I’m no animal lover.  But when attending an event at the Harvard Club recently I looked up at the legendary elephant head mounted in the Hall, an animal shot by Teddy Roosevelt, and wondered, “Why?"  It’s been frozen, cruelly, in a noble pose, with its head lifted upwards and its trunk unfurled.  Another guest explained that the head had been preserved with arsenic, but after pieces began crumbling down into people’s drinks it was removed, refurbished and reinstalled.  What is it all for?

Taxidermy has become the decor of choice for downtown, heritage-themed haunts like Freemans and Home Sweet Home.  But stuