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                    THE MENTOR 1916.08.15, No. 113,
                        Game Animals of America




                            LEARN ONE THING
                               EVERY DAY

                  AUGUST 15 1916      SERIAL NO. 113

                                  THE
                                MENTOR

                             GAME ANIMALS
                              OF AMERICA

                           By W. T. HORNADAY

                           Director New York
                            Zoological Park

                  DEPARTMENT OF             VOLUME 4
                  NATURAL HISTORY          NUMBER 13

                         FIFTEEN CENTS A COPY




Game Preservation


The most striking and melancholy feature in connection with American
big game is the rapidity with which it has vanished. When, just before
the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the rifle-bearing hunters of the
backwoods first penetrated the great forests west of the Alleghanies,
deer, elk, black bear, and even buffalo, swarmed in what are now the
States of Kentucky and Tennessee, and the country north of the Ohio was
a great and almost virgin hunting-ground. From that day to this the
shrinkage has gone on, only partially checked here and there.

There is yet ample opportunity for the big game hunter in the United
States, Canada and Alaska.… It is necessary to remember that these
opportunities are, nevertheless, vanishing; and if we are a sensible
people we will make it our business to see that the process of
extinction is arrested. At the present moment the great herds of
caribou are being butchered, as in the past the great herds of bison
and wapiti have been butchered. Every believer in manliness, and
therefore in manly sport, and every lover of nature, every man who
appreciates the majesty and beauty of the wilderness and of wild life,
should strike hands with the far-sighted men who wish to preserve our
material resources, in the effort to keep our forests and our game
beasts, game birds, and game fish--indeed, all the living creatures of
prairie, and woodland, and seashore--from wanton destruction.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

From “Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter,” by Theodore Roosevelt.

Copyright, Charles Scribner’s Sons.




GAME ANIMALS OF AMERICA

_By W. T. HORNADAY_

THE MENTOR

DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL HISTORY


    _MENTOR GRAVURES_

    ELK

    MOUNTAIN SHEEP

    ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOAT

AUGUST 15 1916

    _MENTOR GRAVURES_

    CARIBOU

    BULL MOOSE

    THE BISON LEADER

[Illustration: Mountain Sheep Head]

Entered as second-class matter March 10, 1913, at the postoffice at New
York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1916, by The
Mentor Association, Inc.

Does anyone doubt that in North America the hunting of big game,--once
marvelously abundant,--is fast becoming an extinct pastime? As a game
animal, the American bison is gone. In the United States, antelope
hunting is gone, forever. The Arizona elk is totally extinct. In the
United States, mountain sheep hunting is extinct in all States save
two: and it should be so in those also. Mountain goat hunting is
possible in two States only. It is now next to impossible to find and
kill a wild grizzly in the United States.

There are many persons, of whom I am one, who believe that in a brief
span of years there will be no big-game hunting in the mountain
States west of the great plains, save around the borders of big-game
sanctuaries, such as the Yellowstone Park.

With the exception of the bison and the Arizona elk, we may even yet
see in our mountain States good specimens of some of the big-game
species that abundantly stocked them in pioneer days. We are glad
that we live contemporaneously