Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/477

Rh slaughter. It is not necessary to look for other causes, this cause is more than sufficient. To return to our analogy, suppose the owner of a cattle range should allow the slaughter of 65 to 85 per cent, of his breeding cows with the consequent loss of their offspring. It would simply mean the ruin of the herd of cattle, and pelagic sealing has in like manner brought ruin on the fur-seal herd.

This cause of decline was established for the government in 1898 by a commission of scientific experts. It was pointed out that only by the establishment of an international game law for the high seas which should protect the female fur seal—in other words, the abolition of pelagic sealing—could the herd be preserved and restored. The property involved is a very important one. The fur-seal herd during the first twenty years of its ownership by the United States yielded to the government a revenue of $13,500,000, almost twice the sum paid for the Territory of Alaska. If the conditions of these twenty years held true for to-day—and they would remain true were it not for pelagic sealing—the herd would now be bringing to the government an annual income of $1,000,000.

In the period of fourteen years since the exact relation of pelagic sealing to the reduced condition of the herd was demonstrated to our government, this wasteful and inhuman form of hunting has gone on season by season without interruption. A total of 200,000 gravid