mate objective is to maintain maximum variety and optimum numbers of wildlife for the many and varied uses of man, to observe, to photograph, to study, and to harvest these surplus for food or for wearing apparel.

At this point, I want to make it perfectly clear the federation is not opposed to complete protection of wildlife as a program management tool.

However, and this is the key point, protection is simply one of the several techniques used by the professional wildlife biologists.

Harvesting of surplus wildlife population is an equally important management tool if the continuing long-range well-being of an animal population is the ultimate objective.

The point I am making, Mr. Chairman, is that any recommendation or decision concerning the proper handling of wildlife should be made within the framework of scientific management based upon factual research data and experience, and on the restoration and maintenance of proper wildlife habitat, not on the basis of emotional, philosophical or moral judgments.

The federation feels it is absolutely vital to world wildlife population that we continue management efforts, crude as they may be, that are built upon a solid foundation of scientific knowledge about the status and needs of wildlife.

If we have insufficient data, and you touched upon this in your testimony, Mr. Chairman, and I do think that we have inadequate data, we should direct our efforts toward filling in those gaps in our body of knowledge.

We need all of the management tools at our disposal, including both protection and harvesting to solve the complexities of contemporary wildlife management.

To do otherwise in this enlightened age would be an abrogation of our responsibilities to the fish and fauna of the world.

No matter how much we desire it, we cannot return to the pristine conditions of the stone age.

Modern man, 5 billion in number, has so disrupted our planet and ecology, poisoned and polluted the environment, that the only hope for much of the world's wildlife is for man to utilize his great powers of reason, science, technology, and persuasion to overcome or minimize the inverse impact of his own intrusions into the plant and animal ecosystems.

The worst disservice we could perform to any form of wildlife would be to abandon the principle of sound management. Because man has so complicated and disrupted the animal habitat, there is little semblance in the balance of nature.

If populations are not kept at levels supported by adequate food supply, living and breathing space, many will die of starvation and disease, plus suffering the lack of procreation.

Recovery to a normal balanced population following a starvation die-off is a slow, inhumane, and unnecessary process.

In our view, the methods employed in removing surplus populations, whether carried out by individuals representing sporting or commercial interests, should be left to regulation by professional wildlife management experts as long as control is exercised to protect the basic broodstocks and the harvest is carried out in the most humane

manner.

I think, Mr. Chairman, the committee will hear probably considerable testimony about the methods employed to take these mammals, and we would like to go on record as saying that if any method used is inhumane, we would certainly seek to develop, through the proper research and investigation, the most humane methods of harvesting the surplus.

I know that the record will clearly show that the National Wildlife Federation has always vigorously supported legislation designed to completely protect rare and endangered species.

There are many of them in the marine mammal category.

Also, the federation endorses the existing legislation that provides Federal protection to certain species of birds, but again, the decisions that led to this legislation were made on a scientifically sound manage

ment basis.

That is why, Mr. Chairman, we support H.R. 10420, and while the bill contains at least, in our judgment, some deficiencies, it embraces the concept of resource management and sustained yield which is so critical to this issue.

In that connection, Mr. Chairman, we have made several suggestions. I would be happy to come back and go over these in detail if you would care to, or utilize the time in acknowledging or answering any questions concerning our specific recommendations to this particular bill.

Thank you.

Mr. DINGELL. The Chair will observe that I have noted with care the suggestions you made which appear in your excellent statement and that the Chair is going to direct the staff to consider these in the markup of any legislation.

Mr. KIMBALL. Fine. In conclusion, we would point out, Mr. Chairman, that the greatest danger to wildlife in the world today is that the opposition to hunting or commercial harvesting of surplus animals will be erroneously interpreted and accepted by the uninformed as

conservation.

As long as hunting and harvesting is conducted on a sound biological basis, "killing," as deplorable as it is to some, is not a conservation issue.

It is a philosophical issue or a moral question that each person must decide for himself, and the federation respects all of these philosophical viewpoints of the individuals, whatever they may be, as most certainly no one would be able to change them.

While sincere people on both sides of the philosophical question of to hunt or not to hunt, or to harvest surplus or to provide total protection are preoccupied with quarreling over the moral issues involved, wildlife's real enemies greed, avarice, environmental degradation, and the loss of suitable habitat will continue to accelerate.

