The writer has deep knowledge about animals and animals life therefore he write beautiful articale about animals and their lives.
There may be more than one way to skin a
cat, but not as many as there are to stuff and mount it. Polymer eyes, anyone?
Foam-body manikin? Alcohol rub to finish? Dave Madden's engagingly offbeat
study, "The Authentic Animal," lets us in on the bizarre and
sometimes repellent world of taxidermy from its earliest beginnings (legend has
it that the Medicis kept a mounted rhinoceros as part of their natural-history
collection in Florence )
to the present. Though the "why" of this peculiar and abiding human
practice is never definitively answered, Mr. Madden does ample justice to the
how and the where.
Is taxidermy even an art form? Or is it
something more primitive? Taxidermy is, as Mr. Madden notes, first and foremost
an act of preservation: "It is to animals, or more properly their skins,
what Mylar bags are to comic books." As with comics, where animals are
concerned our desire to preserve goes hand in hand with another peculiarly
human impulse, the impulse to collect. Cue, here, the first of many euphemisms:
Collecting is the taxidermist's preferred term for killing, an irony not lost
on Mr. Madden.
Human beings, to be sure, have felt the
need to represent animals in art for centuries, from Albrecht Dürer's hare to
Thomas Gainsborough's dogs. But taxidermy appears to involve quite another
urge, the urge simultaneously to extinguish and to resurrect. It is as much
atavistic as aesthetic, and we see it at work in the earliest records of our
interaction with animals, going back all the way to the cave paintings of
hunters pursuing bulls and deer at Lascaux in France. Art is representational,
asking its viewer to forget that the canvas or the block of marble has never
been alive. Taxidermy takes a real hide and asks of us, as Mr. Madden points out,
what is in fact impossible: "Please forget that this animal is no longer
living."
Mr. Madden's attempt to answer the question of why we stuff
animals takes him from museum halls to competitive shows, interviewing hunters,
curators and convention organizers along the way. Narrative interest is
provided in the form of the life story of Carl Akeley, "the father of
modern taxidermy," who pioneered the naturalistic habitat dioramas beloved
of museums worldwide, and whose legacy lives on in the Akeley African Wing at New York 's American
Museum of Natural
History. Akeley is a gift to a biographer—a big-game hunting, glue-pot-toting
Victorian who once strangled a leopard with his bare hands and boasted a record
566 animals killed (sorry, collected) during five epic African field trips.
This article Wildlife Without Life which is written by ELIZABETH
LOWRY which is published in Street Journal.
Today is the father day. This day is celebrated to in favour of
father love. This day is celebrated by American lady when her father is dead in
his early age. Because she is get father’s emotion and love in her early age.
Therefore she decided to celebrate this day she celebrate this day every year.
In early this day is celebrated by the western countries now this
day is celebrated throughout the world to show our emotion with our father.
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