Part 3

There is the further question--affecting all migratory animals, but especially birds--of making international agreements for their protection. There are precedents for this, both in the Old World and in the New. And, so far as the United States are concerned, there should be no great difficulty. True, they have set us some lamentable examples of wanton destruction. But they have also set us some noble examples of conservation. And we have good friends at court, in the members of the New York Zoological, the Audubon and other societies, in Mr. Roosevelt, himself an ardent conserver of wild life, and in Mr. Bryce, who is an ex-president of the Alpine Club and a devoted lover of nature. Immediate steps should be taken to link our own bird sanctuaries with the splendid American chain of them which runs round the Gulf of Mexico and up the Atlantic coast to within easy reach of the boundary line. Corresponding international chains up the Mississippi and along the Pacific would be of immense benefit to all species, and more particularly to those unfortunate ones which are forced to migrate down along the shore and back by the middle of the continent, thus running the deadly gauntlet both by land and sea.

Inland sanctuaries are more difficult to choose and manage. A deer sanctuary might answer near James bay. Fur sanctuaries must also be in some fairly accessible places, on the seaward sides of the various heights-of-land, and not too far in. The evergreen stretches of the Eastmain river have several favourable spots. What is needed most is an immediate examination by a trained zoologist. The existing information should be brought together and carefully digested for him in advance. There are the Dominion, Provincial and Newfoundland official reports; the Hudson Bay Company, the Moravian missionaries; Dr. Robert Bell, Mr. A.P. Low, Mr. D.I.V. Eaton, Dr. Grenfell, Dr. Hare, Mr. Napoléon Comeau, not to mention previous writers, like Packard, McLean and Cartwright--a whole host of original authorities. But their work has never been thoroughly co-ordinated from a zoological point of view. A form of sanctuary suggested for the fur-bearing Yukon is well worth considering. It consists in opening and closing the country by alternate sections, like crops and fallow land in farming. The Indians have followed this method for generations, dividing the family hunting grounds into three parts, hunting each in rotation, and always leaving enough to breed back the numbers. But the pressure of the grab-all policy from outside may become irresistible.

The one great point to remember is that there is no time to lose in beginning conservation by protecting every species in at least two separate localities.

A word as to the management and wardens. Two zoologists and twenty men afloat, and the same number ashore, could probably do the whole work, in connection with local wardens. This may seem utterly ridiculous as a police force to patrol ten Englands and three thousand miles of sea. But look at what the Royal North West Mounted Police have done over vast areas with a handful of men, and what has been effected in Maine, New Brunswick and Ontario. Once the public understands the question, and the governments mean business, the way of the transgressor will be so hard--between the wardens, zoologists and all the preventive machinery of modern administration--that it will no longer pay him to walk in it. Special precautions must be taken against that vilest of all inventions of diabolical ingenuity--the Maxim "silencer." No argument is needed to prove that silent firearms could not suit crime better if they were made expressly for it. The mere possession of any kind of "silencer" should constitute a most serious criminal offence. The right kind of warden will be forthcoming when he is really wanted and is properly backed up. I need not describe the wrong kind. We all know him, only too well.

BENEFITS

I am afraid I have already exceeded my allotted time. But, with your kind indulgence, Sir, I should like, in conclusion, simply to enumerate a few of the benefits certain to follow the introduction and enforcement of law and the establishment of sanctuaries.

First, it cannot be denied that the constant breaking of the present law makes for bad citizenship, and that the observance of law will make for good. Next, though it is often said that what Canada needs most is development and not conservation, I think no one will deny that conservation is the best and most certainly productive form of development in the case before us. Then, I think we have here a really unique opportunity of effecting a reform that will unite and not divide all the legitimate interests concerned. What could appear to have less in common than electricity and sanctuaries? Yet electricity in Labrador requires water-power, which requires a steady flow, which requires a head-water forest, which, in its turn, is admirably fit to shelter wild life. Except for those who would selfishly and shortsightedly take all this wealth of wild life out of the world altogether, in one grasping generation, there is nobody who will not be the better for the change. I have talked with interested parties of every different kind, and always found them agree that conservation is the only thing to do--provided, as they invariably add, that it is done "straight" and "the same for all."

Fourthly, a word as to sport. I have invoked the public conscience against wanton destruction and its inevitable accompaniment of cruelty. I know, further, that man is generally cruel and a bully towards other animals. And, as an extreme evolutionist, I believe all animals are alike in kind, however much they may differ in degree. But I don't think clean sport cruel. It does not add to the sum total of cruelty under present conditions. Wild animals shun pain and death as we do. But under Nature they never die what we call natural deaths. They starve or get killed. Moreover, town-bred humanitarians feel pain and death more than the simpler races of men, who, in their turn, feel it more than lower animals. A wild animal that has just escaped death will resume its occupation as if nothing had happened. The sportsman's clean kill is only an incident in the day's work, not anxiously apprehended like an operation or a battle. But pain and death are very real, all the same. So death should be inflicted as quickly as possible, even at the risk of losing the rest of one's bag. And, even beyond the reach of any laws, no animal should ever be killed in sport when its own death might entail the lingering death of its young. A sportsman who observes these rules instinctively, and who never kills what he cannot get and use, is not a cruel man. He certainly is a beast of prey. But so is the most delicate invalid woman when drinking a cup of beef tea. Sport has its use in the development of health and skill and courage. Its practice is one of life's eternal compromises. And the best thing we can do for it now is to make it clean. We have far too much of the other kind. The essential difference has never been more shrewdly put than in the caustic epigram, that there is the same difference between a sportsman and a "sport" as there is between a gentleman and a "gent." I believe that the enforcement of laws and the establishment of sanctuaries will raise our sport to a higher plane, reduce the suffering now inflicted when killing for business, and help in every way towards the conversion of the human into the humane. Besides, paradoxical as it may seem to some good people, the true sportsman has always proved to be one of the very best conservers of all wild life worth keeping. So there is a distinctly desirable benefit to be expected in this direction, as in every other.

Finally, I return to my zoophilists, a vast but formless class of people, both in and outside of the other classes mentioned, and one which includes every man, woman and child with any fondness for wild life, from zoologists to tourists. There are higher considerations, never to be forgotten. But let me first press the point that there's money in the zoophilists--plenty of it. A gentleman, in whom you, Sir, and your whole Commission have the greatest confidence, and who was not particularly inexpert at the subject, made an under-valuation to the extent of no less than 75 per cent., when trying to estimate the amount of money made by the transportation companies directly out of travel to "Nature" places for sport, study, scenery and other kinds of outing. There is money in it now, millions of it; and there is going to be much more money in it later on. Civilized town-dwelling men, women and children are turning more and more to wild Nature for a holiday. And their interest in Nature is widening and deepening in proportion. I do not say this as a rhetorical flourish. I have taken particular pains to find out the actual growth of this interest, which is shown in ways as comprehensive as educational curricula, picture books for children, all sorts of "Animal" works, "zoos", museums, lectures, periodicals and advertisements; and I find all facts pointing the same way. The president of one of the greatest publishers' associations in the world told me, and without being asked, that the most marked and the steadiest development in the trade was in "Nature" books of every kind. And this reminds me of the countless readers who rarely hear the call of the wild themselves, except through word and picture, but who would bitterly and justifiably resent the silencing of that call in the very places where it ought to be heard at its best.

Now, where can the call of wild Nature be heard to greater advantage than in Labrador, which is a land made on purpose to be the home of fur, fin and feather? And it is accessible, in the best of all possible ways--by sea. It is about equidistant from central Canada, England and the States--a wilderness park for all of them. Means of communication are multiplying fast. Even now, it would be possible, in a good steamer, to take a month's holiday from London to Labrador, spending twenty days on the coast and only ten at sea. I think we may be quite sure of such travel in the near future; that is, of course, if the travellers have a land of life, not death, to come to. And an excellent thing about it is that Labrador cannot be overrun and spoilt like what our American friends so aptly call a "pocket wilderness". Ten wild Englands, properly conserved, cannot be brought into the catalogue of common things quite so easily as all that! Besides, Labrador enjoys a double advantage in being essentially a seaboard country. The visitor has the advantage of being able to see a great deal of it--and the finest parts, too--without getting out of touch with his moveable base afloat. And the country itself has the corresponding advantage of being less liable to be turned into a commonplace summer resort by the whole monotonizing apparatus of hotels and boarding houses and conventional "sights".

