I walked on King Street for a minute last evening, enjoying the celebration of spring. The sky was soft and pink and the light was sweet, presaging the long days ahead and the longing of summer. As I walked up, about to reach Monza and the music filtering out of the doors of Closed for Business, I happened to gaze in a window display where lay dozens of handbags. I had to look closer to see that the bags were made of striped horse-like fur, coarse and bristly and lively had it been on the back of a zebra on the plains of Africa. It was a jolt to the senses to realize that, in fact, they were zebra skin, a piece of animal I am used to seeing in pictures and videos of Africa but that had been laid out here before me in surreal fashion, on top of a full zebra skin to boot. It was like being in front of a fur store, of which fortunately there are nearly none left in this country, for most people, most civilized people, most compassionate people, have come to understand that fur is not cool. And purses and handbags made out of zebra are not cool either, and I found it particularly jolting because the store, which is also part spa and yoga center (proof that yoga, almost proportionally to its proliferation, has come to mean nothing, least of all oneness), touts itself as something spiritually meaningful, related to healing and discovery. Shopping with a conscience. Knowing that what you put on your body gives back to the community. Product with a purpose. Make sure you are conscious of what you are wearing, what it means. That’s the store’s philosophy.

So I was amazed to stare into the store windows and see handbags made out of animals that are supposed to be standing in the savannas of Africa—animals that children here see only in zoos and, well, now, on handbags in Charleston. The beautiful purses display the wide array of magical stripings with which zebras are born, each distinct like our own fingerprints, which they use to distinguish themselves from others and to camouflage themselves and protect themselves in plays of movement in the tall grasses of their environment (although I suspect that these zebras are raised in captivity for various purposes). The stripings, black with white and black with beige, look like supernatural drawings that a man in ecstasy might have drawn but in fact only in nature can be found in such simple, playful and masterful symmetry, which is what draws our eye and heart to them, and, well, in this case, our guns and knives. Several of the handbags included parts of the zebra’s mane—I guess so you can showcase the animal more fully? Perhaps they could dangle a piece of ear with it?—and some even the skin of the face, with the tighter and shorter striping leading towards the eyes. One appeared to be made out of a very small zebra, and I can picture a man saying, oh, that’s too bad, the baby died, too. Maybe the zebra was pregnant and the baby was pulled out and made into a bag. It‘s amazing how much the universe will support your journey, a store promotional video says—what, when you shoot zebras? Global soul. A wellness component. Finding yourself. What the world has to offer. Serenity.

All in a zebra-skin bag.

The company that makes the bags (or pays people to make the bags), whose motto is We Make No Apologies for Luxury (which alone is enough to write a treatise on vapid thinking), produces equally fine brochures to explain and justify its place and endeavors in the world, just in case, while you stand looking dreamily at the handbags and consider purchasing one, something inside you begins to squirm—and, oh, you know it will unless you are brain-dead. As your brain starts sending pesky, discomforting questions about the provenance of this piece of animal you are looking to purchase and considering how great it will make you look, the company materials quickly swoop in, take your hand and help appease your conscience, just in time to make the purchase of a zebra bag feel all right. After all, you need not apologize for luxury! The brochures are laid out behind the display on some kind of little ledge and framed by swatches of zebra hair of different stripings, which I guess you can touch as if you were looking for carpet or paint chips. The company brochure explains that the zebras are killed (I don’t think they use that word—harvested or sourced, perhaps?) with care and concern for the integrity of the environment; that the company would never do anything to unbalance the delicate nature of the ecosystem of Africa—and you know that they stayed up nights worrying about this!—and so they harvest only from the best of the best—local and sustainable! Plus, the company says, they make sure that they leave nothing unused—first hair to last!—and make money from even the smallest of scraps which, fashioned as a zebra-skin bracelet (sorry, kudu bangles!) you can purchase for a couple hundred dollars. (This—the “using everything” line—is, by the way, the new triviality put out by restaurants and nearly every industry in America as if they were living like impoverished farmers in post-war Europe. Like Americans could suddenly give a shit about being wasteful or about using the ears or snout of a dead pig other than deriving the slimmest form of sense of charity and massaging an already completely indefensible and bankrupt conscience.) Again, it is intellectual mediocrity at its best.

The brochure does not mention that, yes, the zebra-skin industry is created to satisfy a fancy, a capriccio, as the Italians say, of the West, and exploits and perpetrates an economy that thrives on our takings and devastation and exploitation, because that is what suits us about Africa, and plus, who cares, Africa is so far away and, oh yes, don’t black people live there? Yes, people have always hunted in Africa, that’s true; they were trackers and hunter-gatherers. But that was for them—for their survival. Now it is for us, for the people shopping on King Street. They are different things, and to continue to parallel the two is to be plainly ignorant of fact. We use such parallels to soothe our own consciences and shore up argumentations that are rendered limp and soft by want and greed. It’s plain bullshit.

The company’s website says that the founder was so moved by Africa that he or she could not but be inspired to create timeless accessories that honor Africa and the cycles of life there. She was so filled by the love of life in Africa that she immediately summoned people to kill zebras for purses. The site says—and I can barely refrain from laughing, or crying—that each bag is handmade to tell the story of the animal’s life in the wild. It’s (sic) struggles. It’s (sic) triumphs. These elegantly rugged bags allow that animal’s unique story to live on. Carrying these bags honors the soul and beauty of these stunning creatures. Are you kidding me? At least do not insult whatever is left of our intelligence. I wonder if the bags come with pictures of the animal killed for the skin, like when you adopt an animal through WWF, except this donation would be for their spirit.

