I HAVE just finished looking over my
first issue of a periodical sent me because I am a
naturalist. I took up the magazine with delighted
anticipation; I laid it down with grief.
Conservation, says Webster, is
"preserving, guarding, protecting; a keeping in a safe or
entire state; preservation."
This magazine is devoted to
"conservation."
So far, so good. But it is preservation
in preparation for slaughter. That is bad. What has in the
past been devastated and destroyed by the lethal instincts
of depraved human nature must now be conserved, preserved,
built up, restored. Why? To undo the wrong done to creation?
No! To provide enlarged opportunity for more murder. The
whole vicious circle is summed up in the one word in display
type at the bottom of the front cover-"Sport."
It labels a picture of a beautiful dog
sitting in a woodsy spot holding up in its mouth a
once-beautiful dead bird. Killing is sport. Death is
delightful to the death-dealer. Conservation is the servant
of destruction.
In no aspect of existence is the fall of
man more vividly illustrated than in his attitude toward the
works of the Creator. He must always destroy. Look at the
twigs on the sidewalk side of the shrubbery on your lawn.
Stripped bare of leaves, no doubt. Infants, from pre-school
to adult ages, seem unable to see anything alive without an
impulse to kill it. So pull off those leaves as you pass by.
Huh! Just leaves! But could you make a leaf to replace the
one you destroyed? In that leaf were utilized principles of
engineering and manufacture that modern industry is just
catching up with, and principles of chemistry still out of
our reach, because divine.
But moronic mankind thinks he is growing
up when he arrives at an "appreciation of nature." So he
rushes out to field and woodland and grabs. Last spring he
came back with his car draped with withered dogwood
branches. Last fall the roadside maples held out mute and
bleeding stubs where their flaming boughs had been
splintered from them.
But mankind progresses. He becomes a
"sportsman"—the highest form of masculinity. He glories in
the science of killing and sets in motion the vast machinery
of conservation to provide more opportunity to kill. But
listen to God's definition of such "sport": "It is as sport
to a fool to do mischief." Proverbs 10:23. Surely it is
mischief to terrify, torture, torment, maim, and destroy
wild creatures who are made by the same Creator who made
you, and who are capable of many of the same emotions with
which the human is endowed. It is God, not I, who named the
"sportsman" in that verse, the sportsman who destroys for
fun what he cannot create.
And the sportsman of Proverbs is further
described by the Creator Himself in a famous conversation He
once held with a group of men who were plotting destruction.
"Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your
father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning."
John 8:44. From the "sport" of destroying the lower
creatures it is less than a step to war. And the Creator
intends once to leave His constructive role for His "strange
work" of destroying "them which destroy the earth."
(Revelation 11:18.)
Let us become true conservationists, lest
we share that destruction.
