Taxidermy, Oh My Heck

The principal gallery at Deyrolle, the famed Parisian taxidermy shop, as it looked before the fire in 2008. Photo by Marc Dantan, Vanity Fair Magazine.

I’ve been both daunted and excited about this chapter. Taxidermy isn’t an easy hobby to pick up nowadays, and for all the straightforward finesse Beard goes through to explain the process to us in his book, I’m absolutely intimidated to paralysis. It’s one of those projects you just know you’re going to fail on the first try, hard as you manage.

George Adams mounting “Raffles”, the talking crow, by Alex J Rota. Image courtesy of The American Museum of Natural History : ‘Picturing the Museum’ archive

And carcasses don’t just appear on the side of the road in near-perfect form for hippy suburban folk like us, whine whine whine, hoping to find something that qualifies for a taxidermy project. You’re supposed to shoot the animal, of course! As an example in the book, Beard suggests we might very well shoot the owl that tries to steal a chicken from our chicken coop. Sure! Just be warned that, today, you’d face a federal crime that carries a maximum fine of $10,000 and possiblity of jail time for keeping a raptor without paperwork.

Oh, where’s the fun anymore?

Cress Funeral Home in Madison, WI. Photo taken byExtreme Craft

Taxidermy was a part of my visual landscape, growing up in Texas, mostly within the context of hunt trophies. My grandparents hunted deer and turkey each fall. They took pictures of the fresh game before they quartered it at camp. Lots of bright orange, beaming smiles and blood. I’d pore over these photographs at my grandparent’s house and then look up at the head mounts on the wall, the trophies of the hunt, then look back down, making the blurry connection. Somewhere in between camp and that wall stood a taxidermist’s shop and a meat processing company, where all deer bits were put to use. I just had no idea how they went about it, all that stuffing in one place and sausage-ing at another, and I didn’t care so long as the deer’s eyes didn’t follow me across the room. At any rate, the heads looked handsome and serious, up there on the wall, and the boudin tasted mighty fine indeed!

My dad and the boys, Mamaw and Papaw’s house, August 2007.

Taxidermy today has become pretty creative. Or at least I hear it has. We’re off to Houston in a week to see the Body Worlds show, which should be terribly anticlimactic as we are the last five people in America who haven’t seen it.

But certainly everyone has seen the most genius build in taxidermy art. For your consideration:

the Jackelope.

The word ‘taxidermy’ comes from the Greek taxis, or “arrangement” and derma, or “skin.” So, literally, ‘taxidermy’ means “the arrangement of the skin.” I imagine the practice of taxidermy began at a time when we no longer needed the skins of the animals in order to survive, right about the time we started getting bored periodically.

But, seriously, what is taxidermy?

Scholar and blogger Rachel Poliquin  muses:

The reasons for displaying a dead animal are as various as the fauna put on view: to flaunt a hunter’s skill, to immortalise a cherished pet, to collect an archive of the world, to commemorate an experience, to document extinct or endangered species, to decorate a wall, to amuse, to educate, to fascinate, to horrify, to delight, and even to deceive.

I think taxidermy is a medium in which humans have learned to get our hands dirty in the quest to make sense of the world. And it broadens our narrow perception of our relationships with all the beasts in nature, the dirtier we get.