He said that the shameful practice of killing the mother seals when they went to their feeding-grounds could be entirely stopped by a means much simpler than the making of a treaty with Great Britain. This means, he stated, has already been tried and found to be most satisfactory; it was in short, branding the skins of the female puppies.
To brand means to mark with a hot iron.
Branding is a practice in use among all cattle raisers, who are thus able to mark their beasts, and if they stray, can recognize and recover them.
In the West, when the owners round up their cattle to count and separate them, each man can tell his own stock by the brand. At the round-up, the young calves, which have been born since the last count, are also marked.
The branding of the seals is not for purposes of identification, but so to destroy the skin of the female seal that it will have no market value.
The seal puppies can be easily caught and handled. Last year three hundred and fifty of them were marked
with a series of bars across the back, which had much the appearance of a huge face.
The hair will never grow again over the spot that has been burned, and the marks are made in all the best parts of the fur, so that the skin is utterly destroyed, and the seal is no longer worth killing.
The pups that had been branded were very carefully watched until they had quite recovered from their burns, and it was found that none of them had been injured by the branding, nor did their altered appearance seem to make any difference in their habits, nor in the friendliness of their tribe toward them.