The Daily Alaska empire., 1951-12-27

you now and then a jaundiceo eye. it may not be because he's remembering the times you've watched the scales suspiciously.
 He may have been reminded of the economic import of wild game meat-eating in Alaska by customer that just left with a package of link sausage as his total purchase after a conversation that went something like this:
 Well. Joe" beams the butcher, Haven't seen you around much lately"
 Nope. Guess not. But you know since I got that new deep freeze last fall and .' With this the former good customer goes off into a detailed description of the venison, moose. duck, geese and fish filling the deep freeze so full that 1t is get ting difficult to close the lid and then, without noticing MT Butchers face is rapidly becoming the color Of liver, he moves off into a yarn about how each kill was made "all at un- believable distances), and perhaps which good friend brought him this and that.
 The butcher puts ideas about the meat cleaver out of his mind and, dcciley. hands over the sausage.
 But by this time, he is thinking. And if he gets paper and pencil he can come up with some interest ing figures. not wholly accurate but enough so to make him realize that hunting in Alaska runs into multi million dollar business. If he ar rives at something like the follow ing he has used conservative figures where facts were available and even in making some estimates where they were not.
 190 Moose PrOcessed
 Just for an example: In the city of Seward, with maybe 1,500 popu- lation, about 1a0 moose were proc essed last year for lockers and home freezers. Allow 500 pounds dressed weight an animal and this null tiplies out to 114.000 pounds of meat, CT about 75 pounds per capita. This of course, is only moose meat. Also packed into those freezers are many pounds of other kinds of game meat.
 Then, through the cold storage facilities at Palmer, possibly third the size of Seward, last year went some AS 500 pounds of moose meat and l3,900 pounds of caribou.
 Game Report
 From a game report by the Fish and Wildlife Service for the 1949- 50 season comes the following fig ures thought to be ultra a-conservative in pounds of various game taken for eating in Alaska. 176,000 pounds of rabbit, 312,0oo pounds of duck, l48,- GOO pounds of geese, 56,000 pounds of grouse, 100000 pounds of ptarmi- gan, II ,680 pounds of bear, 100000 pounds of moose, 822,500 pounds of Caribou, 450, 200 pounds of deer. 18,- 000 pounds of mountain sheep, 46.400 pounds of beaver, and 3,960 pounds of muskrat.
 AS an illustration of how conser- vative these figures are, of 1,970 black bear estimated killed, only one-tenth of these were counted as touched for eating. And of this one-tenth, only 20 pounds from each animal was estimated as actually eaten.
 Added up, this is very nearly four million pounds of game meat for the tables of the 130,000 persons in Alaska. At 75 cents pound (is that conservativeO, this is some $3-mil- lion worth of meat.
 Seafood Consumption
 And small wonder the butcher is not always his old, cheery self.
 And as yet there has not been a mention of the millions of pounds of all kinds of fish and seafood con- sumed each year. There seems to be no closely accurate method of esti- mating either pounds or total value of fish and seafood taken for table use in Alaska. Someone suggested left shoelace multiplied by the estimated population of lower Slob- lovia might be as accurate measure as any.
 The only official survey of any kind available seems to be one by the Alaska Native Service show ing the average annual catch ot food fish in 99 villages along the west coast. This covered about l2,-