CRUEL FASHION by Our Animal Friends

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 16, 1893

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 19, No. 11.

CRUEL FASHION.

By Our Animal Friends

THE destruction of birds for millinery use has been happily on the decline during the last few years, though still waged to an extent almost beyond belief to one who has never seriously considered the matter. The “dead-bird wearing craze” appears to have reached its height, at least in this immediate vicinity, about 1885. For some years just prior to that date, and closely following it, the extent of the slaughter of birds for the millinery trade reached an appalling magnitude, running into the millions of victims annually in this country alone, and at one time became almost indiscriminate, the plainest birds being utilized as well as the more showy, although preference was of course given the latter. A few years of this wholesale destruction resulted in an obvious decrease of our smaller song birds, and in the almost complete annihilation of some of the species most prized for decorative purposes.

No sooner, however, had the attention of intelligent women been called to an evil they had thoughtlessly abetted, than they threw the weight of their influence against the barbarous fashion of wearing birds for personal decoration, and in some quarters, particularly among the more cultivated classes, the practice was quickly considered as not only in “bad form,” but a disgrace. It is lamentable to note, however, that the custom of wearing native birds is not wholly obsolete, and that the number of foreign birds thus utilized in various fanciful combinations of heterogeneous fragments, still demands an enormous slaughter in other countries. There is still enough demand for certain of our birds to give employment to little bands of “plume hunters” and “hat bird” men, but they are forced to pursue their disgraceful calling stealthily, and for the most part in out-of-the-way places where stringently enforced laws of any kind are the exception rather than the rule.—Our Animal Friends.