I know we are all like "people in caveman times would drill holes in their head to relieve headaches" andwe go oh that's so stupid that's so dumb but like. then I get a headache and I'm like.ooooh I get it I get it. Grug prepare the drill.
fictional characters can't consent because they aren't real.. but YOU can consent to reading heavy themes, and you can withdraw consent by clicking the back button and stopping any time, it is your choice to read stories that include or exclude consent 👍
Honestly incredible. If I had actually bothered to go into the industry I got my education in, guys like this would be my peers and my bosses and I frankly think I'd end up on the news if I had to spend most of my waking time around these guys.
Fun update, this guy ended up blocking like a solid third of the entire website's userbase by subscribing to a blocklist full of people who hate AI and his comment sections are still full of people mocking him.
under US law, it's illegal for anyone who's not a member of a recognised native tribe to own an eagle feather. the penalty is a $100,000 fine.
14 years ago when I had recently moved to Alaska, I went hiking with an Aleut friend, and she pointed to a feather lying on the ground and said "hey that's a bald eagle tail feather, you should grab it!" and I was like "uhh I'm very white and that's very illegal" and she went "they're fuckin everywhere up here man. I have 20." so she grabs it off the ground and hands it to me and says "there, now it's a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person."
and I'm like, okay, cool, I guess this is how we do things in Alaska. nice.
so I keep this bald eagle tail feather around for years. display it in my home among other cherished memorabilia from places I've lived and visited, etc.
on a whim, I have just now looked it up. there is no exemption to that law for a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person. the last 7 years I lived in the US, I was technically a bald eagle poacher.
probably a good thing I don't intend to move back there anytime soon. I wonder what the statute of limitations is on bird crimes.
@freedomisscaryshit I'm fucking dying I think you forgot the word "feathers" in your tags?? or do you just wish you could grab whole ass eagles that land in your yard??
As an Indigenous person, it continues to astound me that there are such strict laws (written by White people) in our name, laws against...picking up things just found on the ground. Like, stop pretending this is "for" us. We don't want this.
so, for clarity, that's not what this is. the law against possessing feathers is an anti-poaching measure, derived from a North American treaty protecting certain migratory bird species from hunting. that treaty has an exemption for indigenous people to allow tribes that use eagle feathers in ceremonial or religious practices to continue doing so.
i used to collect feathers (illegally) as a teenager and the thing is that it's incredibly important for feathers from wild birds to be illegal to possess because it ensures that they never become fashionable to wear. the reason we passed the migratory bird act was because the american and european fashion industry was driving species to extinction in a timespan of years. not just decades. the ecological devastation of exporting birds for hats was absolutely insane and people were watching wetlands and forests and meadows just empty out in realtime. look at the wikipedia article for the plume trade.
the law against 'picking feathers up off the ground' means that you can't go shoot an eagle then sell the feathers on etsy by saying you 'just found them'. you can't own them no matter where they came from, which makes sure that they're not going to come from any birds killed and then secretly disposed of.
these laws, as harsh and ridiculous as they seem, saved flamingos, spoonbills, egrets, and all kinds of hawks and eagles from extinction. the minute these laws weaken and people can make money off killing them again, they're fucked.
This is good! I want to add some stuff here about the general economics angle and the specifics of when this law came into effect, because people are talking about capitalism and conservation but nobody is really talking about the hat industry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
But TLDR:
People were buying and selling HUMAN BONES by claiming they were legally obtained, you think they won't do the same with bird feathers if there's any wiggle room?
Anyway, here's a longer thing:
Hats were a big deal in the late 19th/early 20th century. They were a way of showcasing status and wealth: if you had rare, expensive, gaudy feathers on there, you were important.
So they were in high demand, such high demand that many rare native species were hunted to extinction, or near it. This isn't purely a North American issue, but the law we're discussing is specific to North America.
For that reason, it's not "there are such strict laws (written by White people) in our name," as a previous poster said, but "there are such strict laws written to protect native species, with a carve-out for religious purposes that are most common to indigenous peoples." Indigenous peoples got a loophole in honor of their historic practices, but the law was very much about the birds. The eagle feather law, which is the part that mentions indigenous tribes, is the exceptions clause, not the migratory bird act as a whole, and there are also international treaties for this.
The United States Fish and Wildlife Service issues permits for otherwise prohibited activities under the act. These include permits for taxidermy, falconry, propagation, scientific and educational use, and depredation, an example of the last being the killing of geese near an airport, where they pose a danger to aircraft. (src)
I know people hate econ/business theory on the hellsite, but consumer psychology is CRUCIAL to understanding shit sometimes. This law was in response to excesses of the gilded age! Now, in a time of microtrends that are picked up by millions of people at a time, is like the WORST time to remove it!