The National Wildlife Federation is supported by representatives of both of these groups, both the hunter and the protectionist alike, and we hope these wildlife enthusiasts of different philosophical persuasions will unite in the continuing fight to conserve and enlarge the wildlife habitat and to preserve the natural environmental while respecting each other's rights to moral judgments.

Thank you again, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. DINGELL. Mr. Kimball, the Chair wishes to commend you for a very helpful and enlightening and valuable statement.

We are appreciative of your assistance to this committee.

Are there questions?

Mr. ANDERSON. Mr. Kimball, I just want to say that I wish to commend you for your very fine statement, and particularly to thank you for your offer of support to the bill that I have introduced, H.R. 10420. We are aware that there are some deficiencies in it, perhaps, and we will take the suggestion that you make, and go through them point by point, because we do not consider it as a finished bill right as of now. It has some answers, and perhaps it is a step in the right direction. Thank you for your comments.

Mr. KIMBALL. Mr. Anderson, one of the suggestions I would like to make is that the legislation address itself to the international problem. Marine mammals are creatures of the open sea, and as such, the jurisdiction over their taking and use and management is between many nations.

This is one of the real problems of protecting these particular mammals, and hopefully, the efforts of the United States could be directed toward developing some type of international agreement on the management of these species.

It would be based again upon factual research data. If we could pattern it somewhat after the Pribilof seals where nations have agreed upon the harvest of only the surplus, and it is done at a particular time and season so that the basic broodstocks are protected, this could be applied to the other endangered marine mammals. This would be the thrust of the U.S. effort to really help these particular mammals. Mr. ANDERSON. I noticed you had eight or 10 suggestions. Are they in written form.

Mr. KIMBALL. Yes, they are.

Mr. ANDERSON. They are covered in your statement?

Mr. KIMBALL. Yes.

Mr. ANDERSON. Thank you very much.

Mr. DINGELL. Any further questions?

Thank you again, Mr. Kimball.

Our next witness is Mr. Cleveland Amory, president, the Fund for Animals, New York City.

STATEMENT OF CLEVELAND AMORY, PRESIDENT, THE FUND FOR ANIMALS, NEW YORK CITY

Mr. AMORY. Thank you, Mr. Dingell.

Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, my name is Cleveland Amory. I am president of the Fund for Animals, a national anticruelty society with offices at 140 West 57th Street, in New York, and I am here to testify for the Harris-Pryor Bill, H.R. 6558.

There is one particular area of the matter that concerns us this morning to which I would like to address myself, if you will so permit. And that is how the public feels. I have had unusual opportunity to learn how it feels from three directions-first, from the letters I receive from the magazines I write for; second, from the letters I receive from talks I have made on various radio and television shows; and third, at the grassroots level, by actually talking with people in more than 40 American cities so far this year.

The organization of which I am president presently shares, with other major conservation organizations such as the National Audubon

Society, the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, et cetera, a joint exhibit called the National Panorama for Conservation Action.

Starting in Arizona, this huge panorama, more than 30 yards in length, has traveled from mall to mall across the length and breadth of this land, across Texas, into Florida, up the southern coast, through New England, and now back into the Midwest, heading towards its close in California. This week the exhibit is in Omaha, Nebr. Last week it was in Lincoln, Nebr.

I assure you, Mr. Chairman, there are not many ocean mammals in Lincoln, Nebr., nor in Omaha. But I also assure you, Mr. Chairman, that the people there care about ocean mammals. To our exhibit, for example, came thousands of schoolchildren.

One of them pointed to our seal pictures. They show first the clubbing of the baby seals in Canada, then the clubbing of the adult seals in Alaska. Underneath is written, "Our country, too, clubs seals.”

One child, who could not have been more than 11 or 12 years old looked at the exhibit for a long time. His face clouded. Then, suddenly, there was hope in it. "My goodness," he said. "Mr. Amory, cannot you stop it? Through TV Guide?"

Seriously, Mr. Chairman, let us thank God that that child had not yet grown up, that he did not yet know of man's infinite capacity to rationalize his own cruelty.

