Word: reindeers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...enthusiasm than discretion. That, plus annual fluctuations in the whale catch, caused recurrent famine years. So in 1892, a notable famine year, a Presbyterian missionary named Sheldon Jackson, backed by Quaker funds, undertook an experiment in practical ecology, which is the science that relates living organisms to their environment. Reindeer were imported from Siberia into Alaska for the Eskimos' benefit. Unlike its close relative the caribou of Alaska, the Siberian reindeer is easily domesticated. It was figured that the little brown men could use the hides (much warmer than wool) for clothing, the flesh for food, sell their surpluses...
...first decade 1,280 animals were imported. Finding good forage-mosses, lichens, shrubs, summer blueberries, ground willow-the herds eventually increased to over a million. Then they began to dwindle. Wolves, which developed a finicky taste for reindeer tongues, took a heavy toll. Some reindeer wandered off to join the wild caribou. White herders had encroached on the field. One big firm, the Lomen brothers, built slaughterhouses and railway loading platforms, began shipping choice reindeer steaks and reindeer dog food to the States. Discouraged by this high-powered competition, the Eskimos began to lose much of their interest in herding...
Some time ago Congress decided that Eskimos should have a reindeer monopoly in Alaska, that no white person should own any. It provided for Government purchase of the white-owned animals (estimated at 200,000), appropriated enough money to buy them up at $3 to $8 a head to be given to the little brown men. The census and buying job was turned over to big, beaming, bespectacled Charles Gilbert Burdick, a Forest Service inspector in Juneau. Last December Burdick, an assistant and a pilot started out in an airplane, equipped with skis for landing, covered 20,000 miles...
Last week Charles Burdick had finished his job, was flying home to report to his boss, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. And the Eskimo population around Nome was working hard to fill an order for 800 reindeer skinparkas (at $30 apiece) for the U. S. Army...
Britons are concerned not only for their own pets, but also for animals in active war zones. Last week the R. S. P. C. A. announced allocation of $8,000 to aid the Finnish Army Veterinary Corps in caring for 350,000 horses and 100,000 reindeer used in war work. And the Blue Cross branch of Our Dumb Friends League an nounced the readiness in France of a "large convalescence hospital where war-shattered horses and mules may be taken from the front line." Against the time when air raids may begin, a National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee...