A Cold, Dead Love

By Dave Madden





From The Authentic Animal by Dave Madden. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

IF THERE'S ANYTHING I've discovered about taxidermy, it’s that people can have very extreme emotions when it comes to animals. And maybe this is just as good a place as any to get into the ongoing debates surrounding animal rights, for by its very nature taxidermy is an affront to those rights. At least, this is the stance taken by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “If an animal dies of natural causes,” Colleen O’Brien, PETA’s director of communications, told me, “PETA would not be ethically opposed to his or her body being preserved by taxidermy, although it strikes us as disrespectful to put the animal on display. We’d never preserve and display a beloved human family member.”
          Indeed. PETA’s ethos is a golden rule variant. This is the way taxidermy is disrespectful—we wouldn’t allow it for one another. All the taxidermists I’ve talked with, naturally, disagree with PETA. They see taxidermy as a chief form of respect for animals. Like Wendy Christensen-Senk, the chief taxidermist at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Yes, she loves taxidermy, but it cannot compare to the act of bow hunting elk, her favorite quarry. It’s not what most people think when they think of hunting. An arrow can go only a fraction of the distance of a bullet, and so it’s not sitting up in a tree and listening for the footfalls of something tiny and precious. Elk are animals larger than most Volkswagens, and when they run it sounds like a fleet of horses at the finish line, and for Wendy the only way she’s going to come out of this with a kill is to run right alongside these animals, all of them bugling their guttural squeals over the thundering of their hooves. “There is literally nothing more exciting in the world,” she says, likening it to a religious experience. Of every kind of animal on the planet Wendy loves the elk the most. She tries to hunt one every year.
          Like most contradictions, it’s one we’re uncomfortable with, and that characterizes what environmental scholar Stephen R. Kellert calls “nature hunters”: people who love and admire the animals they hunt, who do it for an “intense involvement with wild animals in their natural habitats.” Nature hunters are distinguished from utilitarian hunters, who do it for the meat, and sport hunters, who do it for the mastery and competition. The nature hunter, more than any other hunter, felt [in Kellert’s study] the need to rationalize the death of the animal.
          Kellert found that most hunters (43.8 percent) were classified as utilitarian, with sport hunters falling in second place (38.5 percent). Nature hunters constituted only 17.7 percent of those surveyed. But this is the demographic that almost every taxidermist I spoke with would place himself or herself in. For what other reason than affection and admiration for wildlife would a person become a taxidermist? Certainly not the money. “I have an extreme love for wildlife,” Wendy says. “I’ve always had one. When I was young it always bothered me to see animals all destroyed on the roadside.
          Here, then, is a kind of respect for animals. This animal was alive; then it died. Let’s make it look alive again. One major element of taxidermy is the way it broadcasts human dominance. We can do this to animals, but they can’t do this to us, which brings us back to PETA’s original complaint. The question of course is who gets to decide what’s best for animals, and what exactly does that entail?
         If there’s anyone on the planet best qualified to speak for animals, it’s the bioethicist Peter Singer, if only because he seems to have taken the most time to think about it. In his Animal Liberation—the PETA bible, in many ways—Singer lays out the case for the equal consideration of animals and the minimizing (if not the end) of animal suffering. Singer’s approach is rational, not emotional. He admits early on to not being particularly interested in animals, or even loving them. He “simply want[s] them treated as the independent sentient beings that they are, and not as a means to human ends.” Singer smartly avoids claiming that he knows what’s best for animals. He just knows what’s bad for humans and humans’ ethical living. “Speciesism” is as ethically wrong as racism or sexism, and because we would never sit back and allow suffering on other humans we should also reject the same kinds of suffering done to animals.
         

I've never felt much fury or even held any mild criticism toward hunters. I’ve also never understood the impulse. But what have I ever known about animals? I know that the truth of this world is that our capacity for love is large enough to allow some room for animals, and yet this allowance isn’t as warm as our love for other people. It’s colder, darker, and full of bloodshed. For many people this love has lots of capacity for cruelty. We keep our dogs in cages throughout the workday because, we rationalize, they enjoy having a small, tight space all their own. And when it comes time to sleep at night we do it pretty soundly. Likewise, many people go out in the wild and find animals to shoot and kill, and their nights are just as restful. They’re not monsters. They don’t lack empathetic skills. Moral equivalence isn’t anything I know much of. But increasingly these days, as I talk to new kinds of people, it’s getting harder and harder to confidently call something out when I see it as “wrong” or “immoral.”         
          Hunting is not taxidermy. The latter can exist without the former. But more often than not taxidermy is an outcome of hunting, and so it’s seemed disingenuous to talk so freely about taxidermy without acknowledging its grisly, ethically murky cousin. If it’s true that hunting can be (but isn’t necessarily) a way to honor an animal, or that tangential to the act of hunting is a respect and love for the animal being hunted, then it follows to me that taxidermy is probably the best way to broadcast this love to a dubious audience. Because if you shoot a deer and dress the carcass and butcher the meat to feed your family through the winter and take the skin and make something of it, isn't this a form of honor, of deferential respect?
          We make icons of our idols, and we have done this since Lascaux. It’s why self-conscious, eBay’d taxidermy is, in the end, such a drag to find in people’s houses. An animal had to die for this? To outfit a TV room with a retro-chic vibe? And I say this as a man who has purchased and hung self-conscious eBay’d taxidermy. But no longer. Let this be a bit of advice for anyone looking to get a game head: Don’t just get the mount, get the story behind the mount. Talk to the hunter and listen to the steps he took to track down the animal and shoot it. Figure out what happened to the flesh, the bones, the rest of the skin you’re not seeing. Maybe it uncomfortably reminds us that this thing we have decorating our homes had its life taken from it, but more than anything it keeps taxidermy honest. Every mount is an encounter, a chance to engage in an animal that would have otherwise been a stranger to you. It’s why we invented epitaphs: None of us wants to be forgotten in death. We can’t ever know whether animals feel the same way, but doesn’t it seem respectful to assume so?