Wildlife Conservationist. He was an American zoologist, conservationist, taxidermist, and author. He served as the first director of the New York Zoological Park, known today as the Bronx Zoo, and he was a pioneer in the early wildlife conservation movement in the United States. His advocacy is credited with 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 1903 there were forty bison on the Zoo’s ten-acre range.[10] In 1905, the American Bison Society was formed at a meeting in the Bronx Zoo’s Lion House with Hornaday as its president. When the first large-game preserve in America was created in 1905—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.[11] By 1919, nine herds had been established in the US through the efforts of the American Bison Society. 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 1913 publication—and distribution to every member of Congress—of his bestselling Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation, 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.” Hornaday appealed to readers’ emotions, urging them that the “birds and mammals now are literally dying for your help.” Although he was not entirely opposed to hunting, he became increasingly convinced of the perils that modern hunting—shaped by new firearm technology and easier access to wildlife by cars—posed to wildlife populations. 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 1913, he established the Permanent Wild Life Protection Fund as a vehicle to fund his tireless conservation lobbying efforts.[15] Through a network of conservation activists throughout the United States, Hornaday pushed at both the state and federal level for protective legislation, national parks, wildlife refuges, and international treaties. By 1915, 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.