Go & Get It

Food-rationed U.S. citizens last week heard mouth-watering news. A great overabundance of U.S. wildlife, largely due to the war's curtailment of hunting, was reported by the eighth North American Wildlife Conference in Denver: >Pheasants are so plaguy numerous in some western states (especially the Dakotas) that farmers call them "pests." > Hundreds of thousands of wild ducks have been saved by Coast Guard restrictions, lack of gasoline, fewer hunters. The wild duck population is thought to be the heaviest in years, is making farmers angrier by turning crop lands into "picnic grounds."

> Quail and rabbit in some parts of the U.S. are threats to crops, gardens. > Fewer than 200 reindeer "planted" after World War I on Nunivak Island, off the coast of Alaska, have grown to a herd of 19,000. Since the island will support only about 10,000 reindeer, the surplus must be killed off.

>Yellowstone Park's two elk herds, thinned by 7,230 during the present winter, are still a problem. Wyoming's rising moose population is mooching down on civilization in search of food. One militant moose recently held a group of children imprisoned in a schoolhouse for hours; three other moose had to be shot by a rural mail carrier before they would give him right of way.

Faced with game surpluses that threaten mass starvation of birds & beasts, conservationists are nonetheless dead set against the abolition of a bag limit. They also say that "scientific slaughtering" of excess wildlife is economically unsound, citing the example of California, which in 1924-26 paid $500,000 to get 22,000 deer killed--around $23 a deer. Their point: Why pay people to hunt when hunters will pay for the privilege?

The conservationists' remedy for the surpluses is as plain as the nose on a moose's face: let the Government release a modest amount of ammunition to hunters (dealers' shelves are now bone-bare). They point out that such hunting is not only necessary to maintain wildlife population at an optimum level, but also taps a potential food supply of more than one-quarter billion pounds of meat--plus feathers, fat and fun.

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