Birds and All Nature, Vol. VI, No 4, November 1899

<h2><SPAN name="THREATENED_EXTERMINATION_OF_THE_FUR_SEAL" id="THREATENED_EXTERMINATION_OF_THE_FUR_SEAL"></SPAN> THREATENED EXTERMINATION OF THE FUR SEAL.</h2> <div> <ANTIMG class="drop-cap" src="images/initial_t.jpg" width-obs="58" height-obs="70" alt="" /></div> <p class="drop-cap">THE fur-seal herds of the north Pacific breed on islands situated in Bering Sea and belonging to the United States and Russia. On these islands, Pribilof and Komandorski, for nearly a hundred years they have received all necessary protection from attacks on land. The existence of the herds, however, demands the further protection of the females when they are feeding or migrating in the open sea beyond the usual three-mile limit of territorial jurisdiction. The animals visit certain islands in the summer. They breed on them and make them their home. The young remain there until driven away by the storms of winter. The adults leave the islands in summer only to feed, going to a distance of one hundred to two hundred miles for that purpose. The winter is spent by the entire herd in the open sea, their migrations extending from one thousand to twenty-five hundred miles to the southward of their breeding-resorts.</p> <p>For many years, both under Russian and American control, the herds have, as I have said, received absolute protection on land, the killing for skins being restricted to the bands of superfluous males. As only one male in about thirty is able to maintain himself on a rookery or to rear a family, about twenty-nine out of every thirty are necessarily superfluous. The survival of one male in a hundred is sufficient for all actual needs of propagation. The young males on land are as easily handled and selected as sheep, and no diminution whatever to the increase of the herd has arisen from selective land-killing. The number of females in the herd bearing young each year was, in the earlier days, about 650,000 on the American islands and perhaps half as many on the Russian. The numbers of males and of young were together about twice as many more. This gave an annual total on the American, or Pribilof, islands of about 2,000,000 animals of all classes, while on the Russian, or Komandorski, islands there were about 1,000,000.</p> <p>About 1884 different persons, known as pelagic sealers&mdash;chiefly citizens of Canada, but some of them from the United States&mdash;began to attack the herd in Bering Sea. Here no selective killing was possible. The females were always in the numerical majority, as the males had become less numerous on account of land-killing and as they left the islands less frequently in the summer. Each female above two years, when taken in the sea, died with her unborn young. Most of the adult females so taken after July 1 had left their young on the islands, and these orphan pups invariably starved to death.</p> <p>Beginning with this increase of pelagic sealing in 1884 the fur-seal herds rapidly declined in numbers. In 1897 there were about 130,000 breeding-seals on the American islands, or about 400,000 animals of all classes, while on the Russian islands there were less than 65,000 breeding-animals, or less than 200,000 of all classes.</p> <p>For this great reduction in numbers there is but one cause&mdash;a cause plain, self-evident, and undeniable&mdash;and that is the slaughter of breeding-females at a rate largely in excess of the rate of increase. While other causes have been assigned, none of them is worthy of the slightest consideration in explaining the decline.</p> <p>Even in 1893 it was evident, to all capable of forming an opinion, that pelagic sealing was the sole known cause of the decline of the fur-seal herds. It was also evident that as an industry it must be self-destructive, since, if permitted to exist on any scale which would make it profitable, it must destroy the herd on which it operated.&mdash;<i>"Lessons of the Paris Tribunal of Arbitration," by President David Starr Jordan, in Forum.</i></p> <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />