Tessa Boase writes of the successful campaign against ‘murderous millinery’, while Malcolm Smith recalls the millions of birds slaughtered to provide for the feather-decorated hats obsession in the 19th-century

Your feature on the ethics of wearing feathers (G2, 22 May) name-checks the American socialites behind the Audubon society of 1896, but makes no mention of the women who founded our own Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, with precisely the same goal, seven years earlier. Emily Williamson, Eliza Phillips and Etta Lemon campaigned against “murderous millinery” for over 30 years before the Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act finally became law in 1922, and feathers fell from fashion. They’ve not been remembered by history, but our instinctive unease around plumage is the direct result of their radical campaign.

If all fashions are cyclical, is the Duchess of Cornwall’s flamboyant pink-feathered wedding hat the start of a trend that will soon see whole herring gulls being worn on the heads of women? This was the look at the turn of the previous century.

Tessa Boase

Author, Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather: Fashion, Fury and Feminism – Women’s Fight for Change

• Your otherwise excellent feature on the animal welfare concerns associated with feather harvesting from domesticated birds for dress and hat decoration failed to emphasise sufficiently the shameful track record of the industry.

At its peak in the 19th century, ladies’ obsession with feather-decorated hats accounted for the estimated shooting of 5 million wild birds annually in the US alone. In the UK, great crested grebes were almost shot to extinction so that hats could feature their tiny ear-tuft feathers. And young nesting gulls had their wings torn off – often when they were alive – so that they could be similarly displayed for fashion.

For a century London was the world centre of the feather trade, importing thousands of skins of birds of paradise from New Guinea, countless egret feathers from across Europe, millions of ostrich feathers (which eliminated ostriches from half of Africa and all of the Middle East) and many others including the feathers of parrots, hummingbirds, even whole owl heads.

If today there are, rightly, concerns about suffering caused to domestic birds such as geese and peafowl by plucking feathers for dress and hat decoration, why not cut the feather shaft just outside the skin. Surely the couture industry can cope with cut ends.

Dr Malcolm Smith

Colwyn Bay, Clwyd

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters