Vexed members of the National Association of Audubon Societies hurled no sticks and stones but many a name at their President Thomas Gilbert Pearson last November (TIME, Nov. 3). They called him a killer, a caterer to wealthy sportsmen and potent gun companies, a steam roller. The names hurt President Pearson. After being reelected a director of the association, he appointed a committee to purge him of the bad names. On the committee were President Chauncy J. Hamlin of the Buffalo Museum of Science, Director Thomas Barbour of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, President Alexander Grant Ruthven of the University of Michigan (TIME, Nov. 10).
President Ruthven soon found himself too busy with the students and professors at Ann Arbor and the legislators at Lansing to bother much with ruffled bird lovers in Manhattan. President Hamlin and Professor Barbour browsed among the charges and ruminated over the names against President Pearson until last week they had tart things to say of the Pearson baiters.
The baiters are, in the Hamlin-Barbour opinion, "zoophiles," animal lovers "whose arguments are always based on sentiment and not on reason." Their accusations formed a "long and rather turgid tirade. ... It is not worth while to attempt to analyze or discuss the charges made. They are not worth the time it would take."
The investigators know that President Pearson has accepted money from manufacturers of small arms. But they "cannot agree that there is any moral turpitude in being a gunmaker. and believe frankly that shooting out-of-doors is a normal exercise of healthy and intelligent men, has been so for all time and will continue so to be. It is evident that the preservation of game is vitally dependent upon the interest of intelligent sportsmen more than upon any others."
They believe "that the funds entrusted to [the Audubon Societies] have been well expended . . . that such trifling missteps as have possibly been made from time to time are due to the inevitable frailties of mere man."
Stuffed Dogs
Yale University wants champion dogs for its Peabody Museum of Natural History. It wants champions of different breeds, dead from natural causes or by accident. Yale wants no dogs killed for the kudos of preservation in the museum.
The idea of the Yale dog champion collection is Leon Fradley Whitney's (TiME, Dec. 30, 1929). He, 37, started to be a farmer, changed to merchandising, has been since 1924 executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society. He lives in New Haven and has made an original study of certain genetic traits and the mating cycle in dogs. His collection's purpose is to leave bodily records of how current dog breeds looked, to furnish a record of canine evolution under man's guidance, to keep a place where people may go to learn to recognize the various breeds.