FUR FARMING TO SUPPLY WORLD DEMAND 51 



become as common as muskrat, there is no woman buyer who will 

 object. 



Lessen the price of the silver fox and Alaska seal, and you will 

 multiply buyers a thousandfold. 



However cruel trapping may seem to the tender-hearted city 

 dweller, who knows wild life only from books and not from direct 

 contact, trapping is kindness itself compared to the sufferings and 

 deaths of fur animals in wild life. There is, indeed, hardly such a 

 thing as a natural death in wild life. Mothers and unborn young, 

 weaklings and old — alike fall victims to the ravening tooth and 

 claw of wild life ; and hunger is the periodic urge and starvation 

 a recurrent scourge. All these sufferings are eliminated from the 

 lives of the fur-bearing tribes by fur farming. It is well known that 

 in seasons when berries and haws are plentiful, the marten and bear 

 become fat and sleek, and when cold weather comes, their fur 

 takes on a sheen seen only on animals in perfect flesh. Likewise 

 of the fox. An exclusive flesh diet causes intestinal troubles that 

 fever and dull the fur. Mix the flesh diet with eggs and meal and 

 grapes and wild berries, and the fox is in perfect health. Scientific 

 feeding and food in abundance are possible on the fur farm in a way 

 never known to wild life ; and the entire tendency is to a quick, 

 painless death because any other kind of death may injure the 

 fur. To those kindly souls, who object to death in any form coming 

 to wild life, it ought not to be necessary to say that death ultimately 

 is inevitable to every animal ; and if nature did not eradicate the 

 superfluous male by hunger and scourge and fight, it would be 

 almost an impossibility for the young of any species to survive. 

 It is this drives the caribou thousands of miles to lonely water-girt 

 rocks to bring forth their young. A wolf will not only kill his mate, 

 but disembowel her and eat her young. A mother fox alarmed by 

 danger will slay and eat her young. Scientific abundant feeding 

 to improve the fur and quick painless death not to fever or frighten 

 the animal, become necessary features of fur farming. Weaklings 

 are eliminated. The comfort of the fur-bearing animal is studied 



