Game Conference

Annually for 16 years U. S. and Canadian game officials, game breeders, scientists, sportsmen have met to talk over conservation problems at the American Game Conference held under the auspices of the American Game Protective & Propagation Association. Last week in Manhattan they met for the 17th time. This time, they had important work to do. Two years ago they had appointed a committee to study game conditions, to draw up a constructive plan for increasing North American game. The committee had its report ready for consideration.

President Hoover, fisherman-author of A Remedy for Disappearing Game Fishes, acknowledged the importance of the occasion by sending a telegram: THE PROTECTION AND PROPAGATION OF THE USEFUL WILD LIFE OF THE COUNTRY IS OF MUCH GREATER IMPORTANCE THAN IS GENERALLY REALIZED. . . . THE BIOLOGICAL FACTS SHOULD BE FIRST

ASCERTAINED AND MEASURES PLANNED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THEM AND WITH THE EQUALLY IMPORTANT FACTS OF HUMAN NATURE. Chairman of the planning committee, Aldo Leopold of Madison, Wis., chief of the American Game Survey, submitted the new program. The committee had found that American farmers can do more toward increasing game than any other agency by making game a secondary farm crop. Six years of compensating game-wise farmers in Texas, for example, have increased good shooting preserves to 2,500,000 acres. They recommended that the farmer be protected from lawless hunters, be amply rewarded for his work.* Quail, pheasants, Hungarian partridge, rabbits, squirrels all thrive on the farmer's cultivated land. Other game lives better in forests, wildernesses, land which is cheap enough to be maintained as public hunting grounds. The committee advised that public ownership of these lands be extended as fast as possible, that Game Administration & Management be made a profession like Forestry or Agriculture. The Game Conference approved the Leopold committee's plan. It also: adopted a resolution to bring about laws stopping the sale of black bass in the ten states which permit it ; recommended to the Secretary of Agriculture that beginning February 1932 repeating shotguns be restricted to three shots per loading. Gun manufacturers are willing to cooperate. Among famed conservationists at the game conference were Senator Frederic Collin Walcott of Connecticut, chairman of the Senate Committee on Wild Life Resources; Dr. Thomas Gilbert Pearson, president of National Association of Audubon Societies; Senator Harry Bartow Hawes, Senate Commission on Migratory Bird Conservation; Col. Arthur Foran, comptroller of the Port of New York, vice president of More Game Birds in America, Inc.

* This conclusion and plan are shared by the rich foundation, More Game Birds in America Inc. (TIME, Nov. 24).

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