Taxidermy: Affection

Some animals end up being preserved because of the role they played in life, and a well-known example is Owney the Railway Mail dog. A mutt who was presumably brought to work with his owner some time in 1888, he became friends with the mailmen and started following the mail bags around. Eventually he would follow them onto mail carts and trains, and became a good luck charm for the travelling mail carriers. He started to collect tags from businesses and organizations in the different towns he visited across the United States and Canada. In August of 1895, Owney left from Washington on a steamship voyage around the world, which finished in New York in December of that year. After retiring in 1897, he was given a harness to hold all the tags and display them on his body. He didn’t always want to let people look at them, however, and was shot by the town marshal after biting a mail clerk (Pope, 2011). Having become somewhat of a mascot for the mailmen, it was decided he would be stuffed rather than buried. He was kept in the Albany post office until 1911, at which point he was sent to the Smithsonian Institution. Owney was fittingly commemorated with a postage stamp in 2011, and his likeness also received a restoration to a more lifelike state. 

This newly restored Owney was also safer, since he was originally preserved using arsenic (Blasco, 2011).

See the video below for more about Owney's restoration.

Cisco the dog, preserved by Perpetual Pet

Another form of taxidermy is pet preservation, a moderately active business in the United States which is frequently represented in media, but is in fact less prevalent than it seems. Many pet owners are highly emotionally attached to their pets, and wish to have them in their lives even after their physical death. For some, a memorial is not enough and they want to have the animal itself with them. The pets can be posed actively or as if asleep, and some owners will want to still hold and pet the animals, which can be done if they are well cared for and treated lightly (Perpetual Pet, n.d.). While the practice may seem eccentric to some,  it is actually one of many ways suggested on coping with the loss of a beloved pet. The physical presence is important since so much of the connection humans and animals share is demonstrated through tactile means (Pet Loss, n.d.). Preservation allows people to cuddle their pet and receive the same comfort from them even after they are deceased. The majority of pets people wish to have preserved are dogs or cats, however any sort of animal can be treated to allow their continued physical presence.

The television show American Stuffers (Animal Planet, 2012) focuses on a business which predominantly does this type of preservation; it is a reality-style show, however, so there is just as much, if not more, focus on interpersonal drama and perceived oddity or eccentricity of the customers than on the preservation process itself.

A lizard preserved by Anthony Eddy's Wildlife Studio

-Dylyn Wilkinson