- Oklahoma must stop all spring shooting.
- The prairie chicken must have a ten-year close season, immediately.
- Next time, her legislature will pass the automatic gun bill that failed last year only because the session closed too soon for its consideration.
Oklahoma is wise in giving long protection to her quail, and "wild pigeon," and such protection should be made equally effective in the case of the dove. She is wise in rigidly enforcing her law against the exportation of game.
The Wichita National Bison herd, near Cache, now contains forty head of bison, all in good condition. The nucleus herd consisted of fifteen head presented by the New York Zoological Society in 1907.
The results of the efforts that have been made by Oregon to provide special laws for each individual shooter are painful to contemplate. Like North Carolina, Oregon has attempted the impossible task of pleasing everybody, and at the same time protecting her wild life. The two propositions can be blended together about as easily as asphalt and water. The individual shooter desires laws that will permit him to shoot—when he pleases, where he pleases, and what he pleases! If you meet those conditions all over a great state, then it is time to bid farewell to the game; for it surely is doomed.
No, decidedly no! Do not attempt to pass game laws that will "please everybody." The more the game-hogs are displeased, the better for the game! The game-hogs form a very small and very insignificant minority of the whole People. Why please one man at the expense of ninety-nine others? The game of a state belongs to The People as a whole, not to the gunners alone. The great, patient,—and sometimes sleepy,—majority has vested rights in it, and it is for it to say how it shall and shall not be killed. Heretofore the gunning minority has been dictating the game laws of America, and the result is—progressive extermination.
- First of all, Oregon should bury the pernicious idea of individual and local laws.
- She should enact a concise, clearly cut, and thoroughly effective code of wild life laws, just as New York did last winter.
- Her game seasons should be uniform in application, all over the state.
- Every species of bird, mammal or fish that is threatened with extermination should be given a close season of from five to ten years.
- It is now time to protect the white goose and brant. Squirrels, band-tailed pigeons and doves should be perpetually protected.
- The State Game Commission should have power to close the shooting seasons on any species of game in any locality, whenever a species is threatened with extinction.
- The sale of native wild game, from all sources, should be permanently stopped, by a Bayne law.
- The use of automatic, "autoloading" and pump shot guns in hunting should be perpetually barred.
As a game protecting state, Pennsylvania is a close second to New York and Massachusetts. She protects all native game from sale; she has the courage to prohibit aliens from owning guns; she bars out automatic shot-guns in hunting; she makes refuges for deer, and feeds her quail in winter, and she permits the killing of no female deer, or fawns with horns less than three inches in length. Her splendid State Game Commission is fighting hard for a hunter's license law, and will win the fight for it at the next session of the legislature (1913).
But there are certain things that Pennsylvania should do:
- She should stop all spring shooting. She must stop killing doves, blackbirds, wild turkeys, sandpipers, and all the squirrels save the red squirrel.
- She should give all her shore birds a rest of at least five years, for recuperation.
- She should enact a comprehensive Dutcher plumage law, stopping the sale of aigrettes.
- She should provide a resident license to furnish her Game Commission with adequate funds to carry on its work and exterminate game-killing vermin.
- Little Rhody needs some good, small bag limits; for now (1912) she has none!
- She should enact a Bayne law, a Pennsylvania law against aliens, and a New Jersey law against the automatic and pump guns.
- She should stop killing the beautiful wood-duck, and gray squirrel.
- She should stop all spring shooting of waterfowl.