The logical conclusion of our land that is utterly unfit for agriculture is a great area of land available for occupancy by valuable wild animals. Every year the people of the United States are wasting uncountable millions of pounds of venison, because we are neglecting our opportunities for producing it practically without cost. Imagine for a moment bestowing upon land owners the ability to stock with white-tailed and Indian sambar deer all the wild lands of the United States that are suitable for those species, and permitting only bucks over one year of age to be shot. With the does even reasonably protected, the numerical results in annual pounds of good edible flesh fairly challenges the imagination.
About six years ago, Mr. C.C. Worthington's deer, in his fenced park, at Shawnee-on-Delaware, Pennsylvania, became so numerous and so burdensome that he opened his fences and permitted about one thousand head to go free.
We are losing each year a very large and valuable asset in the intangible form of a million hardy deer that we might have raised but did not! Our vast domains of wooded mountains, hills and valleys lie practically untenanted by big game, save in a few exceptional spots. We lose because we are lawless. We lose because we are too improvident to conserve large forms of wild life unless we are compelled to do so by the stern edict of the law! The law-breakers, the game-hogs, the conscienceless doe-and-fawn slayers are everywhere! Ten per cent of all the grown men now in the United States are to-day poachers, thieves and law-breakers, or else they are liable to become so to-morrow. If you doubt it, try risking your new umbrella unprotected in the next mixed company of one hundred men that you encounter, in such a situation that it will be easy to "get away" with it.
We could raise two million deer each year on our empty wild lands; but without fences it would take half a million real game-wardens, on duty from dawn until dark, to protect them from destructive slaughter. At present our land of liberty contains only 9,354 game wardens. [ [J] ] The states that contain the greatest areas of wild lands naturally lack in population and in tax funds, and not one such state can afford to put into the field even half enough salaried game wardens to really protect her game from surreptitious slaughter. The surplus of "personal liberty" in this liberty-cursed land is a curse to the big game. The average frontiersman never will admit the divine right of kings, but he does ardently believe in the divine right of settlers,—to reach out and take any of the products of Nature that they happen to fancy.
Wild Meat As A Food Supply. —We hear much these days about the high cost of living, but thus far we have made no move to mend the situation. With coal going straight up to ten dollars per ton, beef going up to fifteen dollars per hundred on the hoof and wheat and hay going-up—heaven alone knows where, it is time for all Americans who are not rich to arouse and take thought for the morrow. What are we going to do about it? The tariff on the coarser necessities of life is now booked to come down; but what about the fresh meat supply?
I desire to point out that between Bangor and San Diego and from Key West to Bellingham, our country contains millions of acres of wild, practically uninhabited forests, rough foot-hills, bad-lands and mountains that could produce two million deer each year, without deducting $50,000 a year from the wealth of the country. I grant that in the total number of deer that would be necessary to produce two million deer per annum, the farms situated on the edges of forests, and actually within the forests, would suffer somewhat from the depredations of those deer. As I will presently show by documentary records, every one of those individual damages that exceeds two dollars in value could be compensated in cash, and afterward leave on the credit side of the deer account an enormous annual balance.
Stop for a moment, you enterprising and restless men and women who travel all over the United States, and think of the illimitable miles of unbroken forest that you have looked upon from your Pullman windows in the East, in the South, in the West and in southern Canada. Recall the wooded mountains of the Appalachian system, the White Mountain region, the pine forests of the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf States, the forests of Tennessee, Arkansas and southern Missouri; of northern Minnesota, and every state of the Rocky Mountain region. Then, think of the silent and untouched forests of the Pacific Coast and tell me whether you think five million deer scattered through all those forests would make any visible impression upon them. That would be only about twenty-five times as many as are there now! I think the forests would not be over populated; and they would produce two million killable deer each year!
Last year, 11,000 deer were forced down out of their hiding places in the Rocky Mountains, and were killed in Montana. Even the natives had not dreamed there were so many available; and they were slaughtered not wisely but too ill. It is not right that six members of one family should "hog" twelve deer in one season. At present no deer supply can stand such slaughter.
Assuming that the people of the United States could be educated into the idea of so conserving deer that they could draw two million head per year from the general stock, what would it be worth?
It is not very difficult to estimate the value of a deer, when the whole animal can be utilized. In various portions of the United States, deer vary in size, but I shall take all this into account, and try to strike a fair average. In some sections, where deer are large and heavy, a full-grown buck is easily worth twenty-five dollars. Let him who doubts it, try to replace those generous pounds of flesh with purchased beef and mutton and veal, and see how far twenty-five dollars will go toward it. Every man who is a householder knows full well how little meat one dollar will buy at this time.