Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador: Supplement to an Address Presented by Lt.-Colonel William Wood, F.R.S.C. Before the Second Annual Meeting of the Commission of Conservation in January, 1911Wood, William
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Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador: Supplement to an Address Presented by Lt.-Colonel William Wood, F.R.S.C. Before the Second Annual Meeting of the Commission of Conservation in January, 1911
There is no time to lose. Even now, when laws themselves stop short at
the Atlantic, new and adjacent areas are about to be exploited without
the slightest check being put on the exploiters. An expedition is
leaving New York for the Arctic. It is well found in all the
implements of destruction. It will soon be followed by others. And the
musk-ox, polar bears and walrus will shrink into narrower and narrower
limits, when, under protection, far wider ones might easily support
abundance of this big game, together with geese, duck and curlews. It
is wrong to say that such people can safely have their fling for a few
years more. None of the nobler forms of wild life have any chance
against modern facilities of uncontrolled destruction. What happened
to the great auk and the Labrador duck in the Gulf? What happened to
the musk-ox in Greenland? What is happening everywhere to every form
of beneficial and preservable wild life that is not being actively
protected to-day? Then, there is the disappearing whale and persecuted
seal to think of also in those latitudes. The _laissez-faire_ argument
is no better here than elsewhere. For if wild life is worth exploiting
it must be worth conserving.
There is need, and urgent need, for extending protective laws all
along the Atlantic Labrador and over the whole of the Canadian Arctic,
where the barren-ground caribou may soon share the fate of the
barren-ground bear in Ungava, especially if mineral exploitation sets
in. Ungava and the Arctic are Dominion grounds, the Atlantic Labrador
belongs to Newfoundland, Greenland to Denmark, and the open sea to
all comers, among whom are many Americans. Under these circumstances
the new international conference on whaling should deal effectively
with the protection of all the marine carnivora, and be followed by an
inter-dominion-and-provincial conference at which a joint system of
conservation can be agreed upon for all the wild life of Labrador,
including the cognate lands of Arctic Canada to the north and
Newfoundland to the south.
This occasion should be taken to place the whole of the fauna under
law; not only _game_, but noxious and beneficial species of every
kind. And here both local experts and trained zoologists ought to be
consulted. Probably everyone would agree that flies, wolves and
English sparrows are noxious. But the indiscriminate destruction of
all mammals and birds of prey is not a good thing, as a general rule,
any more than any other complete upsetting of the balance of nature. A
great deal could be learnt from the excellent work already done all
over the continent with regard to the farmer's and forester's wild
friends and foes. A migrating flight of curlew, snipe, plover or
sandpipers is worth much more to the farmer alive than dead. But by no
means every farmer knows the value of the difference.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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