Country Life
To Kill or Preserve ?
A controversy, not without heat, rages round a particular point of natural history and the ethics of a sanctuary. As an illustration to the latest report of the Norfolk Naturalists' Society is published a picture of a keeper and watcher displaying the bodies of a family of stoats which had been breaking the laws of the sanctuary of Scolt Head. All sorts of questions are involved. Should a sanctuary be regarded as the foothills of a Holy Mountain where none hurt or destroy, or should it be controlled, so that the birds for which it is especially designed should find their optimum, their ideal con- ditions, and not suffer at all from a " Nature red in tooth and claw," and, it may be added, toothed trap? Into the ethics of the larger question I do not propose to go, at any rate here and now, but there is a particular point of biology on which my opinion is specifically asked.
Previous page
