Prices go up. The hunt becomes keener, the animals fewer and farther
off. Presently hunters and hunted will reach the far side of the
utmost limits. And then traded, traders and trade will all disappear
together. And it might so well be otherwise.

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.