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On October 29, 1929, a date best remembered for the infamous Black Tuesday stock market crash, socialite and amateur bird watcher Rosalie Edge attended a meeting of the National Association of Audubon Societies. She was there to ask whether it was true, as a pamphlet had claimed, that the organization supported bounties on bald eagles in Alaska and turning wildlife refuges into shooting grounds.
The men who led the organization were outraged that she brought up the issue. But the pamphlet revealed a truth about conservation at the time: The movement was not as much about saving species as it was about saving only certain species that people liked. And sometimes people only liked those species because they liked to kill them.
Human nature and âBeloved Beastsâ
How best can we protect and defend the same animal kingdom we endanger?
By Dan Cryer Globe Correspondent,Updated March 4, 2021, 2:38 p.m.
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On Oct. 29, 1929, at the annual meeting of the National Association of Audubon Societies [
sic], a hitherto-unknown upper-crust birdwatcher from Manhattanâs Upper East Side rose from the audience to address the societyâs directors. Rosalie Edge, a former suffragist, wasnât intimidated. As a writer in The New Yorker later noted, her habitual demeanor was âsomewhere between that of Queen Mary and a suspicious pointer.â
Why, she demanded, was the organization tacitly supporting the killing of bald eagles? The genteel gentlemen she faced dismissed her as impertinent and out of line. It was not until the mid-1930s that they changed their tune.