Fashionable cruelty: Think twice before getting feather hair extensions

Celebrities (like Hilary Duff, right, and Steven Tyler, lower left) started it. It takes a while for fashions to make it to Kentucky, so I had a little time to do some research and stew over feather hair extensions before I started seeing them pop up around town. Now I see them on visitors, on random folks on the street, and in the salon when I go to get my hair cut, and every time, it makes me cringe. Here's why.

The feathers that are now used for hair extensions used to be feathers for fly fishing lures. The roosters they come from are specially bred to grow long, luxurious, beautiful feathers, like the black and white striped grizzly saddle (now the most popular feather for hair extensions). Before, a grizzly saddle would have retailed for $40-$60. Now, people are paying hundreds of dollars for them; a single grizzly saddle feather recently sold for $480 on eBay. I've seen prices quoted in the thousands for high-end feathers.

Like most things in life, this comes down to an issue of supply and demand: thousands of people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for feather hair extensions, so production of feathers has skyrocketed. What most people don't ever think about is where those feathers come from.

These birds are raised solely for their feathers. It takes about a year for the long tail feathers to grow in, and then the birds are "harvested." Some companies euthanize the birds before plucking, but many do not; most of the birds that are plucked while alive do not survive the process. The meat isn't butchered for sale; the birds are just thrown away. While there are some organizations that collect feathers from molting birds or care for their birds humanely until they are plucked, that is not the status quo. The practices were the same when the feathers were just being used for fly fishing lures, but now that the demand is so high, countless hundreds of thousands of birds are dying each year for no other reason than to make us feel trendy.

As someone who works in the humane field, the weirdest part of this whole scenario is that there are companies who sell feather hair extensions for dogs. Humane practices should extend to all animals, not just the ones that we care for in our homes on a daily basis.

There are humane alternatives, so you fashionistas out there can breathe a sigh of relief - there are synthetic feathers available, and other, non-feather decorative extensions are on the market. If you absolutely must have feather extensions, please make sure that you're purchasing synthetic feathers, and do your part to change minds. When someone comments on that beautiful feather in your hair, tell them that it's not real, and tell them why.

I hope you all will share this with your friends, family, and stylists; sometimes all it takes to change the world is a little knowledge.