

484 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



they do not want, they will deliberately wrench its bill apart, so 

 that it must die of lingering starvation. Sometimes the cruelty is 

 done to man himself. Not so many years ago some whalers 

 secured a lot of walrus hides and tusks by having a whole herd 

 of walrus wiped out, in spite of the fact that these animals were, 

 at that very time, known to be the only food available for a neigh- 

 bouring tribe of Eskimos. The Eskimos were starved to death, 

 every soul among them, as the Government explorers found 

 out. But Eskimos have no votes and never write to the papers ; 

 while walrus hides were booming in the markets of civilisation. 

 Things like these are not much spoken of. They very rarely 

 appear in print. And when they are mentioned at all it is 

 generally with an apology for introducing unpleasant details. 



Conservation 



All the sound reasons ever given for conserving other natural 

 resources apply to the conservation of wild life — and with three- 

 fold power. When a spendthrift squanders his capital it is lost 

 to him and his heirs ; yet it goes somewhere else. When a 

 nation allows any one kind of natural resource to be squandered 

 it must suffer a real, positive loss; yet substitutes of another 

 kind can generally be found. But when wild life is squandered 

 it does not go elsewhere, like squandered money ; it cannot 

 possibly be replaced by any substitute, as some inorganic 

 resources are : it is simply an absolute, dead loss, gone beyond 

 even the hope of recall. 



Now, we have seen verifiable facts enough to prove that 

 Labrador, out of its total area of eleven Englands, is not likely 

 to be advantageously exploitable over much more than the area 

 of one England for other purposes than the growth and harvesting 

 of wild life by land and water. How are these ten Englands to 

 be brought under conservation, before it is too late, in the best 

 interests of the five chief classes of people who are concerned 

 already or will be soon ? Of course, the same individual may 

 belong to more than one class. I merely use these divisions to 

 make sure of considering all sides of the question. The five 

 great interests are those of: (i) Food; (2) Business; (3) the Indians 

 and Eskimos ; (4) Sport ; and (5) the Zoophilists, by which I mean 

 all people interested in wild-animal life, from zoologists to 

 tourists. 



