As soon as the proper balance of deer life has been restored, protect the does once more.

The pursuit of this policy is safe and sane, provided it can be wrought out without the influence of selfishness, and reckless disregard for the rights of the next generation.  On the whole, its handling is like playing with fire, and I think there are very, very few states on this earth wherein it would be wise or safe to try it.  As a wise friend once remarked to me, “Give some men a hinch, and they’ll always try to take a hell.”  In Vermont, however, the situation is kept so well in hand we may be sure that at the right moment the law providing for the decrease of the number of does will be repealed.

HIPPOPOTAMI AND ANTELOPES.—­Last year a bill was introduced in the lower House of Congress proposing to provide funds for the introduction into certain southern states of various animals from Africa, especially hippopotami and African antelopes.  The former were proposed partly for the purpose of ridding navigation of the water hyacinths that now are choking many of the streams of Louisiana and Mississippi.  The antelopes were to be acclimatized as a food supply for the people at large.

This measure well illustrates the prevailing disposition of the American people to-day,—­to ignore and destroy their own valuable natural stock of wild birds and mammals, and when they have completed their war of extermination, reach out to foreign countries for foreign species.  Instead of preserving the deer of the South, the South reaches out for the utterly impossible antelopes of Africa, and the preposterous hippopotamus.  The North joyously exterminates her quail and ruffed grouse, and goes to Europe for the Hungarian partridge.  That partridge is a failure here, and I am heartily glad of it, on the ground that the exterminators of our native species do not deserve success in their efforts to displace our finest native species with others from abroad.

The hippo-antelope proposition is a climax of absurdity, in proposing the replacing of valuable native game with impossible foreign species.

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CHAPTER XXV

LAW AND SENTIMENT AS FACTORS IN PRESERVATION

There is grave danger that through ignorance of the true character of about 80 per cent of the men and boys who shoot wild creatures, a great wrong will be done the latter.  Let us not make a fatal mistake.

After more than thirty years of observation among all kinds of sportsmen, hunters and gunners, I am convinced that it is utterly futile and deadly dangerous to rely on humane, high-class sentiment to diminish the slaughter of wild things by game-hogs and pot-hunters.

In some respects, the term “game-hog” is a rude, rough word; but it is needed in the English language, and it has come to stay.  It is a disagreeable term, but it was brought into use to apply to a class of very disagreeable persons.