By Gregory Clark, November 26, 1932.
We have got some inside information, a scoop in fact, to the effect that the Ontario government and the Hon. Mr. Challies in particular are sick and tired of the shooting question and have decided to do with the sportsmen what they have done with the motorist.
They are going to make him pass an examination.
A shooting license, like a driving license, will have to be earned as well as bought.
The way things are now Ontario is a fairly law-abiding community for ten and a half months of the year. Then all of a sudden, in October, about forty thousand men get a touch of frost on their pumpkins, or something, and they snatch up their weapons and go skirmishing in all directions.
They have a few days after partridges and pheasants, during which chickens, ducks, pet dogs, cows, horses and hired men are shot in large numbers.
During the deer season, when high-power rifles loaded with dum-dum bullets are fired off all over the summer resort regions by some thirty thousand hunters, other hunters, horses, cows and porcupines are amongst the trophies. Roofs are punctured, boats are sunk, countless bottles are burst to splinters, tin cans scuppered and out-houses perforated.
Our information is to the effect that the government is going to put an end to all this. It is going to educate the sportsmen.
Night school classes are to be organized all over the province, unless our information is wrong, and every man who hopes to take out a shooting license next season will have to win a certificate from school before he can be issued a permit to shoot.
The schools are to be run on the well-known kindergarten system, with pictures being the secret of the method.
“This Is A Cow” will be inscribed on a large lithograph of a cow. Sheep, horses, chickens of all plain and fancy breeds will have to be memorized. A suggestion has already been offered the government that a well-known German song, sung by ‘Varsity students for half a century, might be employed. “Ist Das Nicht Ein Schnitzelbonk?” is the name of the song. The teacher, using a pointer, sings:
“Is this not a mooley cow?”
And the sportsmen’s class, all in happy unison, sing back:
“Yes, that is a mooley cow.”
Chorus:
“Oh, you lovely,
Oh, you pretty,
Oh, you darling mooley cow!”
And so on, through the quadrupeds, fowls and other creatures that Ontario city and town hunters are not yet thoroughly familiar with.
War in Niagara Peninsula
This system has a great deal of merit in it. As it is now, pheasant shooting down in the Niagara peninsula is sadly in need of rousing music and song to make it real warfare. The platoons and battalions of pheasant shooters, as they march across the fields and vineyards, could sing these college songs, rousingly, as they advance to the attack. It would give a fine martial tone to the pheasant shooting which is all it lacks now. The captains of the shooting parties could watch out for domestic and agricultural animals, and whenever one is spied they could shout out:
“Is that not a Plymouth Rock?1“
“Yaw, dot iss a Plymouth Rock.”
Altogether:
“Oh, you lovely,
Oh, you fatty,
Oh, you sweety Plymouth Rock!”
And another innocent life would be spared.
On taking the full course of sportsmen’s night school the attentive pupil will be awarded a diploma, which indicates to an anxious rural population that the graduate is entitled to affix the initial. B.S. after his name, meaning Bachelor of Sport. He knows the main broad principles in distinguishing between a tame duck and a cock pheasant and between a Holstein cow and a deer. It would not take in Lou Marsh’s wambeazle2. That is a post-graduate course. Pupils will be trained to hold their fire whenever a wambeazle or other unspecified animal leaps out in front of them.
When Canada raised its army of 500,000 men it was supposed that this being a new and pioneer country the art of shooting would come readily to Canadians. But the fact
was that just as much time had to be spent patiently dinging the simple laws of marksmanship and care of arms into Canadians as into Cockneys from Bow Bells.
It took weeks to train any company of men to handle their rifles safely. Then it took weeks more to get them to hold their rifles in such a way as to hit the target if they could aim. Then they were taught aiming.
And when everything was finished about ten in a hundred could get into the bull.
