l _agree_ to it or not. _Of course they will not
agree to it,--never_! But our duty is clear,--to go ahead and _do it_!

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXIV

GAME AND AGRICULTURE; AND DEER AS A FOOD SUPPLY

As a state and county asset, the white-tailed deer contains
possibilities that as yet seem to be ignored by the American people as a
whole. It is quite time to consider that persistent, prolific and
toothsome animal.

The proposition that large herds of horned game can not becomingly roam
at will over farms and vineyards worth one hundred dollars per acre,
affords little room for argument. Generally speaking, there is but one
country in the world that breaks this well-nigh universal rule; and that
country is India. On the plains between and adjacent to the Ganges and
the Jumna, for two thousand years herds of black-buck, or sasin
antelope, have roamed over cultivated fields so thickly garnished with
human beings that to-day the rifle-shooting sportsman stands in hourly
peril of bagging a five-hundred-rupee native every time he fires at an
antelope.

Wherever rich agricultural lands exist, the big game must give
way,--_from those lands_. To-day the bison could not survive in Iowa,
eastern Nebraska or eastern Kansas, any longer than a Shawnee Indian
would last on the Bowery. It was foredoomed that the elk, deer, bear and
wild turkey should vanish from the rich farming regions of the East and
the middle West.

To-day in British East Africa lions are being hunted with dogs and shot
wholesale, because they are a pest to the settlers and to the surviving
herds of big game. At the same time, the settlers who are striving to
wrest the fertile plains of B.E.A, from the domain of savagery declare
that the African buffalo, the zebra, the kongoni and the elephant are
public nuisances that must be suppressed by the rifle.

Even the most ardent friend of wild life must admit that when a settler
has laboriously fenced his fields, and plowed and sowed, only to have
his whole crop ruined in one night by a herd of fence-breaking zebras,
the event is sufficient to abrade the nerves of the party most in
interest. While I take no stock in stories of dozens of "rogue"
elephants that require treatment with the rifle, and of grown men being
imperiled by savage gazelles, we admit that there are times when wild
animals can make nuisances of themselves. Let us consider that subject
now.

WILD ANIMAL NUISANC