Our Vanishing Wild Life eBook

William Temple Hornaday
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 632 pages of information about Our Vanishing Wild Life.

Our Vanishing Wild Life eBook

William Temple Hornaday
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 632 pages of information about Our Vanishing Wild Life.

In this region, as we pushed on over the mountains into the wilderness of Pahang, we saw little of the actual destruction of the primeval native growth, but elsewhere it became a common sight.  Once, for many days we studied the wonderful life of a jungle which stretched up to our very camp.  Troops of rollicking wa-was or gibbons frequented the forest; squirrels, tupaias, birds and insects in myriads were everywhere during the day.  Great fruit-bats, flying lemurs, owls and other nocturnal creatures made the evenings and nights full of interest.

And then, one day without warning came the sound of an ax, and another and another.  From that moment the songs, cries, chirps and roars of the jungle were seldom heard from our camp.  Every day saw new phalanxes of splendid primeval trees fallen, or half suspended in their rigging of lianas.  The leaves withered, the flower petals fell and we heard no more the crackling of bamboos in the wind.  Then the pitiful survivors of the destruction were brought to us; now a baby flying lemur, flung from its hole by the falling of some tree; young tupaias, nestling birds; a few out of the thousands of creatures from insects to mammals which were slain so that a Chinaman or Malay might eke a few dollars, four or five years hence, from a grove of rubber trees.  I do not say it is wrong.  Man has won out, and might is right, as since the dawn of creation; but to the onlooker, to the lover of nature and the animal world it is a terrible, a hopeless thing.

One cannot at present leave the tourist line of travel in the East without at once encountering evidence of the wholesale direct slaughter of wild life, or its no less certain extermination by the elimination of the haunts and the food plants of the various beasts and birds.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXI

THE SAVAGE VIEW-POINT OF THE GUNNER

The mental attitude of the men who shoot constitutes a deadly factor in the destruction of wild life and the extermination of species.  Fully ninety-five per cent of the sportsmen, gunners and other men and boys who kill game, all over the world and in all nations, regard game birds and mammals only as things to be killed and eaten, and not as creatures worth preserving for their beauty or their interest to mankind.  This is precisely the viewpoint of the cave-man and the savage, and it has come down from the Man-with-a-Club to the Man-with-a-Gun absolutely unchanged save for one thing:  the latter sometimes is prompted to save to-day in order to slaughter to-morrow.

The above statement of an existing fact may seem harsh; and some persons may be startled by it; but it is based on an acquaintance with thousands of men who shoot all kinds of game, all over the world.  My critics surely will admit that my opportunities to meet the sportsmen and gunners of the world are, and for thirty-five years have been, rather favorable.  As a matter of fact, I think the efforts of the hunters of my personal acquaintance have covered about seven-tenths of the hunting grounds of the world.  If the estimate that I have formed of the average hunter’s viewpoint is wrong, or even partially so, I will be glad to have it proven in order that I may reform my judgment and apologize.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Our Vanishing Wild Life from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.