Treat Humanely Before Stuffing
CreditTony Cenicola/The New York Times
If you visit Alison Raleigh at home, in Hoboken, N.J., one of the first things you’re likely to notice is all the taxidermy: There’s a deer head in the bathroom, a stuffed pheasant and crow on the mantel, a ram’s head in the study. She bought a lot of it on eBay. But some of it she made herself.
“I was collecting all this taxidermy,” said Ms. Raleigh, 40, a stay-at-home mother of two. “Then I thought, why can’t I just do it? I’m not squeamish.”
There are those who may say that do-it-yourself taxidermy is taking D.I.Y. just a little too far. But not Ms. Raleigh, and many others like her, who are learning this time-honored tradition in classes offered at a variety of venues across the country, including natural history museums, nature centers and even restaurants.
And doing your own taxidermy, Ms. Raleigh was quick to add, is the only way you can make sure the animals are ethically sourced.
That’s right: For those who want to make sure the moose and deer mounted on their walls have been treated at least as humanely as the free-range cows slaughtered for their burgers, there is now ethical taxidermy.
From Death to Beauty
Allis Markham teaches the art of taxidermy and the magic of turning something dead into something seemingly alive.
Video by Arkasha Stevenson on Publish Date October 29, 2014. Photo by Laure Joliet for The New York Times.Mickey Alice Kwapis, 23, a self-taught taxidermy instructor in Cleveland, Ohio, is one of its proponents. The animals she uses — rabbits, squirrels, mice, guinea pigs — were not killed for art’s sake, she said. They were raised and painlessly euthanized to serve as food for reptiles and large cats. Ms. Kwapis gets them from a company called Rodent Pro, which supplies animals to pet stores and zoos.
Ms. Kwapis holds her classes in unlikely places like tattoo parlors and restaurants. “As long as you clean up afterward, there’s nothing to say you can’t hold a taxidermy class anywhere,” she said. “After all, a rabbit has less bacteria than a chicken.”
In addition to teaching her students how to stuff the animals, Ms. Kwapis instructs them on how to prepare the meat for eating, although, she added, “I actually have a lot of vegans in my classes.”
She also shows them how to preserve the organs in jars (if that aesthetic appeals to them) and how to clean the bones to make jewelry or grind them up for fertilizer. “Nothing goes to waste,” she said.
Ms. Raleigh, who learned taxidermy earlier this year in classes held at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, takes a similar approach. Like Ms. Kwapis, she gets her animals from reptile feed companies. And she makes use of the entire animal, feeing the innards of the mice she uses in her mounts to her dog.
“My dog is on a raw-food diet,” she said.
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What exactly constitutes ethics when it comes to taxidermy, however, depends on whom you consult. Allis Markham, 31, sees it a little differently.
“Using animals killed for pet food is the same to me as factory farming,” said Ms. Markham, an assistant in the taxidermy department at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and owner of Prey Taxidermy, which creates mounts for Hollywood productions and offers how-to courses. “Just like the meat I eat, the animals I use for my taxidermy can’t have been raised in an industrial way.”
Ms. Markham gets animals for her classes — typically starlings, quails, squirrels, ducklings and raccoons — from pest control operators who would otherwise have disposed of them in a landfill or from game breeders after the animals have died a natural death. The larger animals she uses in her film work, like deer and peacocks, were either killed by hunters for food or died of natural causes in captivity.
“There’s no shortage of invasive species killed for abatement or animals that died naturally,” Ms. Markham said.
But she draws the line at stuffing people’s departed pets. “I’m not going to be able to put life back in its eyes the way the owner knew and loved it,” she said.
Ms. Markham has decorated her own home with some 30 mounts, including a black bear, impala, antelope and jackal buzzard. Her husband, David Iserson, a writer who has worked on “Mad Men” and “Saturday Night Live,” has been “incredibly supportive of my work,” she said. “And incredibly grossed out.”
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While ethical codes may vary, most taxidermy classes are popular enough to have waiting lists. Students and instructors tend to be women in their 20s, 30s and 40s. Men take the classes as well, instructors say, but usually with a girlfriend or spouse.
“I get a lot of lawyers,” Ms. Kwapis said. “I don’t know what that means.”
Courses can cost $100 to $500 (including supplies) and take several hours, which may be spread over a couple of days. Lessons on skinning, disemboweling, wiring the animal and making a mold are followed by lots of grooming and preening using tweezers and blow dryers, to get the animal looking as fresh and lifelike as possible.
“It’s kind of like sculpture, kind of like painting, almost like hairdressing, almost like sewing,” said Nina Masuda, 36, a graphic designer in Los Angeles who has taken three classes with Ms. Markham, in which she stuffed a starling, a quail and a squirrel. “I thought it would be all science-y, and I’m, like, fluffing up this bird’s hair, trying to give it some volume.”
Ms. Masuda’s mounts have been naturalistic, but students in other taxidermy classes often create anthropomorphic pieces: mice sipping tea from tiny cups, say, or a rabbit strumming a tiny guitar. And then there are the so-called rogue creations, like “Game of Thrones"-inspired three-eyed ravens, or bunnies with squid tentacles.
Ms. Raleigh, in Hoboken, has made one mouse with quail wings and another wearing little clogs and drinking a glass of wine; she has also created a tableau of two mice embracing on a heart-shaped pedestal, as a present for her husband.
“He said it was the most romantic gift he’d ever gotten,” she said.
Her friends’ reactions, however, have been mixed.
“Half of them say: ‘Oh, that is so disgusting. How can you do that?’ And the other half say: ‘Neat! Can do you make one for me?’ ”
But Ms. Raleigh’s new hobby is not as odd or macabre as some of her friends might think. In fact, there’s a historical precedent, said Brian Schmidt, a taxidermist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.
“Back in Victorian times, people, especially women, used to do a lot of taxidermy, putting it under glass domes or in quilts,” Mr. Schmidt said. “So I guess we’ve come full circle.”
Then and now, part of the appeal may be the illusion of cheating death, said Margot Magpie, an instructor at an ethical taxidermy studio in London called Of Corpse!, who sometimes teaches at the Morbid Anatomy Museum.
“Making something that’s dead look alive again helps some people come to terms with death,” said Ms. Magpie, 31.
Magpie, not surprisingly, is not her given name. It’s the name she adopted after receiving threats from animal-rights activists who objected to her art, she said, although she uses animals from reptile-food suppliers that would have died anyway in the maw of an alligator or snake. “I’ve gotten some pretty nasty tweets,” she said.
What is ethical to some, it seems, is anathema to others.