The Deer Family Author:Theodore Roosevelt, T. S. Van Dyke Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: As long as the good citizens of a state are indifferent as to game protection, or take but a tepid interest in it, the politicians, through their agents, will le... more »ave the game laws unenforced. But if the people of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana come to feel the genuine interest in the enforcement of these laws that the people of Maine and Vermont have grown to take during the past twenty years, not only will the mule-deer cease to diminish, but it will positively increase. It is a mistake to suppose that such a change would only be to the advantage of well-to-do sportsmen. Men who are interested in hunting for hunting's sake, men who come from the great cities remote from the mountains in order to get three or four weeks' healthy, manly holiday, would undoubtedly be benefited; but the greatest benefit would be to the people of the localities, and of the neighborhoods round about. The presence of the game would attract outsiders who would leave in the country money or its equivalent, which would many times surpass in value the game they actually killed; and furthermore, the preservation of the game would mean that the ranchmen and grangers who live near its haunts would have in perpetuity the chance of following the pleas- antest and healthiest of all out-of-door pastimes; whereas, if through their shortsightedness they destroy, or permit to be destroyed, the game, they ANOEOF CATON'S CALIFORNIA MULE DEER are themselves responsible for the fact that their children and children's children find themselves forever debarred from a pursuit which must under such circumstances become the amusement only of the very rich. If we are really alive to our opportunities under our democratic, social, and political system, we can keep for ourselves — and by " ourselves " I mean the enormous bu...« less