She was. fed from the first on fresh fish alone, and grew and fattened considerably.
We had her carried down daily in a hand-barrow to the seaside, where an old excavation
admitting the salt water was abundantly roomy and deep for her recreation
and our observation. After sporting and diving for some time she would come
ashore and seemed perfectly to understand the use of the barrow. Often she tried
to waddle from the house to the water, or from the latter to her apartment but
finding this fatiguing, and seeing preparations by her chairmen, she would of her
own accord mount her palanquin and thus be carried, as - composedly as any
Hindoo princess. By degrees we ventured to let her go fairly into, the sea mid
she regularly returned after a short interval; but one day during a thick fall
of snow she was imprudently let off as usual, and, being decoyed some distance
out of sight of the shore by some wild ones which happened to be in the bay at
the time she either could not find her way back or voluntarily decamped. She
was, we understood, killed very shortly after in a neighbouring inlet. We had
kept her about six months, and every moment she was becoming more familiar;
we had dubbed her Finna, and she seemed to know her name. . . .
‘ The younger Seals are the more easy to tame, but the more difficult to
rear- under a month old they must be fed, and especially the barbate [gryp«s\
almost entirely on milk, and that of the cow seems hardly to agree with them.
Perhaps their being suckled by a sow fed chiefly, on fish, the giving them
occasionally a. little salt water, and then by degrees inducing them to eat fish,
might be the best mode until they attained the age of being sustained on fish
alone. In the gryfius to ensure rapid taming it appears to be necessary to
capture them before the period of casting the foetal hair, analogous to what I have
observed in the case of the young of water-birds before getting their first feathers,
and when they are entirely covered with the egg down. These changes seem
connected with a great development of the wild habits, and attachment to and
knowledge of the localities where they have first seen the light. .As the gryfus
until this period is, in reality a land animal, the chief difficulty we have to surmount
with it is in the quality of the milk to be given it. The mtultna ■
essentially an inhabitant of the water from its birth, yet the care of the mother is
perhaps for weeks necessary to judge how long and how often it should be on
| The first young Grey Seal obtained by Mi. Allied Cooks soon died after being fed on pure con's milk. A second
individual, however, was I M S reared on fish jelly and Mellin's Food, and lived for mom than three years. Ajnordmg
to Mr. M r s ’s experience he is of opinion that the temperature of the milk secreted by female Seals IS considerably higher
than that of other, purely terrestrial, mammals.
land, and this we can hardly expect to imitate. In the young of this species
a few days old which we have tried to rear, a want of knowledge of this kind of
management may have led to failure. I have not attempted to rear them at
a greater age.’
Modes o f Capture and Hunting.— It is seldom that the adults are surprised
ashore and clubbed except in the breeding season, but the immatures, which keep
much together and lie up on the skerries-in the winter months, are often attacked
and killed in this manner; this is especially so on the Irish coast, where the
boatmen are extraordinarily skilful in their little flimsy ‘ curraghs,’ and will even
dash in on an incoming roller and land boat and all beside the sleeping Seals.
Of course this is a matter of perfect timing, for if they were caught on the back
wash by the next roller the boat would be filled and sunk. Formerly both in the
south and west of Ireland and in the Shetlands a strong net was employed to
take the old Grey Seals when they were in the caves with their young. Often
the water at the entrance of these caves or Hellyers,1 as they are called in the
northern isles, is quite shallow; the net is dropped across the entrance and the
inmates alarmed. I have not witnessed this mode of capture, and from what
I could learn it is now rarely practised except in Unst. Dr. Edmondston gives
a vivid description of what he himself many times took part in :
‘ The dimensions of the net are about fifteen fathoms long and five broad,
the meshes are nine inches square, and it is made of strong cod-line. When the
Seals are suspected to have brought forth in a cave, the net is rapidly and silently
dropped across the entrance. A man holding a rope attached to its upper ends is
placed on each side, on some convenient pinnacle of rock that affords footing, and
sometimes, from the shelving of the sides of the cave, the net cannot easily close
it, and in this case the men hold each a long pole, with a bunch of straw or
other substance at the end, keeping it constantly in motion under water, to deter
the animal from escaping by means of this vulnerable part of the line of siege.
When all is secured, the boat proceeds inwards as far as possible, and by firing
and hallooing we endeavour to induce the Seals that may be in the cave to
venture out. In one instance I remember seeing a female taken in attempting
from the outside to get to her young. Monogamous or not, the males are the
first to escape. Now is the period of excitement to the hunter. None of the old
ones may be within, and he looks anxiously towards the cavern, straining to
1 These caves were in Scotland always held in strict property, and deeds of conveyance used to be made when a change
of hands took place.