tide of public sentiment is strongly setting against the weasels, mink,
foxes and skunks. (Once upon a time, a shrewd young man in the
Zoological Park discovered a weasel hiding behind a stone while
devouring a sparrow that it had just caught and killed. He stalked it
successfully, seized it in his bare hand, and, even though bitten, made
good the capture.)

The State of Pennsylvania is extensively wooded, with forests and with
brush which affords excellent home quarters and breeding grounds for
mammalian "vermin." The small predatory mammals are so seriously
destructive to ruffed grouse and other ground birds that the State Game
Commission is greatly concerned. When the hunter's license law is
enacted, as it very surely will be at the next session of the
legislature (1913), a portion of the $70,000 that it will produce each
year will be used by the commission in paying bounties on the
destruction of the surplus of vermin. Through the pursuit of vermin, any
farmer can easily win enough bounties to more than pay the cost of his
annual hunting license (one dollar), and the farmers' boys will find a
new interest in life.

In some portions of the Rocky Mountain region, the assaults of the large
predatory mammals and birds on the young of the big-game species
occasionally demand special treatment. In the Yellowstone Park the pumas
multiplied to such an extent and killed so many young elk that their
number had to be systematically reduced. To that end "Buffalo" Jones was
sent out by the Government to find and destroy the intolerable surplus
of pumas. In the course of his campaign he killed about forty, much to
the benefit of the elk herds. Around the entrance to the den of a big
old male puma, Mr. Jones found the skulls and other remains of nine elk
calves that "the old Tom" had killed and carried there.