There is another point that should never be passed over.  In these days the public conscience is beginning to realize that the objection to man’s cruelty towards his other fellow-beings is something more than a fad or a fancy.  And wanton slaughter is very apt to be accompanied by shameless cruelty.  To kill off parents when the young are helpless....  But I have already given enough sickening details of this.  The treatment of the adults is almost worse in many typical cases.  An Indian will skin a hare alive and gloat over his quivering death-agonies.  The excuse is, “white man have fun, Indian have fun, too.”  And it is a valid excuse, from one point of view.  When “there’s nothing in caribou” except the value of the tongue, the tongue has been cut out of the living deer, whose only other value is considered to be the amusement afforded by his horrible fate.  And, fiendish cruelty like this is not confined to the outer wilds.  When some civilized English-speaking bird-catchers get a bird they do not want, they will deliberately wrench its bill apart, so that it must die of lingering starvation.  Sometimes the cruelty is done to man himself.  Not so many years ago some whalers secured a lot of walrus hides and tusks by having a whole herd of walrus wiped out, in spite of the fact that these animals were, at that very time, known to be the only food available for a neighbouring tribe of Eskimos.  The Eskimos were starved to death, every soul among them, as the Government explorers found out.  But Eskimos have no votes and never write to the papers; while walrus hides were booming in the markets of civilization.

Things like these are not much spoken of.  They very rarely appear in print.  And when they are mentioned at all it is generally with an apology for introducing unpleasant details.  But I am sure I need not apologize to gentlemen who are anxious to know the full truth of this great question, who cannot fail to see the connection between wanton destruction and revolting cruelty, and who must be as ready to rouse the moral conscience of our people against the cruelty as they are to rouse its awakening sense of conservation against the destruction.

CONSERVATION

All the sound reasons ever given for conserving other natural resources apply to the conservation of wild life—­and with three-fold power.  When a spend-thrift squanders his capital it is lost to him and his heirs; yet it goes somewhere else.  When a nation allows any one kind of natural resource to be squandered it must suffer a real, positive loss; yet substitutes of another kind can generally be found.  But when wild life is squandered it does not go elsewhere, like squandered money; it cannot possibly be replaced by any substitute, as some inorganic resources are:  it is simply an absolute, dead loss, gone beyond even the hope of recall.