Читать книгу Gun Digest 2011 онлайн

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These are words of a romantic, a semi-mystic who is also a visionary. TR was all of these things and more. His love of the outdoors life led him to become the founder of the National Parks System and a founding member of the Boone & Crockett Club as well as the New York Museum of Natural History, testimony to both his love of the hunt and his respect for the hunted. He is justly recognized as one of the fathers of the modern conservation movement. As a hunter, he well understood the basic principle that preservation of wildlife requires that economic value be afforded to it, game and non-game species alike; that a species’ very survival depends on its value to man. He undertook his safari with this vision in mind:

Wise people…have discovered that intelligent game preservation, carried out in good faith, and in a spirit of commonsense as far removed from mushy sentimentality as from brutality, results in adding to the state’s natural resources…. Game laws should be drawn primarily in the interest of the whole people, keeping in mind certain facts that ought to be self-evident…. Almost any wild animal…if its multiplication were unchecked...would by its simple increase crowd man off the planet; and that far short of this…a time comes when the existence of too much game is incompatible with the interests of the cultivator. There should be…sanctuaries… where game can live and breed absolutely unmolested; and elsewhere…allow a reasonable amount of hunting on fair terms to any hardy and vigorous man fond of the sport…. Game butchery is as objectionable as any other wanton form of cruelty or barbarity; but to protest against all hunting of game is a sign of softness of head, not of soundness of heart.