Word: herds
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...solo trip since Inauguration Day, Mrs. Nixon was a model of warmth and graciousness-flashing her smile and her topaz brown eyes at shy children, embracing self-conscious elderly women, and offering her hand to hesitant black men. She coolly endured heckling at one stop, seemed oblivious to the herd of newsmen pursuing her along her 6,000-mile itinerary, and gratified anxious project directors with her insatiable curiosity-and her ability to attract publicity...
...Brutish British. Anguilla was ready: a flotilla of lobster smacks, so one story went, would wake the island by blowing horns when a British ship appeared. A herd of goats was supposedly assigned to clog the airstrip, and there was desultory talk of using sharp rocks to block island beaches against infiltrators. Undaunted, the British mustered a force of about 300 men, including the Red Devils, a Royal Marine platoon and bobbies from Scotland Yard, to set up a pacification program. When the British surged ashore, automatic weapons at the ready, there were only a few children to meet them...
...Gulf of St. Lawrence. Taking advantage of the breakup, pregnant cows among the 800,000 harps make their way south. Swimming down the Labrador coast and through the Strait of Belle Isle, they enter the broad Gulf of St. Lawrence. In the sheltered waters of the gulf, the herd instinctively turns the ice floes into floating maternity wards...
...jackets. In the gulf, a horde of hunters invade the floes on foot, by boat, on ski-equipped planes and in recent years by helicopter. Hundreds of sealers-"swilers" in the Newfoundland dialect-conduct a brief but grimly efficient slaughter. With stout oak clubs they move systematically through the herd, beating the whitecoats to death with raps on the skull. Only if a hulking 300-lb. cow seal chooses to fight for her baby will a swiler sometimes spare it. But most cows, especially the older ones, abandon their pups and escape into the water...
...Minister Jack Davis, is "probably more humane than most deer hunting." But no newsmen seem to go to the front, where Canadian swilers complain that their Norwegian competitors are still hooking pups with gaffs and skinning them alive. Nor is the annual gulf hunt, contrary to accusations, decimating the herd (although the limitless kill on the front is). Yet no matter how many explanations they make, Canadian officials are unable to quell the uproar for an elemental reason. Says one: "If we could find a way to make pup seals look like alligators, our problems would be over...