basically yes, all taxidermy is bad to me. i'll elaborate and also share the alternate vegan opinion on this (my own opinion is aligned with "moral veganism", but there is an alternate on this which is called "ethical veganism"). my opinion on this is supported by my other politics related to death acceptance, consent, and of course being alterhuman :0]
wait hoooold up ! i want to say that my opinion on pets is also complicated overall but i want to note that i don't think its immoral to keep family animals as taxidermy. i think it's more okay to keep taxidermy of a dead pet than it is to eat meat, or hunt, or get roadkill taxidermy, or wear leather or suede, etc. keeping a dead pet as taxidermy is as close as it comes (imo, right now,) to having ethical taxidermy. obviously the question of the animal's consent is up in the air for me, but it's definitely way cooler to keep Personal Mourning Thing than it is to do any other carnist thing.
also i think fossils are cool. they are probably still as haunted as taxidermy, but at least they're not Meat and at least they're Free from the dirt outside Everywhere , for Free .
sorry this is a long one. im really passionate about anti-speciesism .....
my opinion (+ moral veganism)
i think it's fucked up to own human remains, especially in a private collection; a dead person who donated their body to science could not fathom their body being part of some random fuckass's collection in many decades. the only thing they consented to is being used for education; they did not consent to being sold as an object for profit to be owned by a stranger. i dont think there is a way to ethically own human remains [of a person who is not related to you/did not consent to you owning their remains], so any excuse i could make for owning nonhuman animal remains would be... just that, an excuse. if its wrong to do to a human animal, why is it not wrong to do to a nonhuman animal? (not asking directly. just being thought-provoking. my own answer is that it's wrong to do both because we are all Animal, equal)
there is not really such thing as an ethically sourced product of death. something suffered, died, and then a human saw that death as a way to gain capital. off of the death. directly. nonhuman animals do not know why they were shot, they dont know why they were run over, they dont know why anything bad ever happens to them. why would it matter? does a deer care that it was killed because someone wanted to mount it's skin, or does the deer only care that it's being killed?
an animal which died from being run over by a car suffered excruciating pain until they died from their horrific and unfathomable injuries, the very last thing they ever heard in their life was the sound of cars on a road. the last thing a wild animal ever hears in it's entire life should not be the sound of a highway. the last thing anything hears in it's life should not be a highway.
and then.... some human stranger looked upon their suffering and said "i could make money off this. this would look great as a keychain for my etsy shop."
i dont believe in the idea that an ethical way to "use" an animal is to "use up" every part of them so nothing is "wasted." animals are not objects to use in my opinion, and i dont believe that animals are waste just because a human cannot find a use to assign tothem. that idea is based in human supremacy, and the idea that if an animal is not useful or significant to a human, it is not worthy of respect or life. of course, animals do not exist for human use. animals simply exist.
if i was murdered and my body parts sold on a black market, i would not be relieved to know that "thankfully, every body part was sold and nothing was wasted." i am not waste. no part of me is waste. no person should have the authority to assign me as waste. i would only be relieved if my body was returned to my family in a way that will not cause them farther grief or trauma, i would only be relieved if i was able to have a respectful death.
another thing is that a lot of fur-sellers can just... lie. i follow a therian-coded local shop which sells taxidermy (among other things) and the only thing proving that the fur is ethically sourced is an instagram caption which says "ethically sourced." that's it. someone just... typed it. there's no actual proof that the animal they're selling wasnt poached or fur-farmed. most fur-selling shops are like this. the only thing "proving" that their furs are "ethically sourced" is that they Said It Outloud. i'm not saying every taxidermist is a scammer fur farmer obviously, but i think it's useful to remain skeptical, especially when there are victims involved who cannot speak for themselves, and someone financially profits from their victimhood
EDIT: THIS IS WHAT THE ORIGINAL POST IS REFERENCING, THE FACT THAT THERE'S NOT ACTUALLY A WAY TO KNOW FOR CERTAIN THAT A FUR TAIL DID NOT COME FROM A FUR FARM. it's also referencing how i believe in general that all products of death are bad
there is another aspect to this from the alterhuman perspective, which is that wearing another animal's skin is just that. wearing another person's personhood. it is using Someone and their death as an accessory or as a decoration; not just someone, but someone you claim to be familiar with on a deep level. what if i paid someone to kill you, literally you, abyssal werewolf, stole your skin, and then said "this is MY skin, actually. i bought it, and now, your face is my face. abyssal werewolf does not exist and never existed because now it is me. the animal which came before me never existed to me." not only have you become an object for my entertainment and will, but you have also lost every single ounce of personhood because somebody else decided "you're dead now, which means my existence is more important than yours ever was, so much so, that i will never remember you, i will refuse to acknowledge you ever existed and replace your existence with my own identity." and plastered my identity all over you. in every way, this would mean you no longer exist. there is no "you". there is just me. you have been erased as an individual, forcefully forgotten. i would never consider your friends, your family, your childhood, your favourite food, your favourite memory, or how much you suffered when i paid someone to slaughter you. i would not wish this for a human person, i would not wish this for my nonhuman friends, so i would not wish it for a nonhuman animal. to recognize a nonhuman animal's sentience, self, and personhood, is the bare minimum. because i am also nonhuman, and i have sentience, self, and personhood.
i can understand from a nonhuman person perspective that, once you leave your body behind, you dont care anymore. but no matter what, your corpse does not deserve to be desecrated or used for capital gain, period.
