The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century… (1997)

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0300080867, Paperback)

Ask any resident of a rural area about hunting season in their community and you're sure to get their favorite stories: the malamute that was mistaken for a wolf and shot by that fellow from New York, or the guy driving back to Boston with a goat strapped to his fender, convinced he'd bagged a deer. The tensions and prejudices between country and city are never more evident than during hunting season, and in The Hunter's Game, Louis S. Warren provides an interesting historical perspective to the subject. According to Warren, until the turn of the century, hunting was unregulated, and for many working-class people it was a way to supplement their family's diet. Then the government intervened, designating wildlife as a community resource that had to be managed, and a kind of war broke out between mostly immigrant communities and the wildlife officers sent to enforce new regulations.

What makes The Hunter's Game more than just an interesting anecdote about a historical event is Warren's persuasive argument that hunter's rights and the government's ability to regulate them is emblematic of the sometimes uneasy relationship between individuals and their government. Nearly 100 years later, balancing the individual's rights with the greater good of society is still a contentious issue on many fronts, and the story Louis S. Warren tells is more relevant than ever.