The Cost of a Skin (1907)

AUTHOR: Moore, J. Howard

PUBLICATION: “The Cost of a Skin.” The Herald of the Golden Age  Vol. XI no. 6 (July 1907): 140-141.
https://archive.org/details/heraldofgoldenjul1907exetuoft/page/140/mode/2up 

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Moore draws on his understanding of evolutionary theory to indict the wearing of furs and feathers as a remnant of “the savage stage of evolution”: “No one but a vulgarian would attempt to adorn herself by putting the dead bodies of birds on her head or muffling her shoulders in grinning weasels and dangling mink-tails.” “[A] woman,” he continues, “rigged out in such cemeterial appurtenances is repulsive.” Indeed, Moore thinks the wearing of furs and feathers akin to that of “a necklace of human scalps.” It showcases the wearers lack of empathy; it is also uneconomical, being the “most expensive” way “to garnish human vanity” (140).

Moore then goes on to describe some of the inhuman methods of obtaining furs. Catching animals by means of traps usually results in “days of the most intense suffering and terror.” Steel traps induce their animal victims “to gnaw or twist” their leg off (140). Caught by a spring pole, the animal “must hang until it starves to death, or freezes, or perishes from thirst or pain, or until the particular 'paragon' who carries on this accursed business comes along and confers on it the favour of knocking out its brains” (140). Other trapping devices include the sliding-pole, “an arrangement for causing captives to drown themselves, and the 'dead-fall',” which “is a baited log so adjusted as to fall and crush the life out of any being unwary enough to approach it for the proffered food” (141).

In a thought experiment, Moore asks his readers to imagine themselves in the place of these animals, as the quarry of “a race of giants a hundred feet high, very ingenious, and absolutely without conscience so far as their treatment of us was concerned.” If we were ruthlessly hunted and trapped by these people so that we had “to eat off our own arms or legs” just because they wanted “to get a scalp or a jawbone to dangle about their demoniacal necks,” all while they “imagined themselves to be highly civilized and enlightened”: “What sort of an opinion do you think we would have in the course of ages as to the real character of these people and of their fitness to be the models and superintendents of a planet?” (141).

In the later pamphlet versions, Moore adds that an estimated “30,000,000 living beings are annually put to death in this world for furs alone” (2). He also adds the following description of the trapping of ermines:

The method consists in taking pieces of iron too large for the ermine to drag away with it, and coating them with grease, and then putting these objects where the ermine will find them. The ermine licks at the grease, and the intense cold of the iron causes the tongue to freeze fast instantly as if it had been put into a vice. There is no possibility of escape, except by pulling the tongue out by the roots. The inevitable struggles to escape cause a larger and larger area to become adherent to the pitiless iron, and in time the whole mouth region may become solidified from the prolonged exposures in the bitter Arctic cold (4).

Moore ends this version of his text by pointing to a variety of clothing items made of non-animal products, and by expressing his conviction that “the more enlightened generations of the future, for both moral and economic reasons, will clothe themselves entirely in fabrics of bloodless origin” (5). He also explicitly links dress reform to veg*ism when he views leather as “an incidental arising from the prosecution of our meat-getting depredations” and calls upon “[m]an” to use “his head and heart a little more, and his butcher-knife less” (5).