Samyukta hornady biography of william

According to some sources, Dr. Hornaday was considered to be a bit eccentric in his day and he was involved in a highly controversial exhibit at the Bronx Zoo in that involved an African native named Ota Benga that ultimately ended in tragedy. Hornaday was the President of a conservation group called the Campfire Club in as well as the President of the American Bison Society from He was also the President of the U.

Junior Naval Reserve in and was a published poet as well as a songwriter. He was a very influential writer and wrote hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and twenty-six books, which greatly helped bring about far reaching conservation laws. Seton was selected in , Dr. Hornaday in The very first person chosen for the Conservation Hall of Fame was another icon of Scouting in it's early years.

Hornaday devoted his life to the crusade of wild life protection and proved to be a formidable defender of that cause. He died on March 6, at age 82 in Stamford, Connecticut. While he had the same frailties all humans do, he also had an extraordinary ability to organize and a drive to get things done. His great passion in life was to protect wild life from slaughter by humans.

He believed strongly in captive breeding as a fundamental tool of wildlife management and viewed hunters as a cause of species decline views that put him at odds with other prominent conservationists, such as Aldo Leopold. He was particularly vocal about preservation of the American bison. Hornaday was also a leader of the scouting movement, responsible for the incorporation of conservation and environment as fundamentals of the scouting portfolio.

Bechtel, Stefan. The Atlantic, May 16, Accessed December 1, Hornaday served as the zoo's first director, but left soon thereafter after conflict with the head of the Smithsonian, Samuel Pierpont Langley. In , the newly chartered New York Zoological Society known today as the Wildlife Conservation Society enticed Hornaday back to the zoo field by offering him the opportunity to create a world-class zoo.

Among his several activities, he established one of the world's most extensive collections, insisted on unprecedented standards for exhibit labeling, promoted lecture series, and offered studio space to wildlife artists. Reid Blair. During Dr. Hornaday's tenure as director of the New York zoo, Ota Benga , a pygmy native of the Congo, was placed on display in the monkey house in September Benga shot targets with a bow and arrow, wove twine, and wrestled with an orangutan.

Although, according to the New York Times , "few expressed audible objection to the sight of a human being in a cage with monkeys as companions", black clergymen in the city took great offense. New York Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr. Hornaday, who wrote to him: "When the history of the Zoological Park is written, this incident will form its most amusing passage.

Hornaday remained unapologetic, insisting that his only intention was to put on an "ethnological exhibit". In another letter he said that he and Madison Grant , the secretary of the New York Zoological Society, who ten years later would publish the racist tract " The Passing of the Great Race ", considered it "imperative that the society should not even seem to be dictated to" by the black clergymen.

Hornaday decided to close the exhibit after just two days, and on Monday, September 8, Benga could be found walking the zoo grounds, often followed by a crowd "howling, jeering and yelling". Hornaday's became an advocate for preserving the American bison from extinction. At the end of the nineteenth century, he began to plan, with Theodore Roosevelt's support, a society for the protection of the bison.

Years later, as director of the Bronx Zoo, Hornaday acquired bison, and by there were forty bison on the Zoo's ten-acre range. When the first large-game preserve in America was created in —the Wichita National Forest and Game Preserve—Hornaday offered fifteen individuals from the Bronx Zoo herd for a reintroduction program. He personally selected the release site and the individual animals.

During his lifetime, Hornaday published almost two dozen books and hundreds of articles on the need for conservation, frequently presenting it as a moral obligation. Most notable was the publication—and distribution to every member of Congress—of his bestselling Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation , [ 15 ] a riveting call to action against the destructive forces of overhunting.

As the historian Douglas Brinkley has described it, "What Upton Sinclair's The Jungle had been for meatpacking reform, Our Vanishing Wildlife was for championing disappearing creatures like prairie chickens, whooping cranes, and roseate spoonbills. As he proclaimed with characteristic zeal in Our Vanishing Wildlife , "It is time for the people who don't shoot to call a halt on those who do; 'and if this be treason, then let my enemies make the most of it!

Throughout his career, he lobbied and provided testimony for several congressional acts for wildlife protection laws. In , he established the Permanent Wild Life Protection Fund as a vehicle to fund his tireless conservation lobbying efforts. By , the American Museum Journal declared that Hornaday "has no doubt inaugurated and carried to success more movements for the protection of wild animal life than has any other man in America.

Not only is there a series of conservation awards previously named after him, but his beliefs and writings were a major reason conservation and ecology have long been an important part of the BSA's program. Hornaday's honor and became a BSA award.

Samyukta hornady biography of william

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