Exactly WHAT makes a feather cruelty-free? 

People who buy cruelty-free products have certain expectations about how animals are treated to get those products -- and that includes feathers.  Some people maintain that any use of animal products is cruel in and of itself.  Others, like me, feel that it is OK to use certain animal products, such as feathers and eggs, as long as the animals they come from are treated humanely.   Many people who use feathers for ceremonies and regalia do not want the "negative energy" of factory farms and other cruel practices in their crafts or ritual items.  Although the vast majority of feathers on the market are not cruelty-free, it is possible to find feathers that were collected humanely.   

I deal in cruelty free feathers, both for my own craft work and to sell in my eBay store, The Happy Rooster.  

When I buy feathers, the criteria in this Guide are what I look for.  Don't be embarrassed to ask sellers about these details.  People who truly love their birds will be glad to tell you about them!   (BEWARE: Now that "cruelty-free" is an automated option on "Item Specifics" in the FEATHERS category, some sellers forget to remove it from feather listings that are NOT naturally shed.  So don't rely on that alone.   Always read the entire description and ASK QUESTIONS about the following criteria:

The feathers must fall naturally from the birds

All birds molt their old feathers every year and then grow new ones.  It is a simple matter for bird owners to pick up these naturally-shed feathers and save them -- no harm done to the bird.  On the left you see a variety of small feathers that were shed by my chickens and geese in 2008 and were sold as a "lot" in my eBay store, The Happy Rooster.  On the right is a hat decoration I made with feathers that were all naturally shed by peacocks and parrots owned by people in my feather supply network.   (Note:  Only feathers from domestic poultry species, captive raised parrots and other pet birds, game birds, and unprotected species are legal to sell.)  However, be aware that most of the commercially-packaged feathers you get in craft stores are NOT naturally-shed.  They are a bi-product of the factory farm meat industry and plucked from the slaughtered carcasses -- which brings us to the second qualification: 

A cruelty-free feather comes from a bird who is well-treated and happy

This is definitely NOT the case with birds raised on factory farms.   And that's where most of those commerically-packaged craft feathers come from.   Chickens in commercial farms are raised so tightly crowded together -- often several hens crammed into a small cage that is stacked on other cages -- that the top half of their beaks must be cut off or they will literally peck each other to death out of frustration.  A hen's beak is very sensitive.  She uses it not only to eat, but to explore things around her.   Cutting off her beak would be like cutting off your finger tips.  Not only can the hen not peck other hens, she can't pick up solid things to eat, so she is fed ground-up chicken feed that contains, among other things, animal "by-products" such as feathers, bones, trimmings from packing plants, etc.  Think "Mad Chicken Disease" -- it's bound to happen someday, because feeding animal "by-products" to chickens is no more natural than feeding sheep parts to cows (which is how BSE -- Mad Cow Disease -- got started.  And the deadly H5N1 bird flu began NOT with wild birds, but in the crowded conditions of Chinese factory farms -- but that's a whole other blog.)  Commerical turkeys have been bred to be so large and heavy, the toms cannot mount the hens naturally to mate.  They must be artificially inseminated to get fertile eggs - a very traumatic process for the turkeys.  And once that factory-farm chicken has either stopped laying or reached the desired meat size, she is slaughtered.  The average commercial meat chicken lives 42 days, egg-layers maybe 9 months to a year.

In contrast to this cruelty, our chickens live 8-12 years and they run free, either in big roomy outdoor pens or literally free-range in the fields and woods.  Our geese run free every day.

We rotate which chicken flock goes free range each day to keep certain roosters from fighting, but in the summertime, everybody gets to go outside.   In winter they need to stay inside the poultry house when it's below zero (Fahrenheit) here in Minnesota, but no chicken here is ever crammed into a "battery hen" cage.  (The geese, however, don't mind the snow and even like to slide and bathe in it!)   If a cage is necessary for safety (such as for isolating a sick or injured bird, or a mother hen with eggs or very young chicks), it's a nice, roomy, airy cage or pen, with straw on the floor, plenty of room to peck, scratch, and flap wings.  In some cases, it can also be a cage with no bottom, set outside over grass to eat, or dirt for the bird(s) to dustbathe.   But as much as possible, we let our birds run free in flocks, to eat bugs, seeds, greens -- their natural diet -- in addition to grains that we give them.  At night, they all come inside the coop to roost, and I shut the doors to keep predators out.

Must cruelty-free be cage free?

I won't say they must be 100% cage-free, because many companion birds need an enclosure of some sort to be safe from predators or from getting lost (if your parrot flies out the window he cannot care for himself, and if the fox gets into the henhouse...)   The idea of a mother hen roaming freely with her chicks is cute until you see a hawk grab a baby or hear one screaming as a snake tries to swallow it.   My Silkies (like the blue chick below) stay in cages at night because, being flightless birds, they cannot get up on a high roost and are not safe sleeping on the barn floor.   And chickens, as pretty as they may be, can also become vicious toward an injured flock member and may actually kill her.  So I do use pens and cages for birds who might be vulnerable to attack.    Many birds are also very territorial and will regard their cages as their homes.  Chickens really do come home to roost, and it is sometimes very difficult to get a chicken to switch from roosting in a familiar cage to roosting in the main coop with the rest of the flock.  For example, Punker was a rescue rooster who was injured when I got him, so he had to be isolated until he healed.  For the rest of his life he called that cage home and would lead his two hens there with him every night!  So there are times when cages are not a cruelty but a protection.   However, I do think that any cage or pen should allow enough room for the bird to flap his or her wings, fly around, scratch & peck, take a bath, interract with people & other birds, have interesting things to do, etc.  Wire-bottom poultry cages, in my opinion, are NOT cruelty-free unless you also let the birds out to scratch in dirt and dust bathe.  Nobody on our farm is ever crammed into a factory-farm cage.  And once the chicks are old enough, our hens get to take them outside.    

