Page:Polar Exploration - Bruce - 1911.djvu/136

132 The Southern Fur seal (Otaria australis) is also an animal that is confined to subantarctic and south temperate seas. It does not enter the pack. Much could be said about this interesting animal, concerning the enormous numbers, the animal's habits and home, and how stupid seal-hunters destroyed a valuable industry for half a century by massacring millions of these fur seals, not hesitating to kill mothers suckling their young, which perished in hundreds of thousands (Pinnipeds, J. A. Allen, Washington, 1880, p. 230).

Arctic seals, like Arctic birds, are more numerous in species, but probably not in numbers of individuals. Bloody slaughter is recorded in the north as in the south, especially in the case of the Walrus (Trichechus rosmarus), which has been absolutely exterminated in some parts of the Arctic, where formerly it used to occur in great herds (Seasons with the Sea Horses, Lamont, 1861).

Much has been written recently regarding the great fur-seal fisheries of Alaska and the Behring Straits, and Labrador, but those Fur seals (Otaria ursina), like their cousins in the south, are subarctic rather than Arctic; they keep outside the polar pack. The real Arctic seals are, with the exception of the walrus, like the Antarctic seals, all "true or earless seals," that is Phocidæ. There are several