Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and PreservationHornaday, William T. (William Temple)
History
Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation
Hornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Game-laws -- United States; Wildlife conservation -- United States
But even while these words are being written, there is one large fly in
the ointment. The store-window of E. &. S. Meyers, 688 Broadway, New
York, contains about _six hundred plumes and skins of birds of paradise
for sale for millinery purposes_. No wonder the great bird of paradise
is now almost extinct! Their sale here is possible because the Dutcher
law protects from the feather dealers only the birds that belong to
avian families represented in the United States. With fiendish cunning
and enterprise, the shameless feather dealers are ferreting out the
birds whose skins and plumes may legally be imported into this country
and sold; but we will meet that with a law that will protect all
foreign birds, so far as we are concerned. Now it is time for the
universal enactment of a law which will prohibit the sale and use as
ornaments of the plumage, feathers or skins of _any_ wild bird that is
not a legitimate game bird.
London is now the head of the giant octopus of the "feather trade" that
has reached out its deadly tentacles into the most remote wildernesses
of the earth, and steadily is drawing in the "skins" and "plumes" and
"quills" of the most beautiful and most interesting _unprotected_ birds
of the world. The extent of this cold-blooded industry, supported by
vain and hard-hearted women, will presently be shown in detail. Paris is
the great manufacturing center of feather trimming and ornaments, and
the French people obstinately refuse to protect the birds from
extermination, because their slaughter affords employment to a certain
numbers of French factory operatives.
All over the world where they have real estate possessions, the men of
England know how to protect game from extermination. The English are
good at protecting game--when they decide to set about it.
Why should London be the Mecca of the feather-killers of the world?
It is easily explained:
(1) London has the greatest feather market in the world; (2) the feather
industry "wants the money"; and (3) the London feather industry is
willing to spend money in fighting to retain its strangle-hold on the
unprotected birds of the world.
Let us run through a small portion of the mass of fresh evidence before
us. It will be easier for the friends of birds to read these details
here than to procure them at first hand, as we have done.
The first thing that strikes one is the fact that the feather-hunters
are scattered _all over the world where bird life is plentiful_ and
there are no laws to hinder their work. I commend to every friend of
birds this list of the species whose plumage is to-day being bought and
sold in large quantities every year in London. To the birds of the world
this list is of deadly import, for it spells extermination.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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