The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy by Dave Madden

The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy by Dave Madden

Author:Dave Madden [Madden, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-08-01T16:00:00+00:00


FIVE

As a kid I had any number of ridiculous things on my walls. My collections were few and soon abandoned. I stuck stickers in plastic-paged photo albums the two summers that flanked first grade. Baseball cards for a year or two before puberty. Anything after that was music paraphernalia, probably—cardboard longboxes from the early days of CD sales stapled on one corner of my bedroom’s front wall, a column of concert ticket stubs falling nearly to the floor, some of them (vaingloriously) signed. Who knows where these things are now. That they might be festering in a landfill, turning to dirt and earth, is for me no real tragedy. I still have the memories the things themselves were meant to capture and evoke as I transferred them to my walls, and in those memories I think whatever value I might be talking about lies. But I am not an island, and one’s possessions have value in the global market, and so while I can rest easy at night knowing the longbox of Camper Van Beethoven’s Key Lime Pie I once displayed as a kind of bratty, music-nerd challenge to any potential Top 40 visitors is gone forever, somewhere out there is a different kind of Camper Van Beethoven fan who would pay or give any number of surprising things to own such an item. The thing is mine, was mine. I was the buyer and the owner of the object, and yet it seems I’m not the one who gets to decide its value.

As soon as I began thinking more and more about taxidermy, I wanted some. Just a head I could hang on the wall. Maybe even a jackalope, but ideally a whitetail head—taxidermy’s C-major chord. The words buffalo head in the newspaper’s yard-sale listings sent me one Saturday all the way to the other side of town to take a look, but by the time I got there it had long since been sold. The man in whose driveway I stood, forlorn, said he got $400 for it (I’d been prepared to go up to $80), that his uncle shot it years ago, and that it had been mounted by Jonas Brothers. Four hundred dollars was probably a steal, but what did I know? Another weekend at another yard sale I came upon a pheasant and a deer head hanging up in the back of one man’s garage. These he had taken himself, and for the deer head, which had a hole inexplicably drilled through one antler and was cracking all over the dried-out hide, he wanted $150. This was outrageous, I thought, but then again what I was considering to buy was more than just a piece of taxidermy, it was whatever experience this man had out in the woods, or out in the fields, with whatever hunting companions he may have fallen out of touch with. These were all included in the piece’s value, and it raised the price to more than I could afford. I bought the pheasant instead, a wall mount with its wings spread and beak partially open.



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