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 doesn’t have to even be a dead eagle. One can molt and you can find it on the ground and if you’re 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 I’m not entirely sure I’m 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:
-It’s basically impossible to tell a feather that’s been picked up off the ground from one that’s 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 “found” any feathers from protected species used in the stuff they were selling, and you couldn’t 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 it’s probably far more nuanced than that, but this was kind of the explanation I’d always seen floating around. 😅
That’s 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 “found it while exploring an abandoned house.”
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 it’s 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 wasn’t 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 generation’s chicks and eggs behind to die of neglect.
Beyond hats, the gentleman’s art of fly tying was also a popular art form, more for the sake of showing off one’s 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 that’s found all over north America in truly ridiculous numbers, came dangerously low. But meat wasn’t 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 don’t 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 won’t buy a hat that would get them arrested if they wore it outside, so the market for feathers was gutted.
Even though feather hats aren’t 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, what….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
Y’all in the American SW and west Mexico better check the national hurricane center and your weather for this weekend and next week.
Hurricane Hilary is about to make landfall and that whole desert area is supposed to get a years worth of rain or more. Death Valley is supposed to get twice the annual rainfall. Severe winds, massive flooding, and landslides are all strong possibilities.
This is gonna get ugly. Please spread the word. This is a majorly anomalous event and people may be unaware of the threat headed their way.
Flash floods are definitely gonna kill people, so here’s your regularly scheduled PSA:
Desert soil does not absorb a significant amount of water. It reaches maximum saturation very very quickly, and all the rest of the water rushes downhill. Even if you can’t tell that the ground is not perfectly flat, the water can. And it will move. Quickly. No, faster than that. Nope, still faster. If you try to cross moving floodwater, you will get swept downstream and probably die.
Do not try to wade in/cross flood water that is any deeper than the thickness of the sole of an average athletic shoe, no I am not kidding, the water will get deeper literally while you’re standing in it.
This goes for cars, too. I’ve seen entire vehicles getting swept downstream in flash floods because the driver thought they could cross the “puddle” and Found Out.
Stay safe, y’all.
A couple of inches of moving water is more than enough to move a car. Don’t fuck with it.
there were no fereldan grey wardens in inquisition because they’re too unhinged for this game. i mean they would absolutely ruin the narrative and the stakes. amaranthine squad is literally a dalish mage with a pure disgust for humans and especially their attempts to erase other cultures, a casteless member of the legion of the dead who used to work for carta, a drunkard who keeps finding himself in the weirdest situations possible and getting out of them almost without a scratch and a son of disgraced war criminal and all of them also happened to be buddies with a certain apostate and a spirit of justice. these guys don’t give a shit about andraste’s supposed herald and they already managed to kick one magister’s ass or even reason with him. they would crack some kirkwall boom joke in front of the whole inquisition and then call corypheus a pretentious dumbass and nathaniel would bother to stop it only because he promised the commander they would behave and not cause problems if they left them on their own for a while
It actually isn’t just the one crazy “herbivorize all predators” guy. There appears to be a growing movement of newfangled hyper-vegan animal rights radicals who believe that all animals suffer in nature and therefore we should just eliminate nature to save them, which they hope will be possible through biotech.
There’s hundreds of them in one twitter thread alone and they can’t all be trolls, some of them have careers in STEM or published writing. I don’t care how impossible their idea is, this is something we’re probably going to see keep growing, and their biotech utopia fantasy may be impossible, but they’re already floating ideas to just plain cull predators the old fashioned way. It is not at all unbelievable that one of these freaks will eventually try to poison all the coyotes in their area with “contraceptives” or start trapping and “humanely euthanizing” raptors in one public park, and that’s just the damage they can do before some idiot billionaire joins their cult.
This is probably going to be a “thing” in the years to come whether we like it or not.
JRPG villains.
How fun that this comment was not even in response to the predatory animals topic but on the subject of human suffering. “GENOME REFORM” my dude the word you were looking for is eugenics
i started reading a free book which was a defence of suffering focused ethics & was getting a sus vibe and then the author cited Peter singer and also Jordan Peterson and my eugenics radar started tingling.
i feel these people have taken the wrong message from ‘the nature of reality is suffering’ somehow
Due to circumstances off the internet, I can unfortunately confirm the existence of anti-predation moral coercion hobbyists (activism is not a word with which I want to dignify this pursuit, although it’s technically applicable) who hold the position that predator herbivorization is, while itself unrealistic, a strategically viable wedge issue that can shift simple predator genocide into the overton window.
