Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 79
Feather Fashions, and Hunter-Naturalists
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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