The fur-seal herds of the north Pacific breed on islands situated in
Bering Sea and belonging to the United States and Russia. On these
islands, Pribilof and Komandorski, for nearly a hundred years they have
received all necessary protection from attacks on land. The existence
of the herds, however, demands the further protection of the females
when they are feeding or migrating in the open sea beyond the usual
three-mile limit of territorial jurisdiction. The animals visit certain
islands in the summer. They breed on them and make them their home.
The young remain there until driven away by the storms of winter. The
adults leave the islands in summer only to feed, going to a distance of
one hundred to two hundred miles for that purpose. The winter is spent
by the entire herd in the open sea, their migrations extending from
one thousand to twenty-five hundred miles to the southward of their
breeding-resorts.
For many years, both under Russian and American control, the herds
have, as I have said, received absolute protection on land, the killing
for skins being restricted to the bands of superfluous males. As only
one male in about thirty is able to maintain himself on a rookery or to
rear a family, about twenty-nine out of every thirty are necessarily
superfluous. The survival of one male in a hundred is sufficient for
all actual needs of propagation. The young males on land are as easily
handled and selected as sheep, and no diminution whatever to the
increase of the herd has arisen from selective land-killing. The number
of females in the herd bearing young each year was, in the earlier
days, about 650,000 on the American islands and perhaps half as many
on the Russian. The numbers of males and of young were together about
twice as many more. This gave an annual total on the American, or
Pribilof, islands of about 2,000,000 animals of all classes, while on
the Russian, or Komandorski, islands there were about 1,000,000.
About 1884 different persons, known as pelagic sealers--chiefly
citizens of Canada, but some of them from the United States--began to
attack the herd in Bering Sea. Here no selective killing was possible.
The females were always in the numerical majority, as the males had
become less numerous on account of land-killing and as they left the
islands less frequently in the summer. Each female above two years,
when taken in the sea, died with her unborn young. Most of the adult
females so taken after July 1 had left their young on the islands, and
these orphan pups invariably starved to death.
Beginning with this increase of pelagic sealing in 1884 the fur-seal
herds rapidly declined in numbers. In 1897 there were about 130,000
breeding-seals on the American islands, or about 400,000 animals of
all classes, while on the Russian islands there were less than 65,000
breeding-animals, or less than 200,000 of all classes.
For this great reduction in numbers there is but one cause--a cause
plain, self-evident, and undeniable--and that is the slaughter of
breeding-females at a rate largely in excess of the rate of increase.
While other causes have been assigned, none of them is worthy of the
slightest consideration in explaining the decline.
Even in 1893 it was evident, to all capable of forming an opinion,
that pelagic sealing was the sole known cause of the decline of the
fur-seal herds. It was also evident that as an industry it must
be self-destructive, since, if permitted to exist on any scale
which would make it profitable, it must destroy the herd on which
it operated.--_"Lessons of the Paris Tribunal of Arbitration," by
President David Starr Jordan, in Forum._