751 
EGRET FARMING IN INDIA 
BY 
C. C. Chevenix Trench, I.C.S. 
Thanks to painstaking enquiry and persistent re-iteration of the truth 
by observers in India, there is now no shadow of excuse for any 
intelligent inhabitant of the United Kingdom to doubt the existence, on 
a fairly extensive scale, of Egret farms in India, where the birds are kept 
in conditions favourable to their increase and whence the plumes are 
exported without the slightest danger to the life of the birds. The 
charges of ‘ bribed by the trade ’ so recklessly levelled by the home- 
keeping sentimentalist are now a matter of amused and contemptuous 
recollection. I suggest that the time has come for a brief survey of the 
position of Egrets in India and for determining the lines along which the 
efforts of the Society in their behalf should be directed. The following 
observations are, therefore, submitted, in all diffidence. 
(«) Egrets (Lesser and Cattle) are at present extraordinarily plentiful 
nearly all over India. Their plumes are so valuable and so easily 
smuggled out of the country, that no amount of prohibitive, but 
unintelligent legislation, will prevent the export trade in au/rettes, which 
continues to-day as it has done in the past, in spite of the Plumage Act. 
(6) What has saved the birds from partial or complete extermination 
in the past, is the ignorance, apathy and conservatism of the Indian, 
and the Anns Act. 
(c) The ignorance, etc., is rapidly disappearing under economic pressure. 
(In November the Central Provinces are overrun by itinerant middle-men 
who buy up the plumes from petty local men, and either take them to 
“a gentleman ” in Calcutta or hawk them about Indian cities for a price 
which, in my experience, ranges from 10 to 28 times their weight in silver). 
The Arms Act, under pressure of the Reforms, is being relaxed. Provincial 
Councils cannot for much longer withstand the clamour of the Agricultural 
classes (70 to 80 per cent, of the population) for unlimited gun licenses 
for protection of crops, and soon every peasant will, if he likes, possess 
a gas pipe gun. 
(d) When both these tendencies come into full play, the extermination 
of the egret from India is, I consider, certain, and may take place in an 
astonishingly short time. Because the birds congregate in colonies when 
the plumes are at their best, and have a distinct tendency to locate their 
breeding colonies near or even in the heart of villages and towns. Thus 
they are accessible with no eS'ort and can be killed with the minimum of 
expense. We have the example of the American Bison to warn us. 
(e) In the competition between the gun-man and the egret farmer, for 
the supply of plumes, the latter will go to the wall, unless officially 
encouraged. No one who has watched the course of the times can doubt 
that it will soon be cheaper and easier to kill egrets than farm them, nor 
is there the faintest danger of interference by the local rural police, who, 
in the rainy, i.e., the breeding season, are powerless. 
(/) To save the egret the farming of the birds should be encouraged 
in every possible way, and the e-vport of fanned plumes l ennitted under 
license, 
{(/) This will be the founding of a virtually new cottage industry in 
India of which the profits are likely to be very large. The industry can 
be managed at least as humanely as Ostrich farming. In parenthesis, had 
it not been for the farming of the ostrich, the geographical range of that 
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