A reminder that it’s illegal in the USA to collect or sell the feathers of wild birds (and their eggs, bodies, and nests) even if you find them lying on the ground, unless you have a permit to do so. As in, actually illegal, not “outdated law everyone has forgotten about and is no longer enforced”. Eagle parts are extra illegal.
How about bones?? Not like bird specifically just animal bones in general. Also why is it illegal?? There so many birds ergo so many feathers no ones gonna miss em
The specifics depend on your state, the situation, and whether the species is a game animal, but usually, it’s illegal unless you are licensed (ex for educational purposes).
There really aren’t “so many birds”. The populations of many species are rapidly declining due to habitat loss and pollution. I’ve seen birds of prey autopsied and their insides are often coated in plastics. Pesticides and rodenticides wipe out truly horrifying numbers of larger birds – please only ever use mechanical traps for mice and rats, not poisons.
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 was passed four years after the last passenger pigeon died. It discourages the personal and commercial collection of bird parts for very good reason.
Oh, Ship! Tag me in on this one, I’m ready!
So, the history of Wildlife law in the United States goes way back, actually, to the history of wildlife law in Great Britain.
See, in Ye Olden Days, the King was in charge of deciding who was and wasn’t legally allowed to hunt. This was a Big Deal, because many people needed to hunt to feed and clothe themselves and their families. If the King said “you can’t hunt anywhere near where you live because those are My Deer,” you were, well, fucked.
Eventually, this power of wildlife ownership was technically redelegated to parliment, but hunting often remained super inaccessible to anyone but the wealthy, privileged few.
So when people started coming here from there, it was a total free-for-all. You could hunt anywhere, anything! There were things to shoot in the US that had been extinct in the British aisles for centuries, even!
So not only were people hunting for food, clothing, to drive out unwanted animals (see: wolves), but also for the hell of it because they were allowed!
For a while though, hunting was still very much an “I need to eat” business. Can’t fault ‘em for eating, ya know?
But once Europeans became really established here, with cities and leisure time and fashion, things got way out of hand.
There were pretty much No laws dictating how many animals a person could take, or when and from where they could take them.
What’s more is, suddenly, it wasn’t just for food, it was for MASS PRODUCTION! You know what women REALLY wanted? Hats With Feathers. Lots Of Feathers.
People were already killing Many Birds, but not Enough. “We need to kill WAY MORE BIRDS and FASTER,” they said. So they made These Big Guns.
They were made for mounting on boats, and who gave a damn about ammo? ANYTHING that could presumably maim a duck was a go. They loaded them with pieces of tin, metal, shards of broken glass, ya know. The usual.
Then, at night, during Mating season, they’d go out onto the water, shine a light so that all the ducks raised their heads to investigate, fire the gun, and instantly decapitate hundreds of ducks a shot. It was wild.
So this was happening
And the REASON this was happening was there was a demand for these ducks, feathers, mainly. Meat second.
The demand is what’s imperative here. It didn’t matter if you had the means to kill 100 or 1000 birds in a night. If you shot ‘em, someone would pay for ‘em.
You can see where this started going wrong, however. Eventually, there were like, uh, no birds left to shoot.
So now everyone’s starting to say, “well, what the hell…it seems that shooting All Of The Birds At Once has somehow wiped them out. Maybe we should do something about this.”
NOW, that was NOT a popular move. People were really loving the whole “I can kill anything any time I want” thing going on. They argued that limiting their take would violate their rights and freedoms (never mind the hypocrisy of claiming any rights to the wildlife of this land that had been taken from the indigenous peoples they’d killed and driven out).
But responsible hunters knew that wildlife and hunting laws were imperative to the continued existence of wildlife.
This wasn’t a new concept, mind you. Responsible Wildlife laws are even in the damn Old Testament:
“If you come across a bird’s nest in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs and the mother sitting on the young or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young.” Deuteronomy 22:6
Makes sense, right? Eat the eggs but make sure the mother remains to lay more.
And more than a century before, John Quincey Adams is quoted in reference to the issue:
“I went with my gun down upon the marshes, but had no sport. Game laws are said to be directly opposed to the liberties of the subject; I am well persuaded that they may be carried to far, and that they really are in most parts of Europe. But it is equally certain that where there are none, there is never any game; so that the difference between the country where laws of this kind exist and …where they are unknown must be that in the former very few individuals will enjoy the privilege of hunting and eating venison, and in the latter this privilege will be enjoyed by nobody.”
ANYWAY. Point was, people were realizing that if things didn’t change fast, there’d be nothing left to hunt, to eat, or to use for Fancy Hats.
So we got the Lacey Act of 1900, the first federal wildlife law.