And now, Sir, I venture once more to mention the higher interests, and actually to specify one of them, although I have been repeatedly warned by outsiders that no public men would ever listen to anything which could not be expressed in "easy terms of dollars and cents!" And I do so in full confidence that no appeal to the intellectual life would fall on deaf ears among the members of a Commission which was founded to lead rather than follow the best thought of our time. I need not remind you that from the topmost heights of Evolution you can see whole realms of Nature infinitely surpassing all those of business, sport and tourist recreation, and that the theory of Evolution itself is the crowned brain of the entire Animal Kingdom. But I doubt whether, as yet, we fully realize that Labrador is absolutely unique in being the only stage on which the prologue and living pageant of Evolution can be seen together from a single panoramic point of view. The sea and sky are everywhere the same primeval elements. But no other country has so much primeval land to match them. Labrador is a miracle of youth and age combined. It is still growing out of the depths with the irresistible vigour of youth. But its titanic tablelands consist of those azoic rocks which form the very roots of all the other mountains in the world, and which are so old, so immeasurably older than any others now standing on the surface of the globe, that their Laurentians alone have the real right to bear the title of "The Everlasting Hills". Being azoic these Laurentians are older than the first age when our remotest ancestors appeared in the earliest of animal forms, millions and millions of years ago. They are, in fact, the only part of the visible Earth which was present when Life itself was born. So here are the three great elemental characters, all together--the primal sea and sky and land--to act the azoic prologue. And here, too, for all mankind to glory in, is the whole pageant of animal life: from the weakest invertebrate forms, which link us with the illimitable past, to the mightiest developments of birds and mammals at the present day, the leviathan whales around us, the soaring eagles overhead, and man himself--the culmination of them all--and especially migrating man, whose incoming myriads are linking us already with the most pregnant phases of the future. Where else are there so many intimate appeals both to the child and the philosopher? Where else, in all this world, are there any parts of the Creation more fit to exalt our visions and make us "Look, through Nature, up to Nature's God"?

But, Sir, I must stop here; and not without renewed apologies for having detained you so long over a question on which, as I have already warned you, I do not profess to be a scientific expert. I fear I have been no architect, not even a builder. But perhaps I have done a hodman's work, by bringing a little mortar, with which some of the nobler materials may presently be put together.

Bibliography

This short list is a mere indication of what can be found in any good library.

General information is given in _Labrador; its Discovery, Exploration and Development--By W.G. Gosling: Toronto, Musson._ The Atlantic Labrador is dealt with by competent experts in _Labrador: the Country and the People--By W.T. Grenfell and Others: New York, The Macmillan Company, 1910._ This has several valuable chapters on the fauna. The Peninsula generally, the interior especially, and the fauna incidentally, are dealt with in the reports of _A.P. Low_ and _D.I.V. Eaton_ to the _Geological Survey of Canada, 1893-4-5._ An excellent general paper on the country is _The Labrador Peninsula, By Robert Bell_, in _The Scottish Geographical Magazine_ for July, 1895. The N. of the S.W. part is more particularly described in his _Recent Explorations to the South of Hudson Bay_ in _The Geographical Journal_ for July, 1897. The Quebec Labrador is the subject of a recent Provincial report, _La Côte Nord du Saint Laurent et le Labrador Canadien--Par Eugène Rouillard: Quebec, 1908--Ministère de la Colonisation, des Mines et des Pêcheries._ An excellent account of animal life on the W. half of the Quebec Labrador is to be found in _Life and Sport on the North Shore--By Napoléon A. Comeau: Quebec, 1909._ The zoology of the Mammals, though not particularly in their Labrador habitat, is to be found in _Life-Histories of Northern Mammals--By Ernest Thompson-Seton: London, Constable, 2 Vols., 1910._ The birds, similarly, in the _Catalogue of Canadian Birds--By John Macoun and James M. Macoun: Ottawa, Government Printing Bureau, 1909._ Some books about adjacent areas may be profitably consulted, like _Newfoundland and its Untrodden Ways--By John Guille Millais,_ and American official publications, like the _Birds of New York--By Elon Howard Eaton: Albany, University of the State of New York, 1910._ No. 34 of the _New York Zoological Society Bulletin_--for June, 1909--is a "Wild-life Preservation Number." The best general history and present-day summary of the world's fur trade is to be found in a recent German work, a genuine _Urquellengeschichte._ French and English translations will presumably appear in due course. The statistical tables are wonderfully complete. The illustrations are the least satisfactory feature. This book is--_Aus dem Reiche der Pelze. Von Emil Brass: Berlin, Im Verlage der Neuen Pelzwaren-Zeitung, 1911._

End of Project Gutenberg's Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador, by William Wood