In 1910, Dr. T.S.  Palmer credited Idaho with the possession of about five hundred moose and two hundred antelope.

There is one feature of the Idaho game law that may well stand unchanged.  The open season on “ibex,” of which one per year may be killed, may as well be continued.  One myth per year is not an extravagant bag for any intelligent hunter; and it seems that the “ibex” will not down.  Being officially recognized by Idaho, its place in our fauna now seems assured.

ILLINOIS: 

  Enact a Bayne law, and stop the sale of all native wild game,
  regardless of source, and regardless of the gay revelers of Chicago.

In Illinois the bag limits on birds are nearly all at least 50 per cent too high.  They should be as follows:  No squirrels, doves or shore birds; six quail, five woodcock, ten coots, ten rail, ten ducks, three geese and three brant, with a total limit of ten waterfowl per day.

  Doves should be removed from the game list.

  All tree squirrels and chipmunks should be perpetually protected, as
  companions to man, unfit for food.

  The sale of aigrettes should be stopped, and Chicago placed in the
  same class as Boston, New York, New Orleans and San Francisco.

  The use of all machine shotguns in hunting should be prohibited.

The chief plague-spots for the grinding up of American game are Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans and San Francisco.  St. Louis cleared her record in 1909.  New York thoroughly cleaned her Augean stable in 1911, and Massachusetts won her Bayne law by a desperate battle in 1912.  In 1913, Pennsylvania probably will enact a Bayne law.

Fancy a city in the center of the United States sending to Norway for 1,500 ptarmigan, to eat, as Chicago did in 1911; and that was only one order.

For forty years the marshes, prairies, farms and streams of the whole upper Mississippi Valley have been combed year after year by the guns of the market shooters.  Often the migratory game was located by telegraphic reports.  Game birds were slain by the wagon-load, boat-load, barrel, and car-load, “for the Chicago market.”  And the fool farmers of the Middle West stolidly plowed their fields and fed their hogs, and permitted the slaughter to go on.  To-day the sons of those farmers go to the museums and zoological parks of the cities to see specimens of pinnated grouse, crane, woodcock, ducks and other species that the market shooters have “wiped out”; and their fathers wax eloquent in telling of the flocks of pigeons that “darkened the sky,” and the big droves of prairie chickens that used to rise out of the corn-fields “with a roar like a coming storm.”

To-day, Chicago stands half-way reformed.  Her markets are open to only one-half the game killable in Illinois, but they are wide open to all “legally killed game imported from other states, from Oct. 1 to Feb. 1.”  Through that hole in her game laws any game-dealer can drive a moving-van!  Of course, any game offered in Chicago has been “legally killed in some other state!” Who can prove otherwise?