MAMMALS 317 



females, sometimes as many as thirty to eignty and, fighting 

 away all intruders, keeps guard over the harem for the rest of 

 the season. The young seals, or pups, are born soon after 

 the females arrive on the rookeries, the mothers nursing them 

 until they are themselves able to go into the water for their 

 food. 



In September the seals of the Pribilof Islands begin leaving 

 and in about two months they are all gone. They go as far 

 south as the Santa Barbara Islands off the California coast, 

 then turning north again they keep along the general trend of 

 the shores in water about one hundred fathoms deep. After 

 traveling some 6000 miles or more without touching land, they 

 again reach their breeding grounds. The Russian herd of the 

 Commander Islands makes a similar migration along the coast 

 of Japan. 



When Alaska first became a territory of the United States, 

 there were probably between two and three million seals on the 

 rookeries of the Pribilof Islands, but the relentless way in which 

 they have been hunted in the open sea in the past thirty years, 

 has greatly reduced the size of this herd. In the early days of 

 Russian control the seals were killed indiscriminately. In 

 1834 the Russians established regulations protecting females on 

 the breeding grounds and permitting only young males, or 

 bachelors, to be killed. This has been the method of land 

 sealing ever since. In 1879 pelagic sealing began and many of 

 the mother seals were killed while they were on their migra- 

 tion journey or their feeding excursions. Thousands of the 

 pups were left on the beach to starve, and the herds were 

 depleted. In 1870 there were about 2,500,000 seals in the 

 American herd, in 1890, 1,000,000 and in 1912 only about 

 250,000. The Russian herd has been about one-half as 

 large. 



In 1911 the four governments, Russia, the United States, 

 England and Japan, the two former being owners of the herds 

 and the two latter participating in pelagic sealing, entered into 

 a treaty suspending pelagic sealing for fifteen years. In the 

 law of 1912 designed to give effect to this treaty, our Congress 

 included a provision prohibiting the land killing of males for 



