Last year I visited Paris (France not Texas). Whilst there I went to one of my favourite shops ‘Deyrolle’.

This shop is a taxidermy shop. And it is a strong recommend.

For me, as an animal lover, it is a fascinating place. A museum as well as a shop, filled with all sorts of creatures great, small and very very small. Antique dead and fossil dead. There are hundreds of specimens in all sorts of states of being - stuffed animals of all descriptions, heads on walls, bugs and butterflies behind glass, birds with nests and skeletal remains.

Now before you become outraged I need to advise that most of these are not freshly dead nor freshly stuffed creatures. Many are from collections.

Britannica tells me that “Taxidermy may be traced to the ancient custom of preserving trophies of the hunt, but the principal motive for its development into an art was the growth of interest…in natural history and the consequent appearance of both private collections and exhibits in public museums of birds, beasts, and curiosities.”

I myself have some taxidermy specimens of turtles. One was a beloved pet that the owner had preserved after it died. Another is a specimen from a collection.

Do I feel conflicted about having them in my home? Yes, a bit.

Should I bury them? Give them a send off? Maybe one day.

The skull (pictured) is one I found in the paddock of a neighbour. It is part of the remains of a young calf who must have succumbed to a disease. Lay down by the fence and died. Like Burke and Hare from the1800s I have robbed him from his last resting place. Unlike Burke and Hare I didn’t murder him first and then sell his anatomical bits.

Apart from the beauty and intricacy of these animals, birds and insects the thing that really amazed me was the price of the items at Deyrolle. This stuff is really really expensive. Thousands of dollars expensive.

People are prepared to pay a lot of money to buy such creatures from the taxidermy shop.

People are also content to pay plenty to have their own creatures taxidermied. A quick internet search tells me that it costs about $400 to have a head (presumably of a game animal) stuffed and anywhere from $1000-$10,000 and up to have a full animal taxidermied. The process can take many months in preparation. And then voila….here’s Fluffy as a lamp…

I think that I will be content with photos of my loved ones.