America’s Taxidermy Revival: Kill It, Grill It…And Preserve It

My first brush with the process of taxidermy came as a biology student at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, the largest college of natural resources in America. I was hand selected by my ornithology professor to help expand the department’s collection of birds because I was reasonably handy with a shotgun, and he wasn’t.

Soon I was shooting all manner of songbirds in the name of science and, of course, the good professor had a collector’s permit, so the practice was perfectly legal for educational purposes. If it wasn’t, I’m confident the statute of limitations has long since expired.

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Our field forays to collect larks, finches, thrushes, and the like were followed by long hours of delicate skinning with a scalpel. Once completed, I rubbed a borax preservative into the skins, stuffed them with cotton, and sewed them back together to create pedestrian facsimiles of living birds—albeit crows became scarecrows of sorts. Once fully dried, the specimens were cataloged and placed in a series of drawers where future students could study them and learn their identifying marks up close.

While my efforts were admittedly rudimentary, it did spark a budding interest in taxidermy—what some think is an art form and others label as a fascination with the macabre. Those of the latter tend to profile taxidermy aficionados as the same people who binge WWE and wear camouflage to church.

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However, the first collection of taxidermy dates to the early part of the 16^th century with the oldest mounted specimen that remains in existence (1702) being an African gray parrot that is currently exhibited in Westminster Abbey, London.

The creation of taxidermy coincided with the birth of museums, and many people still associate taxidermy with natural history centers. After having read the book, The Man Eaters of Tsavo in which two marauding lions killed some 135 railroad workers in 1898 in East Africa, I traveled to the Field Museum in Chicago to see these beasts of legend that were on display there. It was a decidedly disappointing affair as the mane-less cats were showing their considerable age.

Taxidermy of yesteryear often looked as if it started as roadkill, the mounts trending closer to cartoon than correct. I didn’t know mountain lions suffered from the mumps…or that’s what happens when a bear is off-plumb?

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The reality of modern taxidermy, however, is that millions of American hunters (many of them wealthy and highly educated) have spurred an industry to create awe-inspiring expressions of their hunts through stunningly beautiful and dramatic mounts and dioramas. Taxidermy in America today is an $800 million industry that employs more than 6,000 people.

“At its best, an animal trophy tells stories. There’s the tale of the animal itself,” wrote the late Mike Boyce, founder of one of the country’s premier animal art studios: Reno, Nevada-based Animal Artistry. “And then there’s the story of the hunt and its many experiences—the cool morning air, the rustling leaves, the anticipation, and the adrenaline. Bringing these stories to life is the goal behind every original piece.”

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Many credit Boyce for the modern evolution of taxidermy that is the current standard today. “He expanded on the basic, static style of pioneering taxidermist Carl Akeley,” says veteran taxidermist Stewart Brown. “He challenged the existing norm in creating animals in dynamic and fluid form.”

Boyce was a hunter and for thousands of years, we were all hunters. There was no debate over the ethics of the practice that sustained our species for millennia. Paintings of hunting scenes have been discovered by archaeologists in a limestone cave in Indonesia that date as far back as 44,000 years—the oldest example of storytelling through pictures in history. Many believe modern taxidermy is merely man’s continued expression of the hunt that is inextricably bound to our genetic code.

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“Somewhere in the pigeon chest of a clerk,” wrote Robert Ruark in his book Horn of the Hunter, universally celebrated as a classic by hunters, “is still the vestigial remnant of the hunter’s heart; somewhere in his nostrils the half-forgotten smell of blood.”

As hunting for clean and sustainable protein in the form of deer, elk, moose, turkey, grouse, quail, and myriad other animals has seen a resurgence in recent years, there remains debate over the so-called practice of “trophy” hunting. Opponents see this as killing an animal purely for the purpose of putting it on a wall. The reality, however, is that mature males of most game species are the most biologically expendable to the population. That is, they have fulfilled their role of spreading their genes through the herd and there is usually an excess of them in the population—meaning, there is a harvestable surplus and a significant percentage of them will die annually regardless of whether human hunters are in the equation.

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Further, a mature elk or deer that a hunter may take as a trophy is, by law, consumed as well. Every state in America requires that a hunter recover the meat from a game animal. That is, a hunter can—and often does—have his steak and his taxidermy, too.

Today, thousands of hunters across the United States and, indeed, the world have private collections of game from all corners of the globe. In so galivanting across the planet, these hunters not only support a growing taxidermy industry, but they also provide funding for conservation and anti-poaching efforts that ensure the survival of their cherished game species. It may seem counter-intuitive to some that killing an animal is helping preserve a species but that is, in fact, the reality—no matter how inconvenient that truth. Wildlife that pays, stays…like it or not.

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As Caroline Galambosova wrote in her Daily Art magazine exhaustive treatise on taxidermy, “What seems to link all the modern practitioners of this art together is an abiding respect for the cycle of life, a reverence for their craft, and a deep desire to honor animals.”

The same could be said for the motivation of hunters who took the beasts in the first place.