"Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation" by William T. Hornaday. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

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This Is A New Release Of The Original 1913 Edition.

Reproduction of the original: Our Vanishing Wild Life by William T. Hornaday

William Temple Hornaday was the Director of the New York Zoological Society and the nation's leading advocate of wildlife conservation in this era. This unsparing manifesto was written to accompany Hornaday's launching of the Permanent Wildlife Protection Fund; it is thus (in the words of the historian Stephen Fox) both "a campaign tract" and "one of the first books wholly devoted to endangered wild animals" (John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement [Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1981], p. 149). It is also a landmark of conservation history which had a profound effect on the thought of Aldo Leopold, among others. The book surveys the history and causes of wildlife destruction in America and elsewhere, and sets forth a lengthy program to ensure the protection of remaining wildlife for the future, often in militant and moralistic terms. The work also throws light on some of the complexities inherent in the conservation movement at this time: for example, Hornaday accepts the classification of certain bird and mammalian predators as "noxious" or "vermin" and appropriate for destruction (pp. 77-81); there is no criticism here of the massive campaign for the extermination of wolves and coyotes being sponsored at the time by the Bureau of Biological Survey. On a more general level, Hornaday's fulminations against Italian immigrants as incorrigible bird-killers suggest a connection between nativism and conservationism, while his excoriations of market hunters set forth a deeply-rooted class bias shared by many leading conservationists.