Would you like to see the bags, a woman asks me. I ignore her. I want to pet the zebras and wish life back into them, that they might stand up here in this store and knock down all the shit in the window and kill everybody in the store, but zebras are not violent. They are like horses, more or less. They live in tribes, in families, and are docile. No, I do not want to see the bags any more closely than I have to. As I am looking at the bags and reading the literature about the harvesting of the zebras taken to make these bags the sound of water trickling in a fountain—from Indonesia maybe, or India!—attempts to appease my senses and make me feel as if I were in a place of healing, of harmony. Dead zebras. King Street. Harmony. Mmm. Should I do a handstand?

At the conclusion of the PR bullshit justifying its products and the provenance of the zebras (who, I wonder, accepts money to write that shit, and how much do they get paid?), the brochure, like throwing in a nuanced coda, adds that, by the way, the zebras from which the bags are made are designated animals of Least Concern (LC), which means that if you are wealthy and you want a zebra bag, you should not worry your pretty head about the wellbeing or death of the zebras because they don’t matter. They make no difference in the greater scheme of evolutionary biology. As species come and go, they are of LEAST CONCERN (though there are zebra subspecies that are now endangered from hunting). From a bureaucrat’s perspective, that means they are insignificant enough or numerous enough or unimportant enough that, well, who cares whose skin it is and if they died for it? As if they didn’t suffer, they didn’t bleed, they didn’t love to run in the savannas and live the life granted to them by nature with their companions and their offspring. So, thinking about the LC designation, which purportedly justifies, if not encourages us to kill zebras for skin, I am thinking, could we not make bags out of cats and dogs? Would that not be appealing? The millions of cats and dogs that populate the streets of the world and the shelters here in the United States, the thousands I see while I look through pictures of lost cats and dogs seeking my lost cat, Joe? Are they not animals of Least Concern merely by the fact that they are abandoned or lost and sitting in shelters by the thousands that we cannot save or feed? What a missed opportunity to make a buck! And what about tigers and lions? They are not on the Least Concern list—they are higher up in the conservation hierarchy—but they are not endangered. They are huntable, and they are hunted, still, in what is a practice that, no matter how the complex arguments on tribal economics in Africa set out to justify it, should, here, in this country, be considered repellent, revolting, stomach-turning, disgusting and unacceptable. Yet, there are people—mostly Americans, though surely Europeans have done their fair share—who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to go shoot a defenseless and gorgeous animal halfway across the world. I am always stunned to know that those people have friends—spouses, even, and lovers—people who make love to them, who caress them and sleep with them at night or share a dinner table with them. I think that sharing a dinner table with them would make me vomit, and sharing a bad with them would make me flee to the darkest corner of the planet. Once I was at a Thanksgiving dinner seated next to a woman who started telling me about someone going on a big-game hunt in Africa and killing an elephant. I sat transfixed by horror, almost not grasping the fact that the person sitting next to me actually knew someone who would do that. What kind of person in 2012 or 2011 (or whatever year it was), I asked the woman, what kind of person would shoot an elephant? My husband, she said, smiling. There you have it, I said: it’s bad enough that you’re married to him, I said, and worse that you seem proud. Thanksgiving dinner was over for me, and perhaps Thanksgiving, too.

So, back to our furs, why not have bags made with lion fur, or tiger, or how about whale—could we use whale skin?—so some self-important person can sit at some insignificant but self-important bar on Upper King Street in insignificant but self-important Charleston and show off their piece of wilderness, like somehow that piece of lion or zebra shines increased worth on them, increased valor or importance—the owner of a piece of skin from an animal of Least Concern in a land far away of which we know nothing about. Do people, really, not understand the wonder of thousands of people traveling every year—and many more yearning to do so—to the lost lands of Africa to merely get a glimpse of these glorious, magnificent animals? Does it not dawn on you, store owner, company owner, that these animals are or should be of concern to humanity merely because of the beauty and fascination with which nature endowed them? Do the eyes of zebras—those magical, perfect stripes—not humble you onto your knees and into stillness and silence? Does it not dawn on you that our shared presence on the planet—our presence in theirs—is a sacred privilege that we should hold dear and endeavor to protect, to earn? Concern comes from the heart—not from a bureaucratic designation that people use to justify shooting. What about giraffes—oh, and monkeys!! There are plenty of monkeys on the Least Concern list! Perhaps some monkey skulls as incense holders, or more handbags? Or monkey belts?

Man stops at nothing, it seems, to take, to appropriate whatever in our perversity we think embellishes us or confirms our importance and place in the world. Will we stop at nothing to caress our egos, to masturbate our vanity, our sense of power—the power to exploit those weaker than us? Our specism must stop. Would I find ivory in your store if elephants returned to be animals of Least Concern—by population statistics alone—and suddenly it were OK to chop their tusks off their faces and leave them for bush meat with their babies crying alongside them? Maybe an ivory dildo, for greater spiritual enhancement? It is not bureaucratic designation that gives sanctity to life, but rather nature—the unity of one—that gives beauty a right to exist in this world and us a privilege to enjoy it. To make money from the suffering and weakness of others, be they animals or people, is exploitation, and there are no pretty words or pieces of luxury PR to make it be anything else.

I wish to revise the list of animals of Least Concern and put humans at the top, as the most harvestable. I want to rank first those with the most money who have the least compassion, then those who are willing to rank so called lower species as something they can take for their own greed and empowerment at the disadvantage of the rest of the people. Those who exploit and take from our universe are next. Are you, owner of that store, sales clerk in that store, not a person of Least Concern? For sure on the planet there are too many of us—and too many who take, too many who don’t give a shit about anything, too many who are thoughtless and greedy and plain stupid. Too many whose comings and goings on the planet will make no difference in the greater evolutionary picture. I say that qualifies you as a person of Least Concern. I say, let’s make some handbags.

Copyright Sybil Fix @2015