i had enough of dating apps and the boring hey what’s up hi nothing wbu messages why don’t you just stab me instead then leave me on your kitchen floor and walk away knowing that your stab was surgical because u wanted me to live
Seeing people shoot raptors in other countries is fucking wild to me because we have a whole system of super strict laws governing how you can handle an individual FEATHER off of an eagle, and it doesnât have to even be a dead eagle. One can molt and you can find it on the ground and if youâre caught with it the warden will fuck your entire life. What do you mean people are out there shooting them to protect a fucking pheasant. A pheasant??? That thing I have to avoid running over approximately 459 times any time I leave a major highway???
My good friend @prismaticate has asked a very good question here, and while Iâm not entirely sure Iâm qualified to explain it and would love some input from more qualified sources, my SUPER simplified understanding of why the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and its numerous modern revisions and addendums have clauses about this included is this:
-Itâs basically impossible to tell a feather thatâs been picked up off the ground from one thatâs been taken from a poached bird
-This used to be a MAJOR problem when bird-feather hats and the like were in high demand back in the day, because several bird species on the edge of extinction kept getting poached in spite of the new laws protecting them since people would just say they âfoundâ any feathers from protected species used in the stuff they were selling, and you couldnât prove otherwise unless you literally caught them in the act of poaching
-This eventually got SO bad that they had to just make it illegal to have the feathers at all, with certain exceptions made for members of different indigenous groups, or authorized organizations that display them as part of efforts to educate the public about the species they belong to
@zooophagous is this a reasonable rundown? Was there anything I missed/any better sources you might recommend to learn more about this? I know itâs probably far more nuanced than that, but this was kind of the explanation Iâd always seen floating around. đ
Thatâs pretty much the gist of it! Eagles and eagle feathers have more laws on top of that because of their sacred uses in certain indigenous practices, how they relate to legal falconry, and because eagles at one time were highly endangered while at the same time being a national symbol. Where a cop or a game warden may shrug and look the other way if you, say, illegally picked up a chickadee feather from your bird feeder, if they see a real eagle feather they will notice and will be VERY interested in where it came from.
Not long ago here someone was arrested and charged for violating these laws because they tried to sell a plains feather bonnet at a pawn shop, claiming they had âfound it while exploring an abandoned house.â
The clerk suspected it was real eagle, the warden confirmed it was, and because those feathers are so tightly tracked they were able to locate the family of the previous owners who said the item had been stolen some time ago.
If nobody knows you have it, obviously you can get away with it. But if they see it, or God forbid you try to SELL it, the hammer will fall.
Im surprised every time people think itâs a crazy sounding law, it is genuinely one of the only things preventing a lot of native birds from extinction or any asshole could kill as many as they want and just say they found them on the ground
Wait, poaching wasnât about the meat, it was about the feathers?
The collapse of bird populations in the USA in the late 1800s thru early 1900s was very much about feathers.
At its peak the feather trade had feathers that were worth more than gold. Commercial hunters would shoot birds out of the sky and sell feathers by the pound, in literal huge crates. Egrets were especially sought after for their beautiful breeding plumage, which was used in fancy hats and accessories. This wrought havoc on the poor birds because they only ever had this plumage during breeding season, so not only were the breeding birds dying, they were leaving next generationâs chicks and eggs behind to die of neglect.
Beyond hats, the gentlemanâs art of fly tying was also a popular art form, more for the sake of showing off oneâs rare collection of feathers and art than for actual fishing.
There was some meat hunting as well before the banning of commercial hunting, mostly ducks and geese, which also drifted close to extinction as they were taken to be sold in markets.
Even white tailed deer, the ubiquitous animal thatâs found all over north America in truly ridiculous numbers, came dangerously low. But meat wasnât where the money was when it came to birds. It was feathers.
The Lacey act banned commercial hunting in the United States, putting an end to the constant unregulated commercial killing to fill market stalls with meat (which incidentally is why you donât see venison in most supermarkets in the states. Only farmed deer is legally allowed to be sold.)
And the Migratory Bird Treaty Act made it a crime to not only kill a bird, but to even posess a single feather from one. Most people wonât buy a hat that would get them arrested if they wore it outside, so the market for feathers was gutted.
Even though feather hats arenât popular in this day and age, nobody is in a hurry to amend these laws, as birds in general are well loved and popular animals and still very much threatened by other stressors such as pollution and habitat loss.
So, in the off chance you find one, whatâŚ.do you do with a feather? Leave it? Report it to local authorities?
You take a picture of your cool find and leave it on the ground
last night i had a dream that i was at an outdoor fair and someone asked me to sign a petition and after i signed it they were like thanks so much! go pick out a prize! so i went into their booth and it was filled with hundreds and hundreds of tiny bottles of perfume and all the perfume had names like “i saw you eating greek yogurt at the reptile house at the zoo” and “you cut down the beautiful 100 year old oak tree in your yard” and i looked up and the perfume collection was called “guys i fucking hate”