However, despite this knowledge of the facts in regard to shooting, Canadian law allows anybody who has the price to buy any kind of gun or rifle he likes and to go gunning for any kind of game he can afford, from artificially planted and reared pheasants in the most densely populated agricultural district in Canada to wallowing after moose north of the Transcontinental.
The modern pump gun in the hands of an expert will fire five shots so fast that five ducks, travelling at the rate of seventy miles an hour, will be blasted down out of the air by powerfully driven loads of scattered shot reaching out sixty to seventy yards. The modern rifle, such as the .270 Winchester, is far more powerful than any army rifle, shoots an explosive bullet so fast that in travelling two hundred yards it rises only two inches above the line of sight. Twenty-five thousand deer hunters this season tried to scatter themselves far enough apart to escape any danger from these modern whizz-bangs. And they didn’t altogether succeed.
To Bring Gunners Under Control
So far the government has touched everything to control hunting but the hunter. It has banned dogs. It limits the number and kind of game that can be shot and the days on which shooting may be done. But it hasn’t said anything about who can shoot. You are tested to be a car driver. You are bonded to be a bank clerk. Educated to be a doctor. Examined to be an engineer. To take up an aeroplane and endanger only yourself you must go through a fearful rigmarole with two governments. But to take out a stick of dynamite in the shape of a modern gun or rifle all you need is the price. It took months to make soldiers even moderate marksmen.
But an army of deer hunters, most of whom never have their rifles out of their cases except on the one or two-week hunting trip, with soft muscles, jumpy nerves, buck fever, goose flesh and wet feet, are entrusted with the responsibility of slaying Ontario’s game neatly and humanely, as licensed experts with the gun. It can’t be done.
The whole thing is very complicated and grows no less complicated with every year’s increase in the number of shooters.
The situation respecting the shooting of pheasants and partridge in the agricultural districts of the province appears to be reaching an impasse.
One solution offered eight years ago and never recognized is this: that the government. oblige all bird shooters not only to have a government license but a permit signed by the owner of the land on which they are shooting. The license itself could be large enough to have on its reverse side a form of permit, with several spaces for signatures. If shooting on wild or crown land no permission would be required. But in the Niagara peninsula, before invading any private property – and there is no public property on which to shoot there – the gunners would have to obtain the signature of the owner. It would be trouble, of course. Plenty of land-owners, when faced with the request, would refuse. To-day hundreds of farmers and fruit growers would prefer to have no shouters banging about their lands, but are afraid to interfere for fear of being considered poor sports. Hundreds of others have posted their land who would be perfectly willing to permit shooters to kill a few pheasants if those shooters came in straightforward fashion and showed themselves and asked for permission – or paid for it!
Why should not the farmer be paid for the nuisance and the damage done to his land by the shooters or to his fruit crops by the pheasants? A farmer who charges for the privilege of fishing for trout in his brook is not a poor sport. He is simply taking steps to keep the mob off his place and also to make a little rightful money. It is true the pheasants were planted by the government. But it is doubtful if the farmer, on whose land the pheasant subsists, was consulted by the government. If the farmer likes pheasants on his land, the government certainly has no privilege to admit shooters on to private land. If the farmer does not like the pheasants on his land he should be privileged to do as he likes about it.
But of all the rational means of bringing several thousand gunners under control the simplest seems to be the hundred per cent. posting of all land in the pheasant country and then the demand, by the government, not by the land-owners, that everyone who shoots on other than his own land, obtain a signed permit of the land-owner.
Twenty-five men in cars, working from telephones at strategic points, could put this law into effect in such fashion in one season that the present ruthless, reckless, rowdy and unsportsmanlike system – perfect for the local sportsmen who have the inside dope, just a panic for the outsiders – would be cured in one year.
Editor’s Notes:
- A Plymouth Rock is a type of chicken. ↩︎
- Lou Marsh was the sports editor for the Toronto Star at the time. The must of been some lore related to the “wambeazle” at the time that I’m not understanding. ↩︎
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