SUMMARY OF THE EVIDENCE. 295 



IX. — Destruction by Pelagic Sealing and Its Extent — The 

 Eemedy Proposed by the British Commissioners — The 

 True and Only Remedy Consists in Absolute Prohibition 

 of Pelagic Seallng. 



It has been heretofore sought to show that the Commissioners for 

 Great Britain in drawing up the report had endeavored to reach a 

 conclusion favorable to the slaughter of seals at sea, an "industry," as 

 they call it, in which they apparently saw little that was objectionable 

 and which they believed it to be the interest and policy of their country 

 to protect. In the course of their examination, however, they have 

 necessarily been furnished with facts palpably inconsistent with their 

 theory and have been reluctantly compelled to produce proofs of the 

 barbarous, savage, and destructive processes by which the Canadian 

 poachers secured their prey. 



(a) The Commissioners allude in sarcastic vein to the fact that "there 

 is a 'remarkable agreement' found among those interested in decrying 

 pelagic sealing, to the effect that the pelagic sealers do and must kill a 

 large number of female breeding seals." Why this "agreement," which 

 undoubtedly exists, should be mentioned as "remarkable," we fail to 

 perceive, the evidence produced by the Commissioners themselves 

 plainly showing that no discrimination is or can be made by the pelagic 

 hunters and that they slaughter indiscriminately all the animals that 

 appear within reach of their shotguns. They themselves admit that 

 "a considerable proportion of gravid females" are slain (Sec. 048), and 

 their own witnesses describe the process of skinning them on deck, in 

 the course of which milk and blood flow freely together, while in some 

 cases fully formed young are taken from the slaughtered mothers. 

 Under such circumstances there is no ground for any criticism nor any 

 reason shown why general acquiescence in such a proposition should 

 be treated with a sneer upon the truth of the statement. 



(b) It is certain, they say, that females with millc are occasionally 

 killed at sea by the pelagic sealers (Sec. 314). That they should not 

 be able to give the exact proportion of the pregnant and nursing 

 females to the rest may be due to the fact that their informants, while 

 exulting over the large slaughter that they succeeded in accomplishing 

 in Bering Sea, do not appear to have stated how many of such breed- 

 ing females they had succeeded in capturing (page 73). 



