I would urge the earliest possible extension of thoroughly well enforced wild-life conservation laws to the whole Labrador peninsula; and I would venture to remind the Commission again, as I did in my Supplement, that the wild life of Arctic Canada is even now in danger and ought to be efficiently protected before it is too late.  But, for the present purpose, I shall revert to Labrador only; and, for a practical beginning, recommend the immediate adoption of conservation only in the “Canadian Labrador”.

So far as I could judge from talking things over with the south coast trappers, most of the fur-bearing animals seem to be holding their own fairly well in the market.  But it should be remembered that, with the recent great rise in prices, fewer skins may mean more money, and that even the establishment of fox farms, and the probable establishment of other fur farms, may not overtake the present increasing demand, which, in its turn, must tend to deplete the original source of supply still further, unless strict conservation is enforced.  There was a wonderful supply of foxes a year ago, though nothing to the muskrats which swarmed down south last fall.  But failure of food further north may have had more to do with those irruptions than any outburst of unusual fecundity.  Caribou apparently remain much as they have been lately.  But the hunger of wolves and the greed of men are two enemies that nothing but conservation can keep in check.  Of course, genuinely “necessary food” is not at all in question.  I know an old hunter, living at Pokkashoo in summer and St. Augustine in winter, who brought in sixteen caribou last season.  But he gave fifteen away to really necessitous families and kept only one for himself.

The whale factories at Lark Harbour and Hawke Bay, on the west coast of Newfoundland, were both closed for want of whales.  The only one in the Gulf that was working last year was at Seven Islands, on the North Shore, 300 miles below Quebec.  I happened to be almost in at the death of the biggest finback ever taken.  But, speaking generally, the season was not really prosperous.  The station of Seven Islands is worked by Norwegians, who are the most exterminatingly efficient whalers in the world.  They worked their own whaleries to exhaustion and raised so much feeling against them among the fishermen that the Norwegian government forbad every factory along the shore.  They then invented floating factories, which may still be used in Canadian waters with deadly effect unless we put whaling under conservation.  The feeling among the fishermen here is the same as elsewhere, strongly in favour of the whales and strongly against the exterminating kind of whaler, because whales are believed to drive the bait fish close inshore, which is very “handy” for the fishermen.