God humans just cannot, CANNOT stop trying to conquer and seperate themselves from the ultimately unconquerable and always evolving concept of nature. Like I don’t even have the words, IF YOUR PLAN TO REDUCE SUFFERING INVOLVES SPECIES GENOCIDE YOU ARE NOT REDUCING SUFFERING, YOU ARE INDUCING IT AND EFFECTIVELY CALLING FOR MASS DOMESTICATION. Hypercolonialist eugenic brain rot.
You give a fuck about animal suffering? Bomb an oil pipeline.
do you not remember the free the nipple protests at all it is literally saying exactly that. like that was their whole thing. you shouldn’t need ~consent~ from onlookers to exist with a body in a public space.
Literally the main concern of the free the nipple movement is that women being topless is considered “non-consentually flashing people” while it’s just normal for men to do it
It shouldn’t have to be said, but if you’re bashing on women actually being topless then you’re actively working AGAINST the movement
So what this paint company does is take iron pollution from abandoned mines that are polluting soils and rivers and makes iron based red pigment paints out of it.
Basically they realized hey no one’s cleaning this shit up, it’s polluting the streams, killing all the fish, making the water undrinkable and there’s a huge market for it so why not make money by cleaning it the fuck up?
They remove this stuff by the industrial bucket load from the rivers. The idea is if it’s in a painting, if it’s in your home, it’s not poisoning wildlife.
Many years ago when I was but a wee little tumblrina, I tried to reinvent a blog I had frequented back in the Livejournal days.
It was called “What Was That One?” and the gist of it was that people could ask the community about things they had forgotten the name of over the years. Stuff like “There was this book I read when I was little about a kid who turned out to be a dead rat in disguise, was that actually a thing or did I hallucinate it??” And then folks could comment giving more information if they had it.
It was a really cool way to surf a nostalgia wave and rediscover practically lost media of all sorts, and I’ve been thinking of boosting it again, because I feel like even in the super information age, there are still things out there that defy standard search engines. (Honestly, the way standard search engines are now, it might actually be harder to uncover this stuff).
So, is this be something you would be interested in?
We’re writing a book about alterhumans, and you can be part of it! For this part of the project, we want to hear from otherkin in particular. In the Otherkin Community Survey, we’re gathering data about otherkin experiences and understandings of themselves and their community. If you participate, the survey asks about your kintypes, how you personally define the word otherkin, and about your experiences. It’s about ten minutes long. This survey is open to anyone who is physically at least 18 who identifies with the label “otherkin” or other synonyms with that word. One response per physical body, please.
This survey will close March 31st, 2024. We will collect data from the survey, which we will publish online afterwards and use for research purposes. Any identifying information that participants submit will be made anonymous or removed entirely. This is part of a series of surveys for our book about alterhumans, by House of Chimeras (@liongoatsnake), Orion Scribner (@frameacloud), and Page Shepard (@who-is-page). If you’re interested in this project, please join our mailing list to get notifications of updates, additional surveys, and other events!
People have asked us this question a few times, so I’m adding this answer to both of the posts:
Should I take the therian survey, the otherkin survey, or both?
It’s best to take the survey for the label that you identify with the most. Some therians don’t identify as otherkin, and vice versa. If you don’t call yourself otherkin or don’t like to, then you don’t need to take the otherkin survey.
Taking both surveys is an option if you identify with both labels. Both surveys contain nearly identical questions. We use a feature to keep your responses to both surveys from being redundant. Near the beginning of the therian survey, it asks if you’re taking the otherkin survey too. If you say yes, then the software will skip you over many questions that would be the same. (Those are about demographics, experiences, and more.) The software will skip you ahead to a few questions that are mostly about how you define the word “therianthropy,” so they’re the only questions that wouldn’t apply the same to otherkin. This way, you still get to answer all the full range of questions, without having to answer a lot of them twice. This saves time for you.
For the purposes of our project, we don’t use “otherkin” as an umbrella term that includes therians. We use “alterhuman” as an umbrella term instead, which includes therianthropes, otherkin, and more. “Alterhuman” was coined in 2014 by Lio of the Crossroads System (under the handle Phasmovore, at the time) to be an umbrella term that therians, otherkin, and members of some similar identities can opt into if they choose. “Otherkin” is distinct from these other identities, and has its own meaning and history. Using “alterhuman” as an umbrella term instead helps respect and preserve these distinctions, instead of erasing them by misusing “otherkin” as a catch-all.
