Near Bridgeport, Connecticut, a gentleman of my acquaintance owns a fine estate which is adorned with a trout stream and a superfine trout pond.  Once he invited a business man of Bridgeport to be his guest, and fish for trout in his pond.  On that guest, during a visit of three days all the finest forms of hospitality were bestowed.

Two weeks later, my friend’s game-warden caught that guest, early on a Sunday morning, poaching on the trout-pond, and spoiled his carefully arranged get-away.

In his book “Saddle and Camp in the Rockies,” Mr. Dillon Wallace tells a story of a man from New York who in the mountains of Colorado deliberately corrupted his guides with money or other influences, shot mountain sheep in midsummer, and “got away with it.”

In northern Minnesota, George E. Wood has been having a hand-to-hand fight with the worst community of game-hogs and alien-born poachers of which I have heard.  There appears to be no game law that they do not systematically violate.  The killers seem determined to annihilate the last head of game, in spite of fines and imprisonments.  The foreigners are absolutely uncontrollable.  The latest feature of the war is the discovery of a tannery in the woods, where the hides of illegally-slaughtered deer and moose are dressed.  Apparently the only kind of a law that will save the game of northern Minnesota is one that will totally disarm the entire population.

In Pennsylvania, there exists an association which was formed for the express purpose of fighting the State Game Commission, preventing the enactment of a hunter’s license law and repealing the law against the killing of female deer and hornless fawns.  The continued existence of that organization on that basis would be a standing disgrace to the fair name of Pennsylvania.  I think, however, that that organization was founded on secret selfish purposes, and that ere long the general body of members will awaken to a realizing sense of their position, and range themselves in support of the excellent policies of the commission.

A POT-HUNTER is a man or boy who kills game as a business, for the money that can be derived from its sale, or other use.  Such men have the same feelings as butchers.  From their point of view, they can see no reason why all the game in the world should not be killed and marketed.  Like the feather-dealers, they wish to get out of the wild life all the money there is in it; that is all.  Left to themselves, with open markets they would soon exterminate the land fauna of the habitable portions of the globe.

No one can “educate” such people.  For the gunners, game-hogs and pot-hunters, there is no check, save specific laws that sternly and amply safeguard the rights of the wild creatures that can not make laws for themselves.

Nor can anyone educate the heartless woman of fashion who is determined to wear aigrettes as long as her money can buy them.  The best women of the world have already been educated on the bird-millinery subject, and they are already against the use of the gaudy badges of slaughter and extermination.  But in the great cities of the world there are thousands of women who are at heart as cruel as Salome herself, and whose vicious tastes can be curbed only by the strong hand of the law.  “Sentiment” for wild birds is not in them.