ANIMAL SANCTUARIES IN LABRADOR 483 



trolled persecution of the new steam whalers. The walrus is 

 exterminated everywhere in Labrador except in the north. The 

 seals are diminishing. Every year the hunters are better 

 supplied with better implements of butchery. The catch is 

 numbered by the hundreds of thousands and this only for one 

 fleet in one place at one season, when the Newfoundlanders come 

 up the St. Lawrence at the end of the winter. The woodland 

 caribou has been killed off to such an extent as to cause both 

 Indians and wolves to die off with him. The barren-ground 

 caribou is still plentiful, though decreasing. The dying out 

 of so many Indians before the time of the Low and Eaton 

 expedition of 1893-4 led to an increase of fur-bearing animals. 

 But renewed, improved, increased and uncontrolled trapping has 

 now reduced them below their former level. Hunting for the 

 market seems to be going round in a vicious circle, always 

 narrowing in on the quarry, which must ultimately be strangled 

 to death. The white man comes in with better equipment, more 

 systematic methods and often a " get-rich-and-get-out " idea that 

 never entered a native head. The Indian has to go further afield. 

 The white follows. Their prey shrinks back in diminishing 

 numbers before them both. Prices go up. The hunt becomes 

 keener, the animals fewer and farther off. Presently hunters 

 and hunted will reach the far side of the utmost limits. And 

 then traded, traders and trade will all disappear together. And 

 it might so well be otherwise. 



There is another point that should never be passed over. In 

 these days the public conscience is beginning to realise that the 

 objections to man's cruelty towards his other fellow-beings is 

 something more than a fad or a fancy. And wanton slaughter 

 is very apt to be accompanied by shameless cruelty. To kill off 

 parents when the young are helpless. . . . But I have already 

 given enough sickening details of this. The treatment of the 

 adults is almost worse in many typical cases. An Indian will 

 skin a hare alive and gloat over his quivering death-agonies. 

 The excuse is, " white man have fun, Indian have fun too." And 

 it is a valid excuse, from one point of view. When " there's 

 nothing in caribou " except the value of the tongue, the tongue 

 has been cut out of the living deer, whose only other value is 

 considered to be the amusement afforded by his horrible fate. 

 And fiendish cruelty like this is not confined to the outer wilds. 

 When some civilised English-speaking bird-catchers get a bird 



