Wild Goose Chases

When I was a young boy, Thornton W. Burgess was published in the Saturday Montreal Star, which was available in the village where we spent summer holidays. Burgess, an American conservationist, wrote children’s stories about the creatures in a patch of forest and field: Jimmy Skunk, Sammy Jay, Bobby Raccoon, Grandfather Frog, and a host of others. The dramatic tension often revolved around the threat of a hunter, which terrified the folk of the woodland and wetland where the tales took place. I have occasionally wondered if this immersion in a juvenile version of an animal rights narrative was the beginning of my lasting revulsion at the idea of killing wild animals.

This revulsion is not universally shared. According to Quebec’s Ministère des Forêts, de la Faune et des Parcs, there are 408,000 licensed hunters in the province — almost a third of the 1.3 million in all of...