honestly i'd be kinda annoyed if i died in a car accident & then some random 12 year old did quads for their tiktok, pretending to be literally me by literally wearing what remains of me, and then after 3 months my semi-eternal resting place was the bottom of their closet. no offense to quad-doers, nothing but respect for my troops! but. yknow. must admit, it's not an ideal situation. the ideal situation is probably decomposing peacefully and being eaten by other animals until there's Nothing; the only fathomable option
another way to put this, i would not buy my [alterhuman] tumblr mutual's mummified remains and pretend that that person is me. even, especially, if they died in a car accident; suffering alone for who-knows how long until death met them. that is horrific. even if their death was related to parasites, an infection, cancer, any natural cause you can think of is not devoid of suffering.
if i am okay with skinning a nonhuman animal and wearing their skin, but i would not do that to a tumblr mutual, that means i must see my mutuals as something above/different than their True Identity. that's also Wrong. i take all of my nonhuman friends extremely seriously as their nonhuman identities. i would not harm them, so i refuse to harm their kin, because to me there is no difference between them and their kin, and i refuse to make excuses which harm their kin (them.)
discussion of racism in the paragraph below.
speaking of mummies, have you heard of the victorian "unwrapping parties"? where rich white english victorians would buy dead human people who had been stolen from their graves in their home, grab a drink, fuck up the mummified person's deeply significant burial items, laugh about it, and then sometimes grind up those humans to use in mummy brown paint? that was pretty fucked up, right? that was pretty fucked up. it wasnt fucked up because we "lost significant archaeological evidence," it's fucked up because it's racist, destructive, supremacist. because humans ascribe very deep cultural, spiritual, personal meaning to death and burial. that was a Person who probably learned about death from a young age, and for however long they lived, they understood their death to be a specific way. they, and people important to them consented to their death being handled in a specific way. this was important to them. it should be important to us all, not something ever worth destruction.
the racism aspect is obviously that the mummified people were racialized -> dehumanized -> objectified, thought of as lesser-than human, and this racist dehumanization is what lead to the destruction of them, their culture, family, etc, by whites. racialized people across all ages have been compared to nonhuman animals or even below animals. if we view the extreme violence racialized people face under the veil of dehumanization as unacceptable, why is it acceptable to do to others [animals]? (it's not acceptable.)
(btw pleeease read about Benjamin Lay. i love him im such a fan! he was one of the first white slavery abolitionists, and later in life he became one of the first (by modern definitions) vegans of history which is deeply supported by his anti-racism and his spirituality!! also he's disabled and married another disabled lady. he's just so fucking cool. link to video essay about little benjamin here. trigger warning because the essayist does a bad accent sometimes and it's toxic-levels of cringe)
ethical vegans will not support factory farming, but thinks it's fine to buy leather coats as long as they're secondhand (therefore, not one bit of money is going towards supporting the Death Machine.) the difference between moral veganism and ethical veganism is that ethical veganism has an emphasis on harm reduction and anti-suffering/anti-torture, while moral veganism has (all that and) an emphasis on anti-objectification. to a moral vegan, it is not enough to simply not torture and kill animals, they must also not be objectified because objectification is what leads all speciesist acts. on a larger scale, objectification (dehumanization) is what leads to all forms of oppression, therefore all forms of objectification must be completely eliminated.
on the first few months of my vegan journey, i was more aligned with ethical veganism. i dont think its a terrible opinion to have, if i was an ethical vegan i might still be able to go to some aquariums LOL. i think it's possible to be vegan and have a leather couch you got from the thrift store. personally, not gonna sit on the skin and flesh couch haunted by a hundred cows, but i understand why someone has this opinion still or might want to keep certain preserved skins. typically once someone becomes an ethical vegan, they wont buy new leathers or furs at all, but will keep any they previously had. i dont think ethical vegans go to hell or anything, i'm just a little beyond that point now :0)
even though i consider myself a moral vegan this is unfortunately where i am. i admit i still own 2 furs and 1 leather. this is a failure for me. i'm accepting more and more that "my" tails need to be buried, and my coat... sigh..... i hate wearing it anyways, all i can think of is how ed-gein-ish it is for me to be wearing skin. so icky LOL. maybe i'll contact a seamstress and ask if they can replace the leather on the jacket with brown fabric? if that's not possible the only option is to also bury it. this may seem extreme. i guess it is :0). donating it to a secondhand shop isn't an option because, yknow, i'd be continuing the animal's objectification and allowing someone else to use them for profit (even though no money will support their slaughter ever again, thats not enough for me). which is the whole point of my dilemma, yknow, to Not do that, so, when i get rid of them it'll be burial. (burial because i dont want a human to find them and take them home, and i dont know if/what chemicals were used to preserve the skin so i also dont want another animal eating it and getting poisoned. decomposing deep in the earth it'll be.)
losing "my" tails is no loss to me compared to the suffering and loss of life the individuals have already faced. i'm just gonna thrift some big fuzzy pillows and sew my own tail :0) My tail. really, actually, Mine. i think that will hold more significance to me than any real fur ever could. even typing about creating my own tail with my hands as a gift to myself is making me emotional.... the human parts of me using tools to create a gift for the nonhuman parts of me.... ohhh what greater show of unity and self love could exist... ohh.... [....spiritual yearning....]
the "ethical taxidermy" i will forever own is some of my cat Ussa's teeth and his whiskers <3 to create my own ethical taxidermy, when Ussa dies and is cremated to ashes, some of his ashes will be sewn into a look-alike plush and i'll attach his real whiskers to the plush's face :0) so cute
to finish off this uh. essay.... oops.... i just want to throw out there that of course vegans like us get accused often of being pushy... i have no intentions to be pushy at all. my opinion has changed a lot since i became vegan in september/october 2024, and it will probably change many times more through the next few years. your opinion will also probably change many times (this is a good thing!). wherever you're at right now is cool. not buying beef burgers is definitely the most important part. i hope you learned something or i made you think in a new way at least x0)
also, thanks for the opportunity to yap and howl about this.... im very passionate about this as u can see hehe. hopefully this is coherent LOL
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