Wildlife Without Life about Animals Life

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.

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