Is feather jewelry taboo?

 

 

Feathers have been used by humans as ornamentation for a really long time.  Like, since before writing.  Feathers are natural, biodegradable, nontoxic.  They can be incredibly low impact, environmentally speaking, when they are a byproduct of a diversified low input farm.  They are SOOOOoo freaking beautiful!  There are a lot of people who love feathers and feather jewelry.  But what comes up when a celebrity wears feathers?   Primarily a lot of trash talking about feathers being dirty, cruel, wasteful.  Maybe because most of the feathers for sale are from who knows where, shipped to who knows where, treated with who knows what and then sold, incredibly, for almost nothing to people who seem to not examine the impact of their purchases. 

I would like to change this status quo.

Feathers can be one of the most ecologically sensitive materials used in crafts and ornamentation.  Think about two different scenarios.  One is hundreds of thousands of birds in an enormous climate controlled and artificially lighted building, each in their own cage not big enough to turn around in.  Eventually, they are processed into dog food.  Their brothers, by the hundreds of thousand, were summarily dispatched shortly after hatching.  This kind of thing is why PeTA hates feather hair extensions.  Then there’s the other scenario: a mother hen sitting on eggs, peeping chicks exploring grass.  Adolescent chickens with their silly patchy feathers coming in, racing after bugs and dust bathing.  The boy chicks raised to maturity and then respectfully harvested as meat for an appreciative market, the girl chicks kept on as layers.  Every part of the birds being kept and used, including their gorgeous feathers.  This is possible with heritage breed birds, which do not grow fast enough to be commercial meat birds and do not produce enough eggs to be commercial egg birds.  They are dual purpose, and they come in a lot of colors and patterns.  There are small farmers growing these birds for the same reasons the breeds were originally developed: versatility, durability, resilience, a love of animals and the land.

 

Local, organic food is so mainstream it is practically passe’.  It is time to welcome back feathers.