OUR WICKED WASTE OF LIFE
A Plea to Women for Consistency
One of the most puzzling things in life is why almost all our mothers and sisters and aunts and "dear teachers" continue to trim their hats with feathers.
They give their boys and girls books about birds, and teach love of nature in the schools, and sing and march on Bird Day, and pay money to missionaries to convert South Sea Islanders from wearing feather head-dresses, and then go down-town and buy bird-skins to deck their own heads! This confuses the boys and girls a good deal. How, they ask, can a mother preach against cruelty and vanity to her children when she continues to load her hat and theirs with feathers every one of which represents a crime against the laws of both God and man? The reason why lawmakers find it so difficult to enforce protective legislation is that the women demand dead birds, careless whether of useful species or not, no matter by what gory slaughter and violated laws obtained, as ministers to their vanity—and the law be hanged!
They will even wear these evidences of cruelty and crime to church, and listen unabashed to exhortations and prayers which others think ought to shrivel them with shame. A recent writer in "Hampton's Magazine" describes his impressions of a scene of this kind in a Chicago church, whose preacher that morning had chosen Christian gentleness as his theme. This writer indulgently believes that the bird-bedecked listeners "did not know at what a cost, not in life alone, but in hard dollars and cents, they, and other persons equally careless and equally reckless, were securing the transient satisfaction of their immediate desires." And he expresses himself as "equally sure that, if they did know, they would never again appear in public so savagely adorned."
We are sorry to be obliged to disagree with him. If they do not know, it is because they do not read and listen, and few American women, gentle or simple, are chargeable with negligence in that respect. The officers of the Audubon Societies, who have been laboring for years as vigorously as they know how, tell us there is no lack of information; but that, in general, women don't care, and can't be made to care what hat-birds cost either themselves or the country so long as they are "in style." Apparently the only way to stop the ruin of our bird-life is for the general government to prohibit absolutely both import and export of any kind of bird-skins or feathers (except of the ostrich) intended or liable to be used in millinery; and for the States to stamp out dealing in feather trimmings by a prohibitive licensing tax. Appeals to the women are useless. The only way is to attack the trade.
Nevertheless, let us make one more effort. Here are four cardinal facts, for instance, relating to the aigrettes, or "ospreys" which you covet, showing what they cost:
(1) Aigrettes are produced only by white herons, and only during the breeding-season; therefore (2) the parent birds must be shot in order to obtain the plumes; hence (3) the young birds in the nests must starve, in consequence of the death of the parents; consequently (4) all statements that the plumes are manufactured or are gathered after being molted by the adult birds are false.