“I have always been a lover of birds, and I always been a hunter as well, for today there is no friend that the birds have like a sportsman-the man who enjoys legitimate sport. He protects them out of season; he kills them with moderation in season.” John Lacey.
It limited market-hunting and commercial wildlife trafficking. People with Super Duck Guns were especially unhappy about this. However, if ducks understood federal laws, they would’ve been thrilled.
The problem was, there was still a HUGE demand for feathers, for meat, and absurdly, for specimen for people’s private collections. “I don’t CARE if that’s the last known living Auk. I want it.”
So they had it.
What we needed to do was to destroy the demand for bird products. And to destroy the demand, we had to stop products from being made. If no one is walking down the street wearing a Fancy Bird Hat, no one else is going to say “oh! I want one too,” and no one is going to pay a Fancy Hat Maker to pay a Big Duck Gun owner to shoot 1,000 birds.
So we got the Migratory Bird Treat of 1918, which made it almost totally across the board illegal to own Any bird parts (excluding legal game birds, but laws about when and how many you could hunt were forming to protect them).
There is a misnomer that taking something off the legal market will increase demand because people love what they can’t have. That’s proven untrue in this case. Very few people are actually willing to break Actual Federal Law in order to own a hat they can’t wear in public. The issue was larger society and for the most part law-abiding citizens who wore this stuff while it was legal but moved on once it wasn’t.
The reason it still exists is to keep the demand for bird parts non-existent, and it’s WHY you can’t legally collect feathers even when they fall off a bird naturally.
Because hey, YOU may live in an area with a healthy golden eagle population. Or a Blue Jay population. Or Red headed woodpeckers. YOU find their feathers all the time! They just fall off, no harm done.
So you pick them up, make them into cool jewelry and art, and post them on your etsy and pinterest.
They’re super popular! People love them!
Now I want in on that business!
But there aren’t many golden eagles, blue jays, or woodpeckers around me, so I don’t find their feathers often. But you know what’s way easier than looking for one, fallen feather? Shooting a bird and getting a lot at once.
And thus an innocent market has once again created an unsustainable demand that will threaten bird populations.
And that’s why it’s just flat out against Federal US law to own, collect, or sell almost any wild bird parts!
And MAKE NO MISTAKE! This law is Very Enforced. Wildlife officers Do pay attention to people talking about collected bird parts, and they Will throw the book at you. The fines are wild. Don’t risk it.
THANKS FOR READING THIS LONG-ASS EXPLANATION!
This is a beautiful history of why wildlife protection laws matter. This is why I’m so stringent about people adhering to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
I just got to the TNG episode in which Data tries to #discourse his way out of being kidnapped.
What I don’t understand is why the episode tries to end on an ambiguous “Oooh, did Data LIE about attempting to shoot the villain?!”
Was it… implied at some point that Data couldn’t lie…? Whatever mysterious dramatic tension they were going for is lost on me.
I thought the point was supposed to be less about whether Data lied and more about whether he was actually intending to shoot the guy. so it’s less “did Data lie” and more “did Data fully make and go through with the decision to take a man’s life, something one could argue was justified in the situation but would be a notable act for someone who values life so highly”.
buuuuuuut I could be wrong. it’s been ages since I’ve seen that episode.
At the beginning of the episode he directly states that he’s programmed to “use deadly force in the course of defense”, which he clarifies as being distinct from murder. The villain then kills an innocent and threatens to kill others… establishing himself as a ruthless murderer and actively dangerous to other life forms across the galaxy, even mortally endangering an entire planet just to acquire Data. Using “deadly force” against him seems to me a very straightforward and completely logical act of defense, especially given that Data had no other means of subduing him before then… maybe I’m missing something? It seems like the only possible moral ambiguity in the situation would have been the emotional turmoil of killing someone. Hell, I overthink and angst about the moral implications of stepping on ants and I would have killed Fajo out of pure, practical necessity… no rage needed.
It just seemed to me like such a cut-and-dry “this is a circumstance in which killing out of defense is justified and necessary” that making it ambiguous as to whether someone programmed to be able to use lethal force in that situation tried to use it… doesn’t make sense to me?
I mean, I kinda read it a little bit as a combination of a couple of those things. Like, You’re right, if he did decide, through absolute logic, that there was no other solution than to kill him, then he should be able to explain that fully to Riker.
Considering he didn’t though, the question comes why would he lie (assuming it wasn’t a malfunction like he said) Which could put…..some form of motivation behind Data’s actions, maybe even hatred towards the man who’d kidnapped him, humiliated him, and murdered the only person who’d tried to help him. The question comes in as to whether Data’s capable of that kind of….distaste for a person.
There’s also the fact that the weapon he was using wasn’t one of Starfleet’s fancy phasers designed specifically to cause the least amount of pain possible, but a horrific weapon designed to kill slowly. Even if he was willing to kill under necessary circumstances, thats not necessarily the same thing as a torturous death.
But thats just my reading. I watched it….a few weeks ago so I sort of remember things but not in explicit detail.
This is why Data’s characterization in early TNG is so frustrating to me. I’m of the mind that he DID have emotions without the emotion chip, just muted ones he didn’t necessarily recognize as such because they did not fully resemble human emotions. Later seasons kind of retconned his subtle android feelings to focus on the chip as the only possible source of his emotion. It’s way more interesting to me to watch an episode like this and think, yeah, he’s feeling Some Kind of Way and isn’t really aware of it.
There was a line I heard talked about recently, from Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
The kid asks the Cyborg whether they feel pain when they get hurt. They respond back “I have sensors to indicate when I am damaged.”
And I’ve really been thinking of how that’s different. Because clearly pain serves that purpose in a human, but pain can also cause fear and panic, two very distinctly traditionally animalistic behaviors.
Which made me wonder, more so than if robots can feel pain, but if robots can experience fear or overwhelming anxiety. Is a DDOS attack the same as causing a mental breakdown?
Fear also serves a purpose in humans, if you think of it as an internal alarm going off. What is fear but the result of different sensors saying “ALERT! Something is wrong! Divert energy and attention to the problem!” We’ve just got some design flaws that occasionally result in alerts going off unnecessarily or interfering with our ability to appropriately identify and address the problem. We have lots of useful subroutines meant to help us avoid becoming damaged, and overriding them with specialized programming is not easy, especially when our CPU usage is high and we have a lot of background programs running.
Ben Hannam designed these “decorative stamps”
that you can put on your envelopes next to your actual postage to make a
small, satisfying statement about 45’s ineptitude. $16 for 56
self-adhesive stamps.
I Was Trying To Be Funny But It Came Out as Really Mean: A 5-part documentary starring me.
I Was Trying To Be Loving And Supportive But I Probably Overstepped My Boundaries And Came Off as Creepy: a feature-length film with two sequels and a TV series adaption.
I Was Trying To Tell You I Relate To Your Difficult Situation But It Probably Sounded Like I Was Making It All About Me: a novel saga with several side book adaptions and a movie.
After 45 Years I’ve Finally Learned That Sometimes I Should Just Shut Up: The Self-Help Bible sweeping the nation
This is actually something I get asked a lot, usually by people who don’t yet realize that yes, the back pain they’ve had since their teens is a chronic condition (and just because a condition can go into remission for a while doesn’t mean it isn’t there anymore), and yes, they belong in the spoonie community if they want to. Even those of us just passing through on the road to recovery are welcome here, at least by my book.
Chronic pain is chronic pain, regardless of whether it was caused by illness or injury. There’s a great deal of overlap between the disabled community and the chronic illness community, and we should be inclusive and supportive of each other. There’s too many people needing help and looking for people who understand what they’re going through to turn round and say “you’re not sick enough to sit with is” because where and how do you set that line? Asthma is a chronic illness, and hardly ever gets the recognition of one. Simply because something is common does not negate the seriousness of it.
So, in short, yes. It’s okay. And I hope you’re having a day with less pain. Sometimes that’s all we can ask for.
Some of them are using converted detention camps that held Japanese American citizens during WW2. Please look into supporting groups like Detention Watch, RAICES, Texas Civil Rights Project and United We Dream to help those fighting for family reunification and freedom.
I hope you don’t mind, but I slowed the gif down because that is a FANTASTIC move.
The sword clearly cuts his wrist and waist. I mean he took the guys sword away, sure, but also fucked up his own ability to fight at the same time. It’d be one thing if he was wearing armor, but this is like a dueling thing.
I think you give too much credence to a Sword’s ability to cut. This is from the manual I practice, “Il Fior di Battaglia,” “The Flower of Battle,” by Fiore dei Liberi. I have performed this maneuver, and I’ve gotta say, when done right, it feels good.
Point being, if you do it right, when you pivot around your guard and bring the pommel around the blade, your wrist does come into contact with the edge, but there is no sliding motion, and it’s that sliding motion that causes a blade to slice. You pivot, pull against the blade, and it goes flying as your wrist pulls away from the edge.
I’ve never made a blade go flying so far as the guys in this video, but even if I did, the blade doesn’t have the right kind of leverage and power behind it to cut into his waist there. It would strike him, and he might feel it, but I doubt it would even scratch his clothes.
