THE STORY OF A CRIME

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 28, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 35.

THE STORY OF A CRIME.

[SOME months ago the following appeared in Our Dumb Animals. The slaughter still goes on. Will our readers who wear this kind of millinery think about it?]

Here, related in the hard, unsympathetic language of commerce, is the tragic story of a crime against nature and the commonwealth:—

Milford, Del., March 7.—Contracts were closed here to-day for the bodies of 8,000 birds, to be killed for New York milliners, at from ten to fifty cents apiece. The contracts call for meadow-larks, blue-birds, red-wing blackbirds, crow blackbirds, English sparrows, and baby owls.

This recital means that a cruel robbery is about to be committed in Delaware—a robbery which is made doubly wicked by the fact that it is perfectly legal. The bird-life of that State is to be sacrificed to the whims of fashion. The farmers are to be deprived of 8,000 of their most efficient crop-protectors, and the landscape despoiled of a charm which nothing can replace. The birds called for by this contract are nearly all of insect-destroying species. They exercise a function in the economy of nature which is almost indispensable to successful agriculture, and aside from their practical value, they constitute a part of the common property of the people which no person has the right to destroy for selfish purposes. The lark that feeds in Farmer Brown’s meadow, and nests in Farmer Smith’s grove, belongs alike to Brown and Smith, but in no greater degree than to the veriest tramp who walks the public highway. The owl that roosts in Gray’s forest and fattens on the mice in Johnson’s grain-fields is the property of the community. So are all the birds of the air. They belong to the people, and whosoever destroys them commits a crime against the commonwealth.

The responsibility for this monstrous destruction of bird-life is easy to place. The birds would not be killed unless they could be sold.