wishbone | he/it

I teased this 10 point Red the other day so here it is!

An absolute giant! Id never thought they were quite that big and I am tiny in comparison.

In chatting with the seller of the Pere David's antler yesterday we actually discovered that the use of tines to age Deer is largely unreliable and a myth!

Theres some restoration work to do on this guy so we'll update again shortly.

Here's something you don't see every day - a donkey skeleton giving birth!

Tragically, the donkey and it's offspring passed while giving birth. Toby Boch, our articulator, has reassembled the pair of skeletons how they were found.

And there’s no way in hell she doesn’t know this, because she used to be a scientific illustrator at the museum. The Field makes it very clear where these animals came from. They have public signage about it, and it’s even more clear down in collections.

It kinda got me thinking again about my feelings re: ethics in the natural history and vulture culture community. We seem to really like it when we can justify the death of an animal as “ethical.” “It was roadkill.” “It died of natural causes.” “Ethically collected.” “Ethically sourced.” Ethics has become SUCH a buzzword, and it’s… I dunno. It kinda feels like there’s a part of the community that doesn’t want taxidermy to be as conflicting as it is, like they want it to be a feel-good hobby that doesn’t center around the fact that something did have to die to make the art you’re collecting.

To me, that’s kind of the beauty of it, looking at death and repurposing what’s left over.

What does ethical taxidermy mean? Does it mean the animal didn’t experience pain? If that’s the case, then you can’t call roadkill ethical. Does it mean the animal’s death was inevitable, and that it would have died anyways and you’re just scavenging the parts? Does it mean that the animal suffered minimally throughout its life? Does it mean simply that taxidermy wasn’t the end goal of the animal’s death and that its death, whether that was at human hands or natural causes, had a different purpose in mind?

There’s a sister train of thought to this as well. Natural history museums- I’m talking the old ones established in the 1800s-1900s- were colonialist endeavours. In many ways they existed to show off the natural resources of a nation’s colonies and territories. There was a lot of resource extraction for these museums- white scientists would go places, shoot as much wildlife as they could, harvest as many native plants as they could, and then come home to exhibit the stuff. It wasn’t so outwardly egregious as museums that were essentially designed as colonial treasure houses (like the British Museum), but it presented a very… strange way of looking at environments, because a lot of these natural history museums ignored the people who were there. And that meant creating this idealized (primarily African) landscape that was just big game as far as the eye could see, a playground for rich white hunters. When people were involved, they were… basically treated like a different sort of animal, something to be gawked at rather than understood. It was wildly dehumanizing, and it’s a legacy that natural history museums are still grappling with today.