Birds should live out their natural lifespans

I look for feathers from people who don't slaughter their birds, or who at least allow them to have some years of happy life first.  This is easy with macaws and parrots, since they cost too much to eat -- $10,000 for a captive-raised Hyacinth Macaw or even a couple thousand for the more common breeds would be a very expensive meal.   Few people eat their peacocks, either.  But finding cruelty-free chicken, goose, pheasant and turkey feathers is another matter, because most people raise these species for meat or hunting.  Over the years I have developed a network of gentle, caring people who keep a few birds for pets, for bug control on their land, or simply for beauty. These people treat their birds like individuals and they save the feathers for me.

What about hunting?  This is controversial among animal welfare people.  Some people believe that hunting is cruel and will not use any animal products obtained from hunters.  Others maintain that a one-shot kill is no more cruel than a kill by a predator (and maybe less so, if you have ever seen a cat "play" with her prey.)  You will need to make your own decisions about this, but for resale I would not label feathers harvested by hunters as "cruelty-free" because of the controversy involved.  Feathers described as "harvested" or "taken" are usually from hunts.  In my store, I do not carry feathers obtained from hunts.

What about road kills?  Some people do not mind feathers collected from road kills, because the birds were living wild before death.  Although getting whacked by a car is not a natural way for a bird to die, it is an accident, not intentional harm by humans.  However, be aware that it is still illegal to own feathers from protected species even if they are road kills, so you cannot collect or sell feathers from hawks, eagles, owls, songbirds, etc.  Occasionally I do have roadkill feathers from legal and unprotected species, but I do not list them as cruelty-free because I cannot claim that "no bird was harmed" in obtaining them.   In my opinion, roadkill feathers should be clearly described as such. 

We do not slaughter or hunt on our farm.  As an ovo-lacto vegetarian household, we do eat eggs, but not the birds.  Even after a hen stops producing eggs, she still gives us feathers to sell, manure for the compost pile, insect control (they LOVE those grasshoppers!)  and the pleasure of having her around.  So here at the Gershom place, there's no such thing as an "unproductive" hen.   Granted, not all of our hens are named, but all are treated as individuals just the same.   One old hen lived to be 11 years old and was a reliable mother who hatched out chicks every year, and taught them all the skills they need to forage.   I liked to think of her as a grandmother with a lot of child-rearing experience!  She was far more valuable in this role than she would have been as a pot of soup.  When she died of old age, I buried her.

What about the roosters from these batches of chicks?  As much as possible, I try to keep them.   Contrary to popular belief, you CAN have more than one rooster in a flock if they are raised together and get along.   Granted, they don't produce eggs, but I love to hear them crow, and they do give me absolutely beautiful feathers to sell.  (When was the last time you actually saw one of those long metallic green tail feathers so often depicted in rooster artwork?  Factory farm roosters are slaughtered for meat long before they are mature enough for those plumes to develop.)   And of course, you need a rooster to fertilize the eggs.  Plus, roosters help protect the hens -- a rooster is constantly on the lookout for predators and will alert the flock.   Occasionally we do have a rooster who is too aggressive for our flocks or the people here.  (A bird who attacks small children, for example, can be dangerous.)  In this case, I try to give him to someone else who needs a new rooster for their flock, and I suppose he might end up as somebody's dinner someday -- but at least he had a life first.  Contrast that with male chicks in many commercial hatcheries, who are simply thrown alive into plastic bags.  When the bag is full, the top is closed, the chicks smother, and are later ground up as more of those "animal by-products" I mentioned above.  Even worse, some hatcheries throw them into the grinder alive.  I cannot even imagine doing such a cruel thing to a newborn baby bird.

Because of all this care, cruelty-free costs more to produce (sigh)

Most birds only shed their feathers once a year, which means their feathers are in limited supply.  Plus, a cruelty-free bird keeper must feed and care for those birds all year-round for their entire lives, and that can get expensive.  As I write this, a 50-pound sack of natural chicken feed (no "animal by-products," no hormones or antibiotics) costs almost $10 per bag.  True, the birds can forage for greens and bugs in the summertime and that helps, but in winter they go through a LOT of feed.   Contrast this with the commercial factory-farm industry, where millions of chickens and turkeys are slaughtered several times a year all year round, and you can see why commercial craft feathers (a by-product of the meat industry) are so much cheaper -- at least in money.  But when you consider the terrible suffering of birds on these factory farms, the moral price is very high indeed.  When you buy cruelty-free, you are getting top-of-the line quality -- and some good karma, too! 

All the feathers I sell either come from my own birds or from happy birds living with people who treat them right. 

When you buy feathers from us, you know that none of them came those from those cruel factory farms.  Cruelty-free crafts sell better, too.  You can assure your customers that no birds were harmed in obtaining them.  

To view my current selection, visit The Happy Rooster store now!

(All photos on this Guide were taken by Yonassan Gershom, owner of The Happy Rooster store, on the Gershom hobby farm in Pine County, Minnesota.)