We who advocated the Bayne law said: "Close the New York markets against Currituck birds, and you will stop a great deal of the slaughter."
We cleaned our Augean stable. The greatest game market in America was absolutely closed.
Last winter (1911) the annual killing of wild fowl was fully fifty per cent less than during previous years. In one small town, twenty professional duck shooters went entirely out of business—because they couldn't sell their ducks! The dealers refused to buy them. The result was exactly what we predicted it would be; and this year, it is reported over and over that ducks are more plentiful in New England than they have been in twenty years previously! The result is wonderful, because so quick.
Beyond all question, the feather merchants of London, Paris and Berlin absolutely control the bird-killers of Venezuela, China, New Guinea. Mexico and South America. Let the word go forth that "the trade" is no longer permitted to buy and sell egret and heron plumes, skins of birds of paradise and condor feathers, and presto! the killing industry falls dead the next moment.
MISCELLANEOUS BIRD SKINS, 8 CENTS EACH
Purchased by the New York Zoological Society from the Quarterly Sale in London, August, 1912
Yes, indeed, members of the British Parliament: it is easily within your power to wipe out at a single stroke fully one-half of the bird slaughter for fancy feathers. It can be done just as we wiped out one-half the annual duck slaughter in wickedly-wasteful North Carolina!