Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 77

Feather Fashions, and Hunter-Naturalists

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Development of Appropriate Regulatory Apparatus
It should be appreciated that much animal law in the United
States was initially designed to guarantee access to the outdoors and
its bountiful harvest (Lund) or tended to be "negative in tone,
promoting destruction rather than protection" (Matthiessen 57).
American legislatures were aware of Europe's oppressive game laws
and so were reluctant to recreate the Old World privileges of an elite
class on these shores. English game law, Americans recalled from the
bad old days, stated that "a man had to be lord of a manor, or have
substantial income from landed property, even to kill a hare on his
own land" (Hay 189). Americans saw clearly enough that much of the
restrictive law in Europe was designed to keep peasants unarmed and
unable to revolt, not to protect God's furry brethren (Royster; Void).
It was a strategy incompatible with a free nation.
These Old World laws, which allowed "gentlemen" to flatten
farmer's crops in pursuit of quarry which the yeoman couldn't even
lawfully buy, were not, of course, made to prevent citizens from
enjoying the hunt. Rather, as is often the vouchsafed reason for
today's increased regulation, they were made in the yeoman's best
interest! That is, they were designed "to prevent persons of inferior
rank, from squandering that time, which their station in life
requireth to be more profitably employed" (Hay 191). With the
nineteenth century's astronomical predation, however, there was
increasing pressure to engage conservation law in spite of these
stinging recollections. Moreover, as a number of outdoor writers have
noted, exhibiting flairs for irony or cynicism, everyone is a
conservationist once economic incentive has been removed by the near
extermination of the target animal. If the harvest is no longer
fruitful, the subject species is likely to be "protected." And animals
were being destroyed rather wholesale.
Conspicuous Display of Natural Ornament
In the United States, and perhaps elsewhere, this restraining
influence was mediated by a growing economy which attenuated the
effect by providing more people with more money and, as was
lampooned by Mark Twain in T H