Whatever it may be in other respects, the fur trade, in so far as it is a supply of ornamental clothing for those who are under no necessity of wearing fur at all, is a barbarous and stupid business. It makes patchwork, one may say, not only of the hides of its victims, but of the conscience and intellect of its patrons. A fur garment or trimming, we are told, appearing to the eye as if it were one uniform piece, is generally made up of many curiously shaped fragments. It is significant that a society which is enamoured of so many shams and fictions, and which detests nothing so strongly as the need of looking facts in the face, should pre-eminently esteem those articles of apparel which are constructed on the most deceptive and illusory principle. The story of the Ass in the Lion’s skin is capable, it seems, of a new and wider application.
Cruel as is all hunting of animals for their fur, there is a peculiar callousness in the seal “fishery,” not only because the seal, far from being a fish, is one of the most sensitive of warm-blooded animals, but because of the atrocious methods by which the practice of “sealing” has too often been pursued. In all the history of man’s dealings with the lower races, there is no bloodier record than that of his treatment of the trustful and unresisting seal.
But if the fur trade gives cause for serious reflection, what are we to say of the still more abominable trade in feathers? Murderous, indeed, is the millinery which finds its most fashionable ornament in the dead bodies of birds—birds, the loveliest and most blithesome beings in Nature! It has been said that “to enumerate all the feathers used for ornamental purposes would be practically to give a complete list of all known and obtainable birds.” The figures and details published by those humane writers who have raised an unavailing protest against this latest and worst crime of Fashion are really appalling in their stern and naked record of unremitting cruelty.
“One dealer in London is said to have received as a single consignment 32,000 dead humming-birds, 80,000 aquatic birds, and 800,000 pairs of wings. A Parisian dealer had a contract for 40,000 birds, and an army of murderers were turned out to supply the order. No less than 40,000 terns have been sent from Long Island in one season for millinery purposes. At one auction alone in London there were sold 404,389 West Indian and Brazilian bird-skins, and 356,389 East Indian, besides thousands of pheasants and birds-of-paradise.”
The meaning of such statistics is simply that the women of Europe and America have given an order for the ruthless extermination of birds.
It is not seriously contended in any quarter that this wholesale destruction, effected often in the most revolting and heartless manner, is capable of excuse or justification; yet the efforts of those who address themselves to the better feelings of the offenders appear to meet with little or no success. The cause of this failure must undoubtedly be sought in the general lack of any clear conviction that animals have rights; and the evil will never be thoroughly remedied until not only this particular abuse, but all such abuses, and the prime source from which such abuses originate, have been subjected to an impartial criticism.[37]
In saying this I do not of course mean to imply that special efforts should not be directed against special cruelties. I have already remarked that the main responsibility for the daily murders which fashionable millinery is instigating must lie at the door of those who demand, rather than those who supply, these hideous and funereal ornaments. Unfortunately the process, like that of slaughtering cattle, is throughout delegated to other hands than those of the ultimate purchaser, so that it is exceedingly difficult to bring home a due sense of blood-guiltiness to the right person.
The confirmed sportsman, or amateur butcher, at least sees with his own eyes the circumstances attendant on his “sport”; and the fact that he feels no compunction in pursuing it is due, in most cases, to an obtuseness or confusion of the moral faculties. But many of those who wear seal-skin mantles, or feather-bedaubed bonnets are naturally humane enough; they are misled by pure ignorance or thoughtlessness, and would at once abandon such practices if they could be made aware of the methods employed in the wholesale massacre of seals or humming-birds. Still, it remains true that all these questions ultimately hang together, and that no complete solution will be found for any one of them until the whole problem of our moral relation towards the lower animals is studied with far greater comprehensiveness.
For this reason it is perhaps unscientific to assert that any particular form of cruelty to animals is worse than another form; the truth is, that each of these hydra-heads, the offspring of one parent stem, has its own proper characteristic, and is different, not worse or better than the rest. To flesh-eating belongs the proud distinction of causing a greater bulk of animal suffering than any other habit whatsoever; to sport, the meed of unique and unparalleled brutality; while the patrons of murderous millinery afford the most marvellous instance of the capacity the human mind possesses for ignoring its personal responsibilities. To re-apply Keats’s words: