Improving the Farm Environment for Wild Life Page: 2
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FARMERS' BULLETIN 1719
Despite their general interest, however, few farmers fully realize
how directly every farm activity affects wild life. From dawn to
dusk of each day the farmer's chores tend, each in its way, to make
his premises a better or a worse home for feathered and furred
creatures. The chopping down of a dead tree may mean death to
a den of lively squirrels; the pasturing of a wood lot may eliminate
a covey of quail; and the use of silos, the storage of manure, the
drainage of marshlands, and many other parts of the farm routine
may react profoundly upon the lives of songbirds, game birds, and
fur animals.
Farm practice often can be modified so as to benefit wild things
and yet in no way interfere with agricultural objectives. In fact,
desirable bird and animal life on the farm may be greatly encouraged
and multiplied by even minor modifications of agricultural usage.
Nearly all farmers are interested in how this can be accomplished.
Wild-life management, particularly game management, is some-
thing essentially different from mere protection and preservation.
Game management is a branch of agriculture, whereas preserva-
tion is much more a function of park and sanctuary administration.
Preservation seeks to hold what there is, a laudable purpose, but
one too frequently implying passive acceptance of present conditions
rather than active efforts to better them. No farmer is interested
merely in preserving his seed corn. No more need he be interested
in preserving only a seed stock of game when he can, if he will,
vastly increase and utilize it.
Furthermore, in reality it is not the lawmaker but the farmer who
determines whether game may or may not be taken. If the farmer
destroys the environment and with it the game, no one can take
game even if there are privileges under the law. If game is present
the farmer may permit hunting or he may prevent it by insisting
on observance of trespass laws.
Although under the prevailing laws of the United States the
farmer does not own the game, he nevertheless controls it, and with-
out his active interest in its increase the hunting public and the
lawmakers are powerless. It is evident that the millions of hunters
in this country cannot be accommodated upon public property even
by the most heroic efforts of game commissions in establishing public
hunting grounds at great expense. By and large, the public must
use the ordinary farm for its excursions after rabbits, squirrels,
pheasants, and quail. To insure the continuance of that privilege
it is incumbent upon sportsmen to observe every courtesy toward
farmers upon whose lands they may have the privilege of hunting
and to conduct themselves in accordance with the Golden Rule.
To make the farm fully productive of game is an agricultural
process; use of the farm by the public, therefore, in harvesting the
game crop demands recognition of costs assumed by the farmer in
maintaining and paying taxes upon game coverts and in his donating
a share of his other crops as food for wild life. Recognition of the
financial aspect of the problem does not sordidly transmute the
recreational value of wild life into gold or dollars; it merely faces
the fact that practical efforts are necessary in the preservation and
increase of game and wild-life environments on farms and that
constructive labor merits reward.2
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Grange, Wallace B. (Wallace Byron), 1905-1987 & McAtee, W. L. (Waldo Lee), 1883-1962. Improving the Farm Environment for Wild Life, pamphlet, 1934; Washington D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc97259/m1/3/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.