that it can according that it learneth of its own kind. And when the sun is arisen, he shall see fresh dew upon the small twigs and grasses, and the sun by his virtue shall make them shine. And that is great joy and liking to the hunter's heart." Read similar passages from Izaak Walton, and then pause and think of the debt we owe these men and others like them. Half the joy of life would be missing if it were not for the appreciation of nature first taught by sportsmen. Have you ever stopped to think that this love of nature is a comparatively new thing in the world, and that its conservation arrived only yesterday? The writings of the ancients show that mankind feared or hated what we now love; hunting was battle, mountains and forests were terrifying, the sea hostile, nature an enemy. Pleasure was found only in what man had wrested from nature, houses and streets and cultivated fields. The antithesis of the sportsman is typified by Browning's Italian person of quality who complains of the whine of the bees in the resinous firs on the hill, but grows enthusiastic over the city: Bang, whang, whang, goes the drum; tootle-te-tootle, the fife; The change in man's attitude toward nature is one of the greatest of all spiritual advances, and compares with the change from Paganism to Christianity. It provides the antidote to our complex civilization, the means of preserving our mental and bodily health. No doubt hunters learned to love the mountains and forests and seas and deserts through the chase, and conversely they learned to love the wild animals and birds and fish through their association with nature. The history of events shows that the sportsmen not only took the initiative in conservation but have developed and carried it on. I am writing to disabuse the minds of those who still hold the colonial New England view, that a sportsman is a man too lazy to work and not smart enough to steal; also that other set of good people who have the midVictorian idea of old Webster's dictionaries, that sportsmen are jockey or gamester types skilled in field sports; also those of a later day who class them as bloodthirsty assassins of wild life. None of these classifications will fit George Bird Grinnell, William Dutcher, George Shiras, Theodore Roosevelt, men who have worked to save wild life and wild nature in this country. While others have scoffed, sportsmen have made their designation a title of honor through unselfish devotion. Good people are confused because the term is too loosely applied. As regards the chase, no one can today be called a sportsman who has not cultivated the ethical side of the thing and developed noblesse oblige. I love hunting; but I do not love it so much for the game in the game pocket as for the game in the fields and forests. I am ready always to give up shooting when the interest of wild life demands it. In this I think I represent the attitude of all true sportsmen. Without legal prohibition, the sportsmen of Massachusetts voluntarily stopped shooting grouse when the supply was threatened. The intelligent application of closed seasons has always been through sportsman initiative. It was so in Minnesota last year. In unintelligent contrast, consider the taking of a game species from the game list in Ohio. Quail were made "song birds there by legislative enactment, successfully promoted by a man entirely out of sympathy with the wonderful conservation movement of today. This man employed an accomplished cartoonist to work upon the feelings of the public with harrowing pictures of wild life persecution such as only he could draw, and he calculatingly fanned into flame the smoldering resentment of farmers against wanton trespassers on their lands. His success was achieved by arousing antagonism against sportsmen, and for what end? The sportsmen suffered and nothing gained, not even the quail, as is shown by their abundance in the neighboring State of Indiana where shooting is permitted. Only pot hunters and vermin profited. This apostle for classifying quail improperly was the man who fifteen years ago tried to remove the protection designed to be given game birds by the original Federal migratory bird legislation. He argued that the bill was too heavily loaded, and that it could not be passed to protect both game and non-game birds, and that the game birds should be sacrificed. The crying conservation need in this instance was protection for the game birds and not the others. Thanks to the Audubon Association, the safety of others had already been assured. But the migratory game birds were on the verge of extinction. Many persons in 1912 believed they were doomed. The great wintering State of Texas had no closed season, and many of the other States along the more important migration routes permitted ducks to be killed at all times when they were present. Market shooting was in full swing without bag limit restrictions. The sportsmen had lovingly included all other birds in their programme, but this man was willing on a mere question of mistaken policy to sacrifice the valuable game species to the ogre of commercialism, the Moloch which has swallowed up so much of the world's wild life! Fortunately for the birds his plan did not succeed. There is still a conflict of opinion between those who stand for the prohibitive system of saving game by constantly cutting bag limits and shortening shooting seasons to the vanishing point, and those who go about conserving and building up the supply by constructive methods; but the conflict has largely narrowed down to a matter of scolding on the part of the former. The critics assert that we have wasted our heritage to such an extent that to save the remnants we must pile the prohibitions of Pelion on Ossa. The verboten system has been with us since the first settlers set foot on our shores. Colonial game laws naturally were patterned after those of the Old World, and particularly after the England of hereditary privilege, the England which taught the ordinary folk to say, "God bless the squire and his relations, and make us know our proper stations," and which hanged the man found hunting on land which did not belong to him. The game saviors of that day framed these laws with considerable severity. They were determined to save the game willy-nilly, by restrictions. It was under this type of law that practically all of our game disappeared. Something was wrong with the system, but for nearly two hundred years nobody could find out why with perfectly constructed statutes the game continued passing over the brink. An uninspired Jeremiah in Philadelphia a hundred years ago sounded the warning to save the remnants. In a way strangely reminiscent of a more modern school, he demanded additional prohibitions, and he lambasted Tom, Dick and Harry for not observing their proper stations. Thirty years later another equally hopeless prophet arose, but this man had sufficient vision to see part way into the fog. He realized what others had not grasped, that the union of monarchial laws with an anti-monarchial sentiment made an impossible marriage, and that in America drastic prohibitions never could be as effective as in England. The American says, "To hell with the squire and his relations!" The thing that Frank Forester failed to envision was the possibility of a new system adapted to a country of equality. And so from a fullness of experience never excelled, he predicted the complete extermination of American game in from ten to forty years, depending upon the variety. Another twenty years passed before, something more than fifty years ago, we began the foundations of our present system. The development came without fanfare of trumpets, and the men who brought it about had no genius for self advertisement. Instead of fulminating, they went to the root of the matter and set about Americanizing the misfit plan. In England the incentive for conservation came from the value of game to the land owner as personal property, and the land owner naturally saw to it that the laws made for his benefit were enforced. Here there was no corresponding incentive. But clear headed sportsmen showed that with game as the common property of all the people, it was the individual's obligation to preserve the asset. It was upon this basis of personal obligation that the problem was solved. Otherwise the predictions of game extermination would long ago have been realized. The first and for a time the only game protective association in America was the New York Association for the Protection of Game. This organization had on its roll the most intelligent of the New York gunners, including some very able lawyers. Its name is written large in the history of conservation, because the little group which directed its energies combined action with vision. They originated much of our basic game laws and secured fundamental decisions of the higher courts establishing the laws. But first they set in motion a campaign for law enforcement through an educational barrage to show their fellow sportsmen that it was their job and no one's else to save the game. They showed that sport was committing suicide, that when a man shot out of season he was taking another's share of the game owned in common. They insisted that the hunter must first observe the law himself, and then see to it that others followed suit. No one had before The doctrine was rudimentary but new. felt personal responsibility to save game. The idea spread like wildfire. In 1874 there was only one game protective association. By the end of the next year there were one hundred, including ten or twelve State organizations. A way had been found. Optimism took the place of pessimism, and the doom of the game was averted. |