The Days of a Man 1896 



able to maintain himself on a rookery and rule a 

 " harem," the great majority are of course superflu- 

 ous. On land the "killables" are driven about and 

 handled as easily as sheep, and no general dimi- 

 nution has ever arisen from such selective slaughter, 

 the survival of even one male in a hundred being 

 sufficient for the actual needs of propagation. 



Each mother gives birth to one pup a year, the 

 proportion of males and females among the newly 

 born running practically equal. During the 'yo's 

 there were at least a million breeding mothers on 

 the American islands, and perhaps half as many 

 Disastrous on the Russian. But pelagic sealing, begun in a 

 effect of sma ll wa y as early as 1872, had within a decade 

 sealing already become a menace. Necessarily the ma- 

 jority of those caught at sea were females, for land 

 killing continually reduced the relative number of 

 males. Moreover, each female taken meant the 

 destruction of not only the unborn young she carried, 

 but also of the nursing pup she had left on the 

 beach while she went out to feed, and which thus 

 died of starvation. By 1897 there were only about 

 130,000 breeding females on the Pribilofs, with less 

 than half as many on the Komandorski, where 

 protection was not so extended. Slaughter of the 

 mothers at a rate in excess of the rate of increase 

 was thus rapidly destroying the herd; although 

 other causes have been assigned for diplomatic 

 purposes, none is worthy of the slightest consid- 

 eration in the face of the plain facts. 



At Paris in 1893 it was evident that no existing 

 canon of international law covered the case, there 

 being no other valuable animal with similar habits, 

 and so no adequate precedent for protection; the 



n 548 3 



