CONTROL AND DOMESTICATION. 219 



and when a little older, after they have learned to swim, they come by 

 thousands upon the beaches close to the village and may be driven up 

 en masse and taken to a corral and impounded, or simply herded by a 

 watchman and kept together for an indefinite length of time. When 

 so herded they may be readily taken up one by one and marked by 

 some mutilation, such as the cutting off an ear, as has been practiced 

 on one or two occasions, I am told, for the purpose of identifying them 

 afterwards, or by branding them. From my experience with both 

 seals and cattle, I should as soon undertake to brand a lot of young 

 seals as so many calves; and I believe by attempting it at the proper 

 season, after the old seals have mostly left the island, and the young 

 are ''pudding" by themselves, there would be no difficulty in " round- 

 ing up" simultaneously nearly all the young born in a single season 

 and marking them for complete future identification. 



Their habits of breeding are so nearly like those of domestic animals 

 that one having them in control needs only to follow his experience as 

 a shepherd or "cattleman" to cause them to become most prolific. He 

 must keep all the females and kill off, as far as possible, all the surplus 

 males above the number absolutely required for breeding purposes. I 

 think these requirements were very exactly fulfilled by the late lessees 

 of the seal fisheries during the time of my employment by them; and 

 they are certainly able to point to the fact, unless I am grossly misin- 

 formed, that from 1870, when they first took hold of the business, up 

 to the end of my service for them in 1884, the system pursued by them 

 was as perfect as it could be and resulted in a steady increase of the 

 seals. They failed only in omitting to take proper measures by brand- 

 ing or mutilation, as I have pointed out, to identify their property 

 while pasturing in the ocean. The owner of a seal-skin with an inef- 

 faceable brand on it would, even in a foreign country, I imagine, have 

 some sort of property right which international law would recognize; 

 and of his ability to mark nearly every skin with such a brand upon 

 the live young animal I have not the slightest doubt. 



If the seal were let alone in the water we could manage them so as to 

 again build up the rookeries. We are so familiar 

 with their habits and they are so accustomed to John Fratis,p. 109. 

 us that there is no difficulty in managing them so 



as to make them increase. They are easy to handle, the little pups are 

 not shy of us, and even when they are older in the fall they can be 

 handled much easier than sheep. I can manage seals better than I can 

 some of the sheep brought on the islands and which I have been sent 

 to catch. 



Through all this slaughter, involving the driving and redriving, year 

 after year, of the same seals, they did not become 

 more timid when on land; but, on the contrary, h. H. McJntjivc, p. 52. 

 those resorting to the grounds most frequently 



disturbed were more tractable and easier driven and killed than the 

 ones from remote points, as at Polavina or West Point, on St. Paul, or 

 Zapadnie at St. George. The "killing gang" frequently spoken of, and 

 I myself, observed the harder work in handling and subdividing the 

 drove from the more distant places, because of the more savage, in- 

 tractable character of the balls. 



I believe the seals to be susceptible of a high degree of domestica- 

 tion. If their strong propensity to bite whatever conies within offen- 

 sive proximity, whether it be seal cub or a hunter's limb, could be 

 cured, they could be as easily managed as a Hock of sheep. Each one 