Let me tell you about the Great Auk.
Once in a while, people ask why there aren't any penguins in the arctic, the way they are in the antarctic, what would happen if they introduced penguins to the arctic, how long would it take for penguins to evolve to fill that role?
The real answer, mostly, is that there was. That niche in the arctic used to have a species to fill it, which was called the Great Auk.
It was similarly sized to a penguin, similarly shaped. It had very, very good down for pillows: see here.
If you come for their Feathers you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but lay hold of one and pluck the best of the Feathers. You then turn the poor Penguin adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leasure. This is not a very humane method but it is the common practize.
- Aaron Thomas of HMS Boston from 1794, via wikipedia
The bird went extinct by 1850. It's not the only one to have been specifically hunted to extinction (as opposed to the more common habitat destruction), but along with the passenger pigeon, is one of the most notable and obvious examples of that. Plume hunting for just feathers and not the actual meat or other attributes is a whole thing
So that's the cause of the act: past overhunting in pursuit of, mostly, plumage.
But why the phrasing?
In the world of the wealthy, there is a general love for expensive, rare goods as status symbols. There is a trade for the eggs and meat and skin of endangered species, wanting to say you ate or wore something so rare that it was illegal, but you had the money to make it happen, had the money to pay the fines.
Imagine there is a bird with plumage as vibrant and identifiable as a peacock, but infinitely rarer. Just a few dozen in the wild. Just one feather sells for a thousand dollars.
You could go out, spend days trying to find dropped feathers... or you could catch and kill one, and get a good two dozen feathers out of it. Almost twenty-five thousand dollars, right there, and without the act, then so long as nobody knows that you killed the bird, it's perfectly legal to have, and sell, that feather.
Poaching is hard to prove. You can say you found the feathers on the ground. You can say you found an already-dead bird half-eaten by the predator that killed it. It's easy to lie.
Or... you can make it illegal to even have the feather. You don't need to prove poaching if it's straight up illegal to have; you just have to prove ownership.
There are exceptions to this rule: if the animal is domesticated and farmed, then you can buy and sell the feathers all you want. This is why you can get goosedown pillows and feather quills, quail eggs and pheasant tails for hat plumes, peacock feathers at the fabric shop, or turkey breasts on the market.
You can also collect as many feathers as you'd like from invasive species, like house sparrows, common pheasants, or starlings. Sometimes you get the double-wammy of the species being both domesticated and invasive, like rock doves/pigeons. You can jsut grab one. Just grab an entire pigeon. I hear it's not that hard.
But there are some very pretty, very vibrant birds out there that are native to North America and could easily become endangered if it were legal to 'just happen to find and keep' the feathers. Top of mind for me are blue jays and cardinals.
Imagine if it was suddenly really hip to wear a fascinator with cardinal feathers. Imagine if a microtrend the size of labubus hit that was entirely about bluejay feathers. Imagine if that happened and you did not have protections in place for native species.
You, yes you personally, might genuinely find and want to keep a singular feather that you found. But you can't ignore that the market forces that have people poaching anything else will also apply to birds. Elephants and rhinos hunted for their tusks? We (general we for humans) made that illegal with narrow and heavily controlled exceptions. Beavers hunted for their furs? We made that illegal so that the populations could recover. Snowy egrets hunted for their feathers?
You make that illegal so it doesn't die out like the Great Auk did.
Sidebar about the baleen trade also!
You can buy it. You can legally buy baleen and products made of it. You cannot SELL it unless you're native
Because it's difficult to claim you just "found" baleen, it's a lot easier to produce a chain of acquisitions. If you want, say, a professionally made corset with real whalebone, you need to buy the baleen yourself and then commission someone to make the corset, but they cannot make the corset using baleen they bought unless they are native
That stuff is expensive because of the acquisition costs! You are unlikely to dispose of any kind of certificate of authenticity by accident.
You can't even buy feathers from a native person, because, among other things, that acquisition process would rarely be recorded with the kind of specificity that you'd need to be able to ENFORCE that.
You'd have people "finding" feathers and asking a native buddy to sign off on it being legally obtained, because people do that with other shit. If there is ANY gap in the law that doesn't require extensive paperwork (religious exemption to use feathers) or paper trail (whale parts), people will sneak through.
my disaster @littlebitfurtheron - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
jbbartram-illu
jacobvanloon
prguitarman
blakekathryn
izzy806
gummygunk
