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Show 542. for the Sons of Daniel Boone." in it he attempted to establish a kind of wilderness ethic for this precursor of the Boy Scouts. He wished to encourage "walking in wild places, so that our boys may gradually grow out of natural hunting, blood-loving, savagery into natural sympathy with all our fellow mortals - plants and animals, as well as men." He recommended the kinds of excursions in which the walker "sees most, learns most, loves most, and leaves the cleanest track." He was taking a stand for a better sort of education, trying to counteract the primitivist' s version of wilderness experience which included hunting and fishing, or the Roosevelt kind of exposure to wild Nature which developed "hardihood, resolution, and scorn of discomfort and danger." In particular, the ethical issues which arose from men's inhumane treatment of animals became the basis for most of Story of My Boyhood and Youth. The book began with Muir's remembrance of discovering "a mother field mouse with half a dozen naked young hanging to her teats." Was this a "real" incident, or the memory of a poem by Burns? The allusion to Burns was more obvious when Muir compared the little dog Stickeen to the field mouse of Burns, the "wee, hairy, sleekit beastie." in Story of My Boyhood and Youth, this was only the first of many anecdotes about the essential humanity of wild and domestic animals. Oxen, pigs, horses, and dogs served Muir's purposes as much as did the wild animals he encountered in his youth. They all shared the emotions of humans, and so Muir argued that "almost any wild animal may be made a pet, |