In some parts of the United States an ingenious by-industry to the fur-trade has arisen, for the offered-bounty destructive animals are carefully reared in illicit kindergartens.  As some states pay for the scalps of these animal pests and other states for the tails, the undertaking is interesting and profitable.  The only gamble is in the nursery.  When the gladsome breeder gets his wild-cat or coyote big enough to market, it is “heads I win, tails you lose.”  The United States, in twenty-five years, has paid two and a half millions in wild animal bounties.  California paid in a year and a half $190,000 on coyotes alone, and no breed of noxious animals is yet extinct.

What is true of the undesirable animals fortunately is true also of the harmless fur-bearers.  Several causes make against the extermination of these in Canada.  The range is so wide that, harassed in one quarter, the animal may get his family around him and make tracks for safer pastures.  Hunted in the winter only, he has a good six months of planning and putting into practice plans of preservation as against the six months of active warfare when the trapper’s wits are pitted against his.  The fickleness of Fashion’s foibles, too, in his favour.  In no line of personal adornment is there such changing fashion as in furs.  A fur popular this season and last will next spring be unsaleable at half its original value, and some despised fur comes to the front.

What causes the changed standard?  Who shall say?  World’s Fairs, in showing perfect specimens, popularise particular skins.  Some princess of the blood or of bullion wears mink at a regal or republican function, and the trick is turned.  The trade-ticker on mink runs skyward and a wireless thrill of warning should by poetic justice be impelled here to the shores of the Slave where Mr. and Mrs. Mink and all the little minxes love and hate and eat and sleep (with one eye open).  During the last five years furs have been increasingly fashionable, and to this end no one cause has contributed so strongly as the automobile.  The exhilarating motion makes necessary clothing of compact texture.  This truth is self-evident and does not require the involved chain of reasoning by which a friend over our milkless teacups last night strove to prove that by all laws of the game the auto makes milk cheap.

The burden of his demonstration is this.  Autos have largely done away with the keeping of horses for pleasures.  Horses and horse-stables inevitably breed flies.  Flies in summer worry cows, and they, to escape the annoyance, stand for hours in running streams and do not graze.  For lack of food, the milk-supply yielded by the cow is scanty, and milk rises in price.  The auto upsets all this, and, undeterred by the horse-bred fly, complacent cows crop grass and distend their udders with cheap and grateful milk.  Now, the reasoning is plain and incontrovertible at any one point, and yet urban milk grows dearer and Northern travellers drink boiled tea au natural.  Cows are the eternal feminine and will not be explained by logic.