THE WANTON WAY

"There's an Angler's law, and a court or legal law. The fisherman who adheres to the Angler's law can't break the court law."—Seth Fielding.

Gentility in the limit of the catch and giving the fish its sporting chance on light tackle constitute the ethical soul of angling. The fisherman who stops fishing when he has a few specimens is angling; he's an Angler. The fisherman who fishes with no limit in his catch is merely fishing; he's a fisherman, not an Angler.

Any picture of a few fishes may illustrate the catch of the Angler, and the photograph on Frontispiece shows the catch of the worst type of fisherman—the wanton fish exterminator who, ignoring the Angler's gentle law, takes his greedy mess because it is according to the so-called legal law.

Dr. William T. Hornaday, author of Wild Life Conservation, The American Natural History, Our Vanishing Wild Life, etc., and director of the New York ZoÖlogical Park, has sent me the photograph of the greedyman's catch—made near Spokane, Washington—with the following notes:

"The great trouble [in the matter of wasteful fish-catching] is not so much with the people who catch fish as with the brutally destructive laws that permit fishermen to catch four or five times as many fish as they should. There are a great many sportsmen who sincerely believe that it is all right to take all the fish and game of all kinds that the law allows. Whenever any destruction is waged on that basis I always charge it to the abominably liberal laws that in many cases seemed framed to promote destruction. Ninety-nine per cent. of the streams of this country very soon will be so nearly destitute of fish that fishing will become a lost art. In the Rocky Mountains the overfishing abuse is particularly vicious and destructive because in those cold streams the fish mature slowly, their food is very scarce and dear, and the fish are so hungry that they are easily caught. It is an easy matter to completely fish out a mountain stream in the Rocky Mountain region or in the Pacific States. In the State of Wyoming some very aggravated cases of wanton fish destruction by indifferent rod and line fishermen have lately been brought to my attention."

Dr. Hornaday is an Angler, and his views and practices are endorsed by all Anglers. His great book on wild life conservation is brimful of practical detail and should be in the library of all who are interested in the preservation of our fishes, birds, and quadruped game. Here is a sample of the Doctor's vigorous style in his admirable campaign against the exterminator:

"A few years ago, certain interests in Pennsylvania raised a great public outcry against the alleged awful destruction of fish in the streams of Pennsylvania by herons.... A little later on, however, the game commissioners found that the herons remaining in Pennsylvania were far too few to constitute a pest to fish life, and furthermore, the millinery interests appeared to be behind the movement. Under the new law the milliners were enabled to reopen in Pennsylvania the sale of aigrettes, because those feathers came from members of the unprotected Heron Family! It required a tremendous State campaign to restore protection to the herons and bar out the aigrettes; but it was accomplished in 1912. Hereafter, let no man for one moment be deceived by the claim that the very few-and-far-between herons, bitterns, and kingfishers that now remain in the United States, anywhere, are such a menace to fish life that those birds are a pest and deserve to be shot. The inland streams of the United States and Canada lack fishes because they have been outrageously overfished,—wastefully, wickedly depleted, without sense or reason, by men who scorn the idea of conservation. In Orleans County, New York, a case was reported to me of a farmer who dynamited the waters of his own creek, in spawning time!"

The Angler angles according to his own humanely conservative law. The greedy fisherman fishes according to court or so-called legal law, good or bad, and he always breaks the Angler's law and very often the court's law.

In viewing Dr. Hornaday's Spokane photograph note the bait-casting reel on the fly-casting rod—the rig of a clumsy as well as greedy fisherman. The mess of trout shown is one that no Angler would ever make and one that any gentleman would be ashamed of—"three times too many fish for one rod," as Dr. Hornaday says, "another line of extermination according to law." Of course, the Doctor means the fisherman's law or the court's law, not the Angler's law.