Game or Vermin ?
Trappers of another destructive animal, the rabbit, lately pleaded in court that they were catching not game, but vermin. Their argument was not accepted in law, but perhaps the law rather than the law- breaker was at fault. It might very well be worth while to put the rabbit into the lower class. On certain properties this has been done in effect, and the results were astonishingly thorough. The ferret and the snare in expert hands very soon cleared the land of this new sort of vermin, to the great benefit of the crops. Very much the same result was being achieved many years ago when I was in New Zealand with a much more noble animal. The red deer had descended on young forests in the plains and they were so destructive that freedom was granted to kill them by any means: they were degraded to the state of vermin, and rapidly disappeared.
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