Mr. Chairman, I have found in my mail, in my travels, and in person something I am sure you gentlemen have found far more, and far more accurately, than I have something I dare say was directly responsible for these hearings, and this is something which I can only describe as a new wind blowing through our land.

Only a few short years go, a very small number of people would have been at all concerned with what concerns us here today. Only a few voices were then raised against any animal abuses, pathetically few for abuses seemingly as far removed as those concerned with ocean mammals. But now those few voices have grown into an army. And it is a new kind of army-the army of the kind.

Two years ago the Fund for Animals started something off the west coast of California called the Wildlife Protection Patrol-the country's first coast guard for animals, to prevent the ravishing and cruel abuse of sea mammals by so-called sportsmen and others.

The Wildlife Protection Patrol, Mr. Chairman, had only one power-moral power. But that moral power has, time and time again, proved far more powerful than power power. And something else was proved by the Wildlife Protection Patrol-that, as our friends on the beaches of California learned more and more about our fellow creatures of the deep, an extraordinary bond was created. Mr. Chairman, the true horror of what we are talking about today is that some of these mammals are going to be extinct before we even have learned anything about them.

Let me give you just one interesting case the experiments of Dr. John Lilly with the dolphin. Dr. Lilly found that, in some cases, the bond between his researchers and dolphin became so deep that when the researchers were reassigned, or when it became clear to the dolphins that, no matter how hard they tried, they were not going to be able to establish real communication, the dolphins first appeared distressed and then, in some cases, they died. In fact, they literally committed suicide. Dr. Lilly then gave up his experiments.

But an even more important point may be at issue here. We are, after all, not just talking about extinction and endangered species here. The voice of the new army to which I have referred is loud and clear on this subject. It does not matter how many of an animal or sea mammal there is. What really matters is the total immorality and senselessness of taking any such creatures for such a frivolous purpose. For that great and noble creature, the whale, from which we get not one single product which could not be better gotten elsewhere, man has reserved one of the cruelest deaths of all. That tiny, inoffenive creature, the baby seal, man chooses to club. And for what? Not even for a fur coat-for a fur lining.

Mr. Chairman, I have stood in 30-degree-below-zero weather on an ice floe off the Magdalen Islands, in a 50-mile-an-hour wind. It was a wild, eerie scene, of quiet and white nothingness. A winter wonderland so beautiful that the beauty, let alone the cold, took your breath

away.

The only inhabitants of that ice floe, and indeed of all the other ice floes for miles and miles around, were thousands upon thousands of seals. Two by two they were a beautiful, gray-coated mother beside her unbelievably appealing pup; a fat, fluffy ball of solid whiteness out of which appeared three somber black blobs, two of them eyes, trusting and friendly, the third an inquisitive snout.

The age of the pup? Six days. And then the men from the sealing ships advanced. At the last moment a baby seal moved toward them. He seemed to think the first human being he had ever seen come close to him was something to play with, and in friendly, curious fashion, he wiggled forward—waggling, since he had no tail, his whole backside.

Mr. Chairman, all that remains of him now is the lining of your glove, or perhaps of your jacket, or even your billfold. And all of his, of course, could be better made of something else.

May I say in closing that the animal army of which I speak is oday such an overwhelming majority that I venture to say you canot find a single soul in this hall, in this building, in the streets below, r in the entire country, who does not want to do something about vhales, about seals, and sea lions, unless, and I repeat, unless, it is omeone with a vested interest in their persecution.

And that, Mr. Chairman, is my final point here. Up until now, the J.S. Government has had a vested interest in this persecution, in one f the cruelest businesses on the face of the earth, the clubbing of eals. Sir, it must divest itself of this vested interest. It must divest self, wash the blood from its hands, and stand in fair and new and resh and decent judgment.

Mr. Chairman, we ask of our Government in this matter, as so many eople are asking in so many other matters, that it be not on the side f the angles, but on the side of the angels. The Government has two rguments. It says it has to kill seals because of a treaty. That is one rgument. The other is that it has to kill seals because it is good onservation.

Mr. Chairman, I am always suspicious of someone who has two rguments. If one of the arguments was really good, why would two e necessary? Not long ago I asked an official in the Bureau of Comerical Fisheries if the seal killing would go on for conservation