If Canadian conservationists had had their way at the turn of the twentieth century, their country would be the place Americans looked to when they sang yearningly of a home where the buffalo roamed. With the proper measures, Canada could have been a haven for North America's wild animals, a place where remnant populations devastated by settlement and development would recover and flourish. The country's treatment of wildlife became a way for some Canadians to distinguish themselves from their southern neighbours. For others, it embodied a different kind of ecological consciousness, one...