i io DELIBERATE DESTRUCTION OF ANIMAL LIFE 



destructiveness belongs to the. greed of gain. Reckless de- 

 struction regardless of waste has followed upon the discovery 

 of a profitable commodity. Garefowls or Great Auks 

 were slaughtered by thousands on account of theic oil and 

 feathers and their bodies were burnt in great fires ; the 

 Buffaloes of North America and the Wild Cattle of South 

 America were slain by millions, the former for their skins and 

 tongue, the latter for their hides and horns, and their carcases 

 were left to rot upon the plains. So too, and in even less 

 worthy cause, the Egret has been slaughtered for its "osprey 

 plumes," and precious birds all the world over for their 

 brilliant plumage. And what is one to think of the wasteful 

 slaughter proceeding at the present day in the islands of 

 South Georgia, where, for the sake of their oil, Whales 

 innumerable are being killed and their flensed carcases cast 

 adrift, so that in the neighbourhood of the whaling stations 

 masses of festering flesh spread solid for miles out to sea ? 



Many human motives have given rise to serious deple- 

 tion of the animal world, and the chief of these I have 

 endeavoured to illustrate from the Scottish point of view in 

 the pages that follow. But the general warning must be 

 added that a hard and fast classification must be looked 

 upon only as a guide to clearness, that motives are seldom 

 unmixed that the creature slain in sport may also be used 

 as food, just as the bird killed for the sake of its flesh may 

 also yield valuable feathers and oil. 



It ought also to be added that in the balanced order of 

 nature the slaughter of one animal means invariably the 

 increase of another. The unrestricted killing of Seals on the 

 Pribilof Islands, off Alaska, increased the yield of the skins 

 of the Blue Fox, which were valued at ,3000 to ^4000 

 annually, but since seal-killing was restricted on the high 

 seas in 1911 and prevented in the Islands since 1912, the 

 output of fox skins has greatly diminished, owing to the 

 lack of carcases upon which the foxes depended for food. 



The steps of the decadence of an animal due to deliber- 

 ate slaughter, or to any other cause, can be traced in stages, 

 first of reduction of numbers, second of curtailment of range, 

 and lastly of extermination. 



