The Authentic Animal

This article is written by Dave Madden which is published in Street Walls Journals and little bit review of his book. 

Having started modestly with a neighbor's canary, Akeley went on to mount P.T. Barnum's prize circus elephant, Jumbo, devising a cunning wooden armature that was larger than life and then cutting the hide into pieces and stretching and nailing them across the form. (Apparently Jumbo wasn't jumbo enough.) The thickly seamed exhibit thus produced must have been grotesque; but in the taxidermic equivalent of air-brushing, Akeley redeemed this patchwork monster by rubbing a special gray putty all over it. Improbably, the result was worth it: The titivated Jumbo was so lifelike that he looked ready to charge at spectators—and, presumably, he still would, had his artificial hide not caught fire and burned him to a crisp in 1972.

All of which points to a paradox: The main aim of taxidermy, through its manikins and fixatives and sleights of hand, is maximum verisimilitude. That is gloriously illustrated by the maverick branch of the trade known as novelty taxidermy—creating creatures that never could be. Barnum exhibited the "Feejee Mermaid," for instance, a grisly amalgam of the head and torso of a monkey sewn onto the lower body of a large salmon, cleverly billed as having "such appearance of reality as any fish lying [in] the stalls of our fish markets."

Appearing equally real is a griffin—made from a lion cub's body, a ptarmigan's wings and a chicken's head crammed over the skull of a bald eagle—that Mr. Madden comes across at the World Taxidermy Championships. Then there is the ubiquitous jackalope—"jack" as in rabbit, "lope" as in antelope—a prime example, Mr. Madden wryly suggests, of taxidermists "looking to make an easy buck." The jackalope proliferates in tourist traps and fraternity houses. This is before we even get to squirrels in little berets holding automatic firearms, chipmunks doing the hula in grass skirts or kittens drinking tea.

Why do we feel moved to pose dead animal bodies in this mawkish way? Mr. Madden ventures hopefully that the anthropomorphism of much novelty taxidermy is meant to restore in ourselves "some lost animal nature," but the explanation really seems to lie in our very human appetite for sentimentality and kitsch. And this, finally seems to be the problem with taxidermy. Mr. Madden tries valiantly to argue that this "beautiful and horrible" skill—for it is certainly a skill, if not an art—honors a dead animal in a way other forms of killing do not; that it tells us something essential about the animal itself; that it is "a way to measure and characterize the relationship between humans and animals"; that is revelatory, almost sacramental. In truth, however, the strange habit of stuffing animals tells us something definite about one animal only: man.

Mr. Madden wonders "what would happen if the tables were turned" and the animals were able to put us on display. He needn't; in this freakish expression of our overlordship, we already are. The stuffed moose head on the wall of Uncle Al's den speaks volumes about our voraciousness as a species, our sheer inability to let be. "A taxidermized animal," concludes Mr. Madden, "is a remembered animal, a memorialized animal, and something memorialized is something loved." That, at least, is indisputable. Just ask Norman Bates.

Ms. Lowry is the author of "The Bellini Madonna."