CHAPTER XLII. The Ethics of Sportsmanship

THE ETHICS OF SPORTSMANSHIP

I count it as rather strange that American and English sportsmen have hunted and shot for a century, and until 1908 formulated practically nothing to establish and define the ethics of shooting game. Here and there, a few unwritten principles have been evolved, and have become fixed by common consent; but the total number of these is very few. Perhaps this has been for the reason that every free and independent sportsman prefers to be a law unto himself. Is it not doubly strange, however, that even down to the present year the term "sportsmen" never has been defined by a sportsman!

Forty years ago, a sportsman might have been defined, according to the standards of that period, as a man who hunts wild game for pleasure. Those were the days wherein no one foresaw the wholesale annihilation of species, and there were no wilderness game preserves. In those days, gentlemen shot female hoofed game, trapped bears if they felt like it, killed ten times as much big game as they could use, and no one made any fuss whatever about the waste or extermination of wild life.

Those were the days of ox-teams and broad-axes. To-day, we are living in a totally different world,--a world of grinding, crunching, pulverizing progress, a world of annihilation of the works of Nature. And what is a sportsman to-day?

A SPORTSMAN is a man who loves Nature, and who in the enjoyment of the outdoor life and exploration takes a reasonable toll of Nature's wild animals, but not for commercial profit, and only so long as his hunting does not promote the extermination of species.

In view of the disappearance of wild life all over the habitable globe, and the steady extermination of species, the ethics of sportsmanship has become a matter of tremendous importance. If a man can shoot the last living Burchell zebra, or prong-horned antelope, and be a sportsman and a gentleman, then we may just as well drop down all bars, and say no more about the ethics of shooting game.

But the real gentlemen-sportsmen of the world are not insensible to the duties of the hour in regard to the taking or not taking of game. The time has come when canon laws should be laid down, of world-wide application, and so thoroughly accepted and promulgated that their binding force can not be ignored. Among other things, it is time for a list of species to be published which no man claiming to be either a gentleman or a sportsman can shoot for aught else than preservation in a public museum. Of course, this list would be composed of the species that are threatened with extermination. Of American animals it should include the prong-horned antelope, Mexican mountain sheep, all the mountain sheep and goats in the United States, the California grizzly bear, mule deer, West Indian seal and California elephant seal and walrus.

In Africa that list should include the eland, white rhinoceros, blessbok, bontebok, kudu, giraffes and southern elephants, sable antelope, rhinoceros south of the Zambesi, leucoryx antelope and whale-headed stork. In Asia it should include the great Indian rhinoceros and its allied species, the burrhel, the Nilgiri tahr and the gayal. The David deer of Manchuria already is extinct in a wild state.

In Australia the interdiction should include the thylacine or Tasmanian wolf, all the large kangaroos, the emu, lyre bird and the mallee-bird.

Think what it would mean to the species named above if all the sportsmen of the world would unite in their defense, both actively and passively! It would be to those species a modus vivendi worth while.

Prior to 1908, no effort (so far as we are aware) ever had been made to promote the establishment of a comprehensive and up-to-date code of ethics for sportsmen who shoot. A few clubs of men who are hunters of big game had expressed in their constitutions a few brief principles for the purpose of standardizing their own respective memberships, but that was all. I have not taken pains to make a general canvass of sportsmen's clubs to ascertain what rules have been laid down by any large number of organizations.

The Boone and Crockett Club, of New York and Washington, had in its constitution the following excellent article:

"Article X. The use of steel traps, the making of large bags, the killing of game while swimming in water, or helpless in deep snow, and the unnecessary killing of females or young of any species of ruminant, shall be deemed offenses. Any member who shall commit such offenses may be suspended, or expelled from the Club by unanimous vote of the Executive Committee."

In 1906, this Club condemned the use of automatic shotguns in hunting as unsportsmanlike.

The Lewis and Clark Club, of Pittsburgh, has in its constitution, as