THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 587 



milk or differing less from it than any other milk does. They 

 have wool that seems as good as sheep's wool for garments, although 

 this wool has not yet been fully tested. It certainly has the ad- 

 vantage that garments made of it will not shrink. Each animal 

 gives more wool than a sheep,* and of meat it gives three times 

 as much. The annual meat output would not, however, be treble 

 that of the sheep, for it probably takes ovibos four years to mature. 



When we sum up the qualities of ovibos, we see that here is an 

 animal unbelievably suited to the requirements of domestication 

 — unbelievably because we are so habituated to thinking of the 

 cow and the sheep as the ideal domestic animals that the possibility 

 of a better one strikes us as an absurdity. We have milk richer 

 than that of cows and similar in flavor, and more abundant than 

 that of certain milk animals that are now used, such as sheep and 

 reindeer; wool probably equal in quality and perhaps greater in 

 quantity than that of the domestic sheep; two or three times as 

 much meat to the animal as with sheep, and the flavor and other 

 qualities those of beef. When you add to this that the animal 

 does not roam in search of pasture, that the bulls are less dangerous 

 than the bulls of domestic cattle because not inclined to charge, 

 and that they defend themselves so successfully against packs of 

 wolves that the wolves understand the situation and do not even 

 try to attack, it appears that they combine practically every virtue 

 of the cow and the sheep and excel them at several points. 



They are now living prosperously on the north coast of the most 

 northerly land ever discovered and on every arctic island on which 

 they have ever set foot except those from which they have been 

 exterminated by man. That there are only a few hundreds or 

 thousands now surviving on the continent of North America where 

 there must have been millions at the time when they extended south 

 to the Ohio, may seem to indicate some unfitness for competing 

 with the environment. But probably there has been no unfitness 

 except inability to compete with man. 



Zoologists generally assume that ovibos have died out from the 

 southerly lands they formerly inhabited as a result of a change 

 of climate, possibly through bacterial attack, possibly because the 

 vegetation became unsuitable. But the habits of this animal are 

 such that they and their human hunters armed with even the most 



* Here we have no direct evidence except the statement of Dr. W. T. 

 Homaday, Director of the New York Zoological Garden, who estimates that 

 one animal kept there in captivity yielded fifteen pounds of wool per year. 

 The uncertainty consists in the fact that the wool was not actually weighed 

 but merely estimated. 



