Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V FUR FARMING TO SUPPLY THE WORLD DEMAND FOR FURS ?SILVER FOX Fur farming is the most hopeful and fascinating phase of the fur trade to-day. You can call it by any name you like; but when human care of a fur-bearing species supplies the world with over three million lamb skin coats a year, transforms a whole province like Prince Edward Island into a silver fox farm, increases the number of buffalo in one park from a few hundred to 5000 in ten years, changes the skunk into a domestic pet though it can change neither the odor nor the stripes, brings back the number of beaver from a rarity to almost a pest, and restores the depleted Alaska Seal Islands to the yearly production of 100,000 pelts a season, equal to the best days of the seal fisheries ? fur farming has come to stay. It has also become a mighty important factor in the fur trade. Ten years ago, the greatest authorities on the fur trade were saying fur farming couldn't be done. To-day, they are asking ? will it be overdone like the tulip craze of Europe ? If a whole province goes into silver fox farming, won't it be overdone so that prices will slump and the farms lose profit and so be forced out of business ? If ten years' government care of Alaska seals has increased the fur output of the rookeries from a few thousands to a hundred thousand ? which is the expectation by 1922 ? won't seals become as common as muskrats ? To which the most obvious answer is, if furs as beautiful as silver fox and Alaska seal so become as common as muskrat, there is no woman buyer who will object. Lessen the price of the silver fox and Alaska seal, and you will multiply buyers a thousandfold. However cruel trapping may seem to the tender-hearted city dweller, who knows wild life only from books and not from di...