Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 November 1879 — Enforce the Game Law. [ARTICLE]

Enforce the Game Law.

New Albany Ledger-Standard. This is the season of the yeatr for the city hunter to depredate upon his countrymen in the rural districts. Gardeners near the city and farmers in the country have their trials and tribulations with the smart city chaps. There are a few persons who, at this season of the year make their regular raids for recreation and sport, but seldom bag game sufficient to pay for the powder burned. The “plod hoppers,” as the smart Alecks term farmers and gardeners, fairly shudder at the approach of what is called the hunting season. Even the cattle, the geese, chickens and ducks and innocent birds fear the standing collar hunter. Full grown men, half grown boys with dogs, guns and pistols, seem to swarm and pervade every road, lane, field and yardway within many miles of cities and towns. The hunter seems to be abroad in the land and they are often dangerous to even the lives of country people. The damage to fences, jrops, stock and poultry yards which these depredators infect is a very large item of loss. But it Is nothing in comparison with the actual loss to the crops from the wholesale slaughter of insectivorous birds. These, to be sure, are protected by law; but the law is really never eu forced. If the destroying vagabond be a stranger, the former is afraid to interfere with him lest he return and burn his buildings at night. Il he is the son of a neighbor or of a resident of the next village, he will not incur the displeasure of his family by a prosecution. And so the .birds suffer in myriads, and the worms and insects come down unopoosed upon the growing crops and fruits; and the aggregate damage would be appalling if it could possibly be ascertained in figures. It has been gravely asserted by men who have given the subject serious and patient study,that the locust and grasshopper pests, which, from time to lime devastate some of our western states and territories, are due to the Wholesale destruction of the game birds of the Rocky mountain slopes and the Mississippi valley. Prof. Rilev, state etomologist of Missouri, »declared that one grouse would in a season oon-

sume eggs and larvae of locusts enough, if hatched out, to destroy the crops upon one hundred acres of land. These birds are the guards which nature has set over the fields, and we might as well poison the soil as to remove them from their appointed work. And what the grouse is to the western farmer the beautiful Virginia partridge is to the eastern —for it comes in numbers proportioned to the fields sown, and takes as the recompense of its guardianship of the young crops only the scattered grains of the harvest. Even the ungainly crow has at last found favor in the eyes of the husbandman. He pays for the few grains he steals from the first planting by an incessant warfare upon countless unseen enemies of the corn. But these are not all. The trees, the hedges, and the grass are alive with smaller birds which contribute their share to the security of field and orchard, and which are swept away in multitudes by the foolish gunners who infest the country from the first of October to the first of January.