No Easter Chicks

The nation's S. P. C. A.'s, Manhattan's especially, last week prepared to invoke state criminal codes to prohibit the sale of baby chicks as Easter toys, since few grown-ups know how to feed or bed them, and children squeeze, trample, stuff, chase them to early death. First result of S. P. C. A. pressure was Newark, N. J.'s health office order last week prohibiting sale of Easter chicks because "many died in stores and store windows."

Federal Fowl

When the U. S. duck & goose gunner takes out his fowling piece next autumn he will, if law-abiding, be going after fewer birds than ever before. The U. S. Department of Agriculture has limited his bag to four geese per day and eight in possession, including brant, of which eight formerly might be taken in addition.

Other changes in Federal hunting regulations for 1931-32 include:

Shortening of all open seasons on wild fowl by 15 days.

Beginning the open season at 12 noon of the first day.

Limiting to ten the number of live goose decoys which may be shot over at any one stand.

A closed season on Ross's geese and cackling geese everywhere and on snow geese through the Atlantic States.

No baiting of mourning doves.

Rail and gallinule may be shot in New York and Washington throughout October and November.

Woodcock shooting in southern New York (including Long Island) from Oct. 15 to Nov. 14, elsewhere in New York limited to October.

These regulations were issued fortnight ago. They interested not only the nation's great body of gunners but many a wildlife association--the National Association of Audubon Societies, the Permanent Wild Life Protection Fund, More Game Birds in America, Inc., etc., etc.

Last week forceful Dr. William Temple Hornaday, retired founder-director of New York City's Bronx Zoo and long Chief Taxidermist to the U. S. National Museum, writing on the stationery of the Permanent Wild Life Protection Fund, criticized the new regulations as follows: "It is a pity to reduce those open seasons by halves, when it would have been both easy and safe to have adopted our recommendation of eight weeks instead of 12 or 14 weeks. We think that the duck-hunters of the United States now are so thoroughly scared (and with mighty good reason!) that they would have accepted the full reduction without any fuss whatever."

Dr. Hornaday also viewed with renewed alarm a rival organization which does not want to limit or scare duckhunters, believing that commercialization of hunting rights and game will cause farmers to breed game birds sufficient to stock the country (TIME, Nov. 24). His letter said: "We have been watching the 'More Game Foundation' with . . . some anxiety. . . . And we must say that the first real action of the new group has gone far beyond our fears. The Foundation has caused to be introduced into the New Jersey legislature a bill ... to legalize game breeding in preserves, and game shooting and sale. . . . And it has been stated that the Foundation intends to introduce that bill in every State legislature now sitting!"

Quail 'Leggers

For two years U. S. sportsmen's magazines have carried advertisements of one M. E. Bogle of Memphis, Tenn., "America's largest producer of quail for breeding and restocking purposes." His reputation and output had waxed so great that when Connecticut's Board of Fisheries & Game last decided to re-quail the State, they ordered from Bogle. But the large shipment of "imported Mexican quail" which arrived in Connecticut looked strangely native. Several specimens despatched to Washington were declared by Department of Agriculture experts to be U. S. birds, the big brown bobwhite quail and not the smaller, bluer Mexican.

Tennessee game wardens sent decoy letters to M. E. Bogle. They shadowed his bird-cage trucks, finally unearthed a huge quail ring whereby two men in two years had bought and distributed 80,000 quail illegally trapped by farmers in Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama.

Canned Horses

Thousands of "wild" horses still roam the Western plains. But except for a few specimens, most wild horses are starving runts, and subject to a highly contagious equine disease known as dourine. In hopes of controlling this malady, generally fatal two years after inception, Dr. W. Huffman, representing the U. S. Government, went last week to Boise, Idaho to arrange with State Veterinarian A. T. Dickman for a complete spring horse-cleaning of the Idaho plains. Owners and claimants of the horses-at-large cooperated readily, since U. S. canning factories provide a steady demand for horseflesh at 1-c- per lb.*

The largest horsemeat packing plant in the world is in the U. S.--P. M. Chappel's canning factory in Rockford, 111. Organized in 1920, the Chappel cannery sliced up approximately 60,000 horses last year, wrapped most of them in tin, stuffed them in barrels, exported them for human consumption to France, Holland, Italy, Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark. Most of the raw material was wild range horses raised on 15 Chappel-owned ranches, which total 1,500,000 acres, in Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming. Chappel products are several-- puppy ration, kitty ration, kennel biscuit, pheasant meal, and leather specialties, besides food for grown dogs and foreigners-- but P. M. Chappel has never attempted to sell horse meat as food for U. S. humans.

*In Olympia, Wash, last week, Governor Roland H. Hartley vetoed the latest bill for a horse-cleaning of his State. Officially he wrote: "This bill says a mule is a horse. ... A horse might make a jackass out of itself, as did certain members of the present State Senate, but I would still be unwilling to convert a State Senator into a jackass by legislative enactment. This would be unfair to the jackass. . . ."

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