Taxidermy, by Kevin

Taxidermy is a very interesting hobby that will interest a lot of people. What taxidermy is, is stuffing dead animals, mostly with sawdust but also sometimes with cotton, wool, cotton wool, bits of rag, cloth, hair, your sister's scrunchies, shoelaces, and cardboard. Sometimes I use torn-up copies of Just Sixteen magazine.

Some people think of taxidermy as a barbaric practice, but they are wrong. They think this because they are based on a misunderstanding, which is that taxidermists kill animals and therefore are some kind of genetically inbred shut-in from the country who wears glasses and breeds rabbits just in order to kill them, like that man in Copycat or the one in Father Ted. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most taxidermists buy their animals pre-killed, and already with their insides removed, so they are not even as barbaric as someone such as a housewife who takes the giblets out of a chicken and makes them into gravy. That is really sick. But I have not told my mother.

The advantage to buying your pelts pre-cleaned is that it is not messy. This is what pre-cleaned means. Also the packaging is flatter, which means that the postman can easily put it though the letterbox and does not have to knock on the door to disturb your parents and say "I have got a parcel here for Kevin MacPherson from Glaxo SmithKline Beecham laboratories. Sign here please. It is two monkeys." Also, it means that you can order in bulk and it does not cost the earth. The current piece de resistance in my attic is a diorama I have made of Geoff Hurst's third goal in the final of the World Cup in 1966, when England beat Germany, complete with some people running on the pitch who think it's all over, as described by Kenneth Wolstenholme. Out of squirrels.

Before you think I am mad to take on such a major project, I should disabuse you of the idea that I reproduced the entire scene. I cannot afford 100,000 squirrels. How I wish I could! No. My diorama just consists of Geoff Hurst, the German goalkeeper, the referee, a fan running on the pitch, and the rest of the England and German teams. And Sir Alf Ramsey. I didn't even have to trim the eyebrows for Alf Ramsey.

If you want, you can dress your stuffed animals in clothes or in the uniforms of your favourite team. My favourite team is MK Dons. However, this requires some sewing skills, and this essay is not about sewing. It is about taxidermy. You can ask your mother to make the kits for you, but then she will ask what they are for, and you may not want to say that they are for your dead animals in the attic. The alternative is to buy the kits ready-made from a specialist supplier who makes football strips for stuffed animals, but I am afraid to say that there aren't any. I have looked.

Once you become an expert at stuffing animals, there is no limit to what you can stuff. There are shows in America where expert taxidermists put on display their stuffed bears, stuffed horses, stuffed worms, stuffed deer, and even stuffed peppers, although peppers are not strictly speaking an animal. In some countries, such as Russia and China, they even stuff their dead leaders, such as Lenin and Chairman Mao, and they put them on display for the residents to admire their work, although for some reason they never put their leaders in exciting poses, such as haranguing the masses or swimming the Yangtse. My father says that this is because the quality of the workmanship in Communist countries was always much poorer than in the West, and that Lenin and Mao are lying down probably because they have sawdust pouring out their anus.

Anyway, I hope that you will take up taxidermy now that I have explained it all to you and shown you how good it is. Send me pictures of your stuffed animals and I will pin them up on my shrine.

Goodbye.




(Kevin MacPherson is Jeffrey Dahmer professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins Open Prison.)