This year, a woman from Dundee posted an unusual ad for her dog, Snoopy, on Facebook’s Marketplace. The unusual thing about it was that the dog was dead. “Had our dog turned into a rug when he died,” the ad read. “Treasured family pet. Has to be sold as new dog keeps trying to hump it. Lookin for 100 pound ONO. Very cosy and unusual piece.”
Cosy is questionable; unusual was an understatement. Snoopy’s flattened form and smiling face were considered so shocking that editors on the Telegraph and Argus and the Dundee Evening Telegraph put warnings at the top of their stories. By then the ad had already been howled off Facebook and the owner of the dead pet had backed away into anonymity.
What do you do with a dead pet? What is the appropriate farewell to these creatures that psychologists call “self-objects”, so familiar they are almost a part of you, sighing sympathetically while you weep, cavorting idiotically, loving you uncritically. How do you cope without the pet whose lifespan encompassed long-outgrown childhoods and that your kids loved sometimes more than they loved their parents?
And why, when we make desirable items out of leather, and admire stuffed animals in natural history museums and pass the mounted head of a stag without a second glance, why does turning this pet into an animal skin seem so ... wrong?
Psychologists can explain how we love the way a pet offers uncritical, uncalculating affection in an otherwise conditional world. They talk of pets as witnesses to our lives. I’m with them on that. More than a year after the second of our border terriers died, her earthly remains, along with her mother’s from a couple of years earlier, are still boxed up just as they came from the pet crematorium. They live under a chair, out of sight, but not in any way finished with. For a start, we have yet to summon the courage to say goodbye. And we can’t decide how to do it: burial in the garden, or scattering along the way of a favourite walk? Casual and informal, or with readings and tearful recollections? This is what they call disenfranchised grief.
Sam Carr, a psychology lecturer at the University of Bath who is interested in animals and attachment theory, says pets are “there in every page of your narrative. When you lose that kind of figure, there’s a trauma.” It is a kind of bereavement, which demands some formal response. But there isn’t one. “I’ve never met anyone who either skinned or stuffed their pet,” says Carr, “but I can imagine it offered some kind of respectful way of commemorating their life, maybe a tribute or a celebration.”
George Jamieson, a taxidermist who works near Edinburgh, describes good taxidermy as “a frozen moment. It’s as if the soul of the animal is still there. It’s somewhere between not being able to let go and wanting to keep something of what was.”
Jamieson used to stuff pets, but now he finds it’s too intensive, trying to make a realistic portrait of an animal that is already dead. He doesn’t say so, but I’m left with the impression that people who want their dead pets stuffed are psychologically needy in a way that someone who deals with dead animals for a living finds difficult to handle.
Victorians loved taxidermy. Death was a daily threat and the death of a loved one commonplace. Sentimentality seems to have been a way of holding fear close in order to control it. Walter Potter’s Museum of Curiosities exhibited homemade anthropomorphic dioramas of stuffed white rabbits dressed as small schoolchildren sitting in rows in a classroom. Others featured kittens at tea and animal weddings. It was a hugely successful visitor attraction in Sussex (and, more recently, at the short-lived Brooklyn Morbid Anatomy Museum). At Bítov Castle in Moravia, whole rooms are dedicated to the deceased pets of the castle’s last owner, Baron Georg Haas. Unlike the clumsy realisations in the Potter museum, the baron’s dogs, mainly terriers, lie heads up, ears cocked, poised to leap up after a rabbit.
A pet, by definition, is an animal without a purpose, kept for love and amusement. They have been kept since at least classical times – we know because their lives were recorded on vases and stellae as lovingly then as they are photographed and painted and memorialised now. Pet owners have been chastised for their excessive attention to their pets in the face of the suffering of the world for just as long. And the negotiation between the pet as an animal (and therefore a creature without a soul, ultimately lesser than a human) and the pet as a family member, which is part of the everyday business of being a pet owner, isn’t resolved by the pet’s death.
Yet there has never been any cultural accommodation with the peculiar nature of our attachment to some animals and not others. Most western thought divides all humans from all animals. So although it is widely acknowledged that we can love animals as much as or even more than humans, western society has never developed cultural forms that help us to manage the trauma of animal loss.
On the whole, pet lovers who do anything choose burial. Some people really splash out. Pet cemeteries’ offers range from statues and trees to online tribute sites. Frederick the Great, the Prussian enlightenment monarch, built himself a summer palace at Potsdam, where he buried his beloved greyhounds and marked their lives with exquisite calligraphy on marble tablets, and when he died he was buried with them. Peggy Guggenheim, one of the few people since who could match both Frederick’s wealth and his love for his dogs, is interred with her terriers at her Venice palazzo.
There is even the “undeath” option: a cloning service is now available in South Korea. More often, though, people try to cheat the fact of death by preserving the likeness of the living. Ronald, the horse that carried Lord Cardigan in the charge of the Light Brigade, has been split up into four feet (inkwells scattered around stately homes in Britain) while his head and tail remain at his master’s home, Deene Park.
But something about our sensitivities has changed. The animal rug – let’s call it the Dundee option – is now on the outer edge of commonplace. Although not as far out as the Dutch artist Bart Jansen, who turned his dead cat, Orville, into a drone. Jansen insists he loved his cat, and denies there was an element of revenge in turning him into furry drone even though, when thwarted, Orville was a biter.
About the same time as Snoopy went on sale in Dundee, I found an exquisite, unmarked kingfisher that must have flown into a window. The russet and turquoise streak that I have only glimpsed once or twice on the periphery of my vision was lying just outside my house. The desire to preserve it was overwhelming – not an image, but the creature itself, so rarely seen and still more rarely touched. Without really thinking, I found a taxidermist nearby and delivered the small body into her freezer, from where at sometime in the future I hope it will be resurrected. This, I realise, is what Damien Hirst meant when he called his shark the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living.
Hirst is not the only contemporary artist who is fascinated by the dead/aliveness represented by taxidermy. Nature morte, the French expression for still life, works better as a literal translation. The artist Polly Morgan uses taxidermy to explore what was called in one of her exhibitions “the poetics of strangeness”. She and Hirst were both represented in a show of 18 contemporary artists in Rhode Island last year.
Of course, they used wild animals. We may try to avoid thinking about the reality of stuffing a wild animal, but it is not – yet – an uncomfortable idea. My stuffed kingfisher will not shock.
According to Clare Fowler, the taxidermist I took my kingfisher to, people who want their pets stuffed often come to her as I did, in a state of unanticipated bereavement. She thinks that taxidermy serves as a waypost in the process of grieving. The ones who call her in advance – she works in deep, rural Dorset – because they are going to have their pet put down, usually change their minds after they have understood what taxidermy entails.
The day I go, she is working on an old lady’s pet cat, the second she has done for this client. It lies on her workbench – or at least the cat’s head, still attached to its empty skin, lies there looking mildly surprised. Fowler will make a fibreglass mould from the body that the fur once encased, and then, after preserving the skin, stretch it back over the artificial form. This one will be a sleeping cat. “I like to do them sleeping. It looks passive, and I think it’s less difficult for the psyche. Sleeping ones are lovely and most people agree and go with it.”
Not all pet owners want a grief object. Fowler has mounted the head of a young man’s terrier on a shield. It was an unusual request, but it didn’t upset her. “Some people would be shocked, but no one would think twice about a deer or a game animal. I do get a few people attacking me on Facebook. But people want it done. And I love animals. I think they [her critics] must think I’ve skinned them alive or something, but I love fur and feather and this is about keeping that beauty.”
Her worst experience was a woman who first arranged for her cat to be stuffed and then asked her to take it out of the storage freezer and thaw it because she had bought a magical incantation on the internet that was guaranteed to bring it back to life. It didn’t work.
And then there was Elfie. Elfie was a cat who was fulfilling an important attachment role for her two owners, Rachel and Matthew, whose relationship was going through a rough patch. Elfie was killed on the road when Matthew was caring for her. “I thought, what would Rach want – I know, I’ll get her stuffed.”
The news of Elife’s death was broken to Rachel. In secret, Elfie’s unscathed body was rushed into a freezer, and then transported in an insulated box to Fowler in Dorset. Nine months later, the job was done. By then Rachel and Matthew were happily back together, and Rachel knew about the preservation project. “Rach was over the moon,” according to Matthew, and – this must be why they are together – she says: “I thought it was the most romantic thing ever.”
The not-dead Elfie sits alert at the top of the stairs. “She’s been through it a bit, she looks a bit older,” Matthew and Rachel agree. “Some people jump and shriek. The new cat is a bit puzzled. But we don’t get a big negative reaction. I know a lot of people don’t have taxidermy in their house – but we love it.”
For nearly a decade, up until about 2012, the British artist David Shrigley used pet dogs and cats, stuffed, often standing anthropomorphically on their back legs holding placards saying: “I am dead”. It was an exploitation of the transgressive idea of stuffing a family member. Shrigley sees the pieces as something between black humour and a conversational gambit about the nature of death. And life.
Since he acquired a puppy five years ago, Shrigley has abandoned using pets (although, he adds quickly, he never hurt an animal in his earlier work). He says he wants his work to be more positive (his was the thumbs-up on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square last year). Recently, struck by how the lambs gambolling outside his bedroom window were playing just like his puppy had, he stopped eating meat entirely.
“Taxidermy is such a weird thing,” he says. “It’s supposed to be a representation of life. But it’s a representation of death.”
Odder still is that as the number of Britons who, like Shrigley, take up vegetarianism rises (6% now), so does the passion for pets and for unusual, unexpected ways of preserving their memory.
