EXPERIENCE IN RAISING ELK. 29 



ginia deer, as they advance in age, by their pugnacious habits are apt to become 

 troublesome and dangerous. The elk lives to a great age, one having been kept 

 in the possession of the elder Peale, of Philadelphia, for thirteen years; we 

 observed one in the park of a nobleman in Austria that had been received from 

 America twenty-five years before. 



Professor Baird was of the opinion that the elk could easily be 

 domesticated, and that, next to the caribou and the moose, it is the 

 " one to which we are most entitled to look for an increase of our 

 stock of domestic animals. The great size of the horns of the male, 

 and his fierceness and uncontrollability during the rutting season, 

 are certainly obstacles in the way of reducing the elk to the rank of 

 a servant to man; nevertheless they are not unsurmountable, after 

 all." He suggested that, as in the case of the buck of the common 

 deer, castration would effectually subdue the animal. He suggested 

 further that if the social instinct is necessary to the complete 

 domestication of an animal, no deer possesses it in a higher degree 

 than the elk, which is often found in immense herds. 6 



One of the earliest successful attempts to domesticate the round- 

 horned elk was made by Col. John Mercer, of Cedar Park, West 

 River. Md. Colonel Mercer obtained his stock from St. Louis about 

 seventy-five or eighty years ago. The animals were transported to 

 Wheeling by water and thence to West River by way of Cumber- 

 land on foot. A few other breeders obtained stock from Colonel 

 Mercer, among them Col. Joseph Tuley, of Millwood, Clarke 

 County, Va. 



Lorenzo Stratton, of Little Valley, Cattaraugus County, N. Y., 

 began experiments with this species about sixty years ago. In a 

 letter addressed to D. J. Browne, and dated January 12, 1859, he 



The American elk, with all its claims to attention, is fast disappearing from 

 the earth, with scarcely an effort for its preservation or domestication. By 

 domestication I do not mean simply taming, but a course of intelligent breed- 

 ing and protection. A series of experiments with this animal * * * has 

 furnished me with sufficient evidence to say confidently that this business may 

 be made of great importance to the country. * * * I have now a herd so 

 gentle that a visitor at my farm would hardly imagine that their ancestors 

 only three generations back were wild animals. * * * 



The facility for extending this business may easily be conceived. New York 

 alone might support 100,000 elks on land where our domestic cattle could not 

 subsist; furnishing an amount of venison almost incredible; while the adjoin- 

 ing State of Pennsylvania, to say nothing of others, might sustain a still larger 

 number without encroaching upon an acre of land now used for stock rearing, 

 or any other purpose connected with agriculture. 



a The Quadrupeds of North America, II, 92, 1851. 



b Report U. S. Com. Patents (Agriculture) for 1851, p. 118, 1852. 



c Report U. S. Com. of Patents (Agriculture) for 1858, p. 237, 1859. 



