DEATHS FROM ROUGH HANDLING. 91 



square was missing from Ler back. Such an injury as this last may have been inflicted 

 in the attempt of some envious bull to appropriate his neighbor's wives by dashing into 

 a harem, seizing a cow by the skin of her back and carrying her off bodily, a perform- 

 ance eminently calculated to create respect for the bull's strength and agility. 



Naturally such a Sabine outrage as this does not go unheeded by the bull whose 

 cow has been taken, but his pursuit of the oflender is hampered by the fact that he 

 dares not leave his harem too far behind lest in trying to save one wife he lose others. 



One enterprising bull was seen to come out of the water, grasj) the nearest cow by 

 the neck, plunge back and swim away with his prize to a spot some 75 yards distant, 

 captor and cajiturod being under water most of the way. And after all this labor 

 the cow slipped away three minutes later wliile the bull was engaged in a discussion 

 with a neighbor. Occasionally, too, it will happen that when a cow has been seized by 

 some predatory bull her rightful lord and master will dash to the rescue and grasp 

 her by the most convenient si)ot, usually the neck, and endeavor to liberate his 

 abducted bride by main force. A game of pull devil, pull baker, ensues, and the poor 

 cow is tugged about until the skin gives way or one of the bulls gets tired and lets go. 

 Observation of a rookery impresses one with the fact that among fur seals matrimony 

 is a very serious matter for all i)arties concerned, and that the bad temper displayed 

 by the bulls is, to a great extent, excusable. 



Eough handling by the males may be set down as the most evident known cause 

 of death among the females, and the greater the i^roportion of bulls the greater the 

 nirmber of deaths, so that in a state of nature the superabundance of bulls must 

 probably be an important factor, if not the chief factor, in checking the increase of 

 the fur seals. As the proportion of the sexes at birth is equal, and as at least thirty 

 males are born where one is needed, there must in olden times have been a prodigious 

 amount of fighting and a mighty turmoil on the breeding grounds, with a conse- 

 quent destruction of mothers and pups. There were 42 dead cows on Keef rookery in 

 1897, and if there was such a visible loss with only a moderate surplus of males what 

 must have taken place before any males were killed by man? It is evident that if 

 many cows are killed outright many more must be badly injured and eventually die, 

 an inference made in discussing the mortality among the pups, where it was suggested 

 that the loss of these injured females at sea probably accounted for much of the early 

 starvation of the young. 



Whjle rough handling by bulls is thus the most evident factor in the death of 

 cows, yet the vast majority perish from causes which must, from the nature of things, 

 remain unknown. Occasionally, however, we find deaths resulting from unsuspected 

 causes, as when four cows were found to have died during parturition from a wrong 

 presentation of the fetus ; in two cases the shoulder having offered, and in the third 

 the occiput. In this latter case the head of the fetus was doubled up on the body 

 and firmly wedged in the pelvis of the mother, which had evidently lived some time 

 after the death of her offspring. The fourth case was in many ways very remarkable, 

 for while death had occurred in parturition from a breech presentation, the conditions 

 showed a iiretty clear case of super fetation. The placenta was torn away and lay 

 outside the ruptured uterus, which contained in the left branch a pup of the ordinary 

 size and also a small, shrivelled-ui) fetus, about 6 inches long, attached to the caudal 

 side of the horn near its junction with the main branch. This had apparently reached 

 a certain stage of development and then been resorbed, leaving little more than the 



