The gray squirrel should be perpetually protected,—­because he is too beautiful, too companionable and too unfit for food to be killed.  Even the hungry savages of the East Indies do not eat squirrels.

  Pass an automatic pump-gun law.

  Extend the term of the Fish and Game Commissioner to four years.

Vermont’s great success in introducing and colonizing deer is both interesting and valuable.  Fifty years ago, she had no wild deer, because the species had been practically exterminated.  In 1875, thirteen deer were imported from the Adirondacks and set free in the mountains.  The increase has been enormous.  In 1909 the number of deer killed for the year was about 5,311, which was possible without adversely affecting the herds.  It is a striking object-lesson in restoring the white-tailed deer to its own, and it will be found more fully described in chapter XXIV.

VIRGINIA: 

Virginia is far below the position that she should occupy in wild-life conservation.  To set her house in order, and come up to the level of the states that have been born during the past twenty years, she must bestir herself in these ways: 

  She must provide for a resident hunting license, a State Game
  Commissioner and a force of salaried wardens.

  She must prohibit spring shooting.

  She must impose small bag limits on game-slaughter.

  She must resolutely stop the sale of all wild game.

  She must stop the killing of female deer, and of bucks with horns
  under three inches long.

  She must stop killing gray squirrels and doves as “game.”

  She should not permit the beautiful wood-duck to be killed as
  “game.”

  She should accord a five-year close season to grouse, and all shore
  birds.

  She should rule out the machine shot-guns which gentlemen can no
  longer use in hunting.

She should adopt at once a comprehensive code of game laws, and clean her house in one siege, instead of fiddling and fussing with all these matters one by one, through a series of ten long, weary years.  The time for puttering with game protection has gone by.  It is now time to make short cuts to comprehensive results, and save the game before it is too late.

WASHINGTON: 

The state of Washington still flatters herself that she has all kinds of big game to kill,—­moose, antelope, goat, sheep, caribou and deer.  Evidently this is on the theory that so long as a species is not extinct, it is “legal” and right to pursue it with rifles during a specified “open season.”

The people of Washington need to be told that conditions have greatly changed, and it is now high time to put on the brakes.  It is time for them to realize that if they wait any longer for the sportsmen to take the initiative in securing the enactment of really adequate preservation laws, all their big game will be dead before those laws are born!  Every man shrinks from cutting off his own pet privilege.