Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 79

Feather Fashions, and Hunter-Naturalists 77 consumer economy and a necessary adjunct to the industrial age. Doughty continues: The unprecedented abundance of ornamental plumage, the range of birds which supplied it, created a specter of suffering and extinction over the breeding grounds of many species. After the middle of the nineteenth century, the sight of stuffed seabirds, finches' wings and waving sprays on hats touched the consciences of people, and sore consciences helped create the movement to banish the use of ornamental feathers. The cavalier manner in which birds were sacrificed on the alter of vanity began to arouse feelings of disgust and outrage, not admiration. (Doughty 15) Doughty recounts that on one stroll through the New York fashion district in 1886, ornithologist Frank Chapman found that three-quarters of the 700 hats he viewed featured feather decoration. As suggested above, this is all quite obviously a fundamental change from the idea of appropriate restraint embosomed by the nation's Quaker, Puritan, and Colonial Republican forebears. Of course, men as well as women were attracted to natural elements. William Wright, for instance, a long-time hunter who gave it up to become a zealous conservationist, raged against "the wastes of trapping . . . and such travesties as the sale of elk teeth to members of the Fraternal Order of Elks, who used them for ornaments without a thought to all the elk that were killed to obtain them" (Schullery 179). In any event, the spectacle of waste stimulated activity in those more attuned to embrace the outdoors as an important, perhaps even therapeutic, emotional experience rather than a trove of cheap produce. The Hunter-Naturalist Develops In 1887 the Boone and Crockett Club was founded. Coordinated with it was a quite formalized philosophy of sport hunting which was, along with related movements, to act as a catalyst for change, changing traditional hunting ideas of appropriateness to those more useful in an industrial milieu. So influential and progressive was the