Farley Mowat

Canadian naturalist-author. His other books include Canada North, The Grey Seas Under, Westviking, and Never Cry Wolf.

The descendants of the whale forefathers now number about a hundred species which man, the great cataloguer, has divided into the families of the toothed and the baleen whales. A Whale for the Killing, 1972.

 

A commander in the Royal Canadian Navy who served four years in corvettes, frigates and destroyers in the North Atlantic told me he believed a high percentage of the depth-charges fired from his ships had been directed at submerged whales rather than at submarines. Ibid.

 

Why is it, if man has such a remarkable intelligence, he has been unable to avoid an almost continuous acceleration of the processes of self-destruction? Why, if he is the most advanced of beings, has he become a threat to the survival of all life on earth? Ibid.

 

The living whale is something else. . . We were all . . . made sharply aware that these creatures were paragons of grace who had achieved a harmonious relationship to the world of waters such as man will never know in air or on the land, in nature or in art. Ibid.

 

And the great Fin Whale, who had been unable to pass that barrier alive, floated easily over it in death . . . returning, now that there was no return, to the heart of mystery from whence she came. Ibid.

 

Before that most rapacious of predators, the human animal, set about annihilating them in earnest during the 17th century, the eight species of Great Wales are believed to have numbered as many as four and a half million individuals. Ibid.

 

By 1930, three centuries later, they had been reduced to about one and a half million. Less than half a century after that, in 1972, there were estimated to be no more than three hundred and fifty thousand survivors. Ibid.

 

As the oystercatcher became increasingly rare, scientific collectors moved in on the few remaining colonies and, not content with collecting eggs for their "cabinets," collected the adults as well, and to such effect that, although the bird is now rare in life, it is very well represented in the collections of "study skins" in North American museums. Sea of Slaughter, 1984.

 

In 1982 the bag by sportsmen in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec alone included 800,000 ducks and 100,000 geese. To this we must add an additional 20 to 30 per cent to cover the death of wounded birds and of those that died of poisoning after ingesting spent lead shot picked up from the bottoms of ponds, lakes, and swamps. Ibid.

 

Surviving common loons today represent only a small fraction of those that, 100 years ago, filled the summer evenings with their haunting cries. Ibid.

 

As sportsmen depleted available stocks of game fishes, the fraternity reacted as they have always done, by savaging those animals that could be thought of as competitors. Ibid.

 

The last recorded wild specimen (of passenger pigeon) seems to have been shot at Penetanguishene, Ontario, in 1902. Ibid.

 

Birds of prey have been treated as enemies ever since European settlement began. Eagles were and by many still are regarded as "wolves of the air" and accused of killing anything from human babies to small calves. Ibid.

 

Perhaps we are beginning to narrow the abyss our recent forebears opened between our species and the avian kind. If so, perhaps there are grounds for hope that we may be able to find our way back into that lost world, where all life was one. Ibid.

 

The pros and cons of the wolf's reputation are complex. It must suffice to say here that the preponderance of independent scientific opinion agrees that the wolf serves a vital role in the well-being of its prey species; is no threat to human life; is responsible for only minutiae of domestic animals; and for the most part, will not even live in proximity to human settlement and agricultural enterprises. Ibid.

 

Between 1904 and 1939 well over 2,000,000 great whales died the death prescribed for them by modern business practices. Ibid.

 

Beginning in the mid-1940s, U.S. naval aircraft flying out of their leased base at Argentia, Newfoundland, regularly used whales as training targets, attacking them with machine-gun and cannon fire, rockets, depth charges, and bombs. When this came to light in 1957, as a result of an investigation by Harold Horwood of the St. John's Evening Telegram, the naval authorities appeared baffled by and even indignant at the resulting public outcry. Ibid.

 

When our forebears commenced their exploitation of this continent they believed the animate resources of the New World were infinite and inexhaustible. The vulnerability of that living fabric&endash;the intricacy and fragility of its all-too-finite parts&endash;was beyond their comprehension. It can at least be said in their defense that they were mostly ignorant of the inevitable consequences of their dreadful depredations. Ibid.