SUMMARY OF THE EVIDENCE. 309 



Profitable as the business appears to have been to Mr. Short, he is 

 candid enough to say that in his opinion — 



It is a shame to kill the female seal before she has given birth to her 

 young. Pelagic sealing in the North Pacific Ocean before the middle 

 of June is very destructive and wasteful and should be stopped. * * * 

 Sealing in the sea should be prohibited until such a time as the pup 

 may have grown to the age at which it may be able to live without 

 nurse from its mother. 



James Sloan (ibid., p. 477), of San Francisco, by occupation a sea- 

 man, made three voyages to Bering Sea, in 1871, in 1884, and in 1889. 

 A great many of the females that they killed had their breasts full of 

 milk, which would run out on the deck when they skinned them. In 

 1889 they went to the Okhotsk Sea and sealed there about two 

 months. They got about 500 seals, of which more than one-half were 

 females, and the most of them had pups in them. They entered Bering 

 Sea about the 17th of May and caught about 900 seals. Most of them 

 were mother seals. 



Mr. Sloan predicts an early extermination of the seals unless the 

 destructive processes are stopped. As he says, the hunters kill them 

 indiscriminately and all the hunters care about is to get a skin. 



See, also, the testimony of Fred Smith (ibid., p. 349), of Victoria, a 

 seal hunter. 



Of Joshua Stickland (ibid., p. 349), also of Victoria, a seal hunter 

 who declares that out of 111 seals killed by him in the last year he 

 killed but three bulls. 



John A. Swain (ihid., p. 350), of Victoria, a seaman, gives his experi- 

 ence in 1891. He was on board the steamer Thistle, Nicherson master. 

 They caught about 100 seals. They were all females that had given 

 birth to their young. In 1S92 they caught 270, most of them pregnant 

 females which were caught along the coast. 



Theodore T. Williams (ibid., p. 491), an intelligent gentleman, by pro- 

 fession a journalist, employed as city editor on the San Francisco Ex- 

 aminer, makes a very interesting deposition. In pursuit of his pro- 

 fession he had not only had occasion to make extended inquiries into 

 the fur-sealing industry of the Aleutian Islands and the North Pacific, 

 but had gone to the North and had made a complete and exhaustive 

 examination of the open-sea sealing, its extent, probable injury, etc. 

 The perusal of the whole of this very interesting document is recom- 

 mended. As the result of his investigation in the Bering Sea and 

 North Pacific he asserts the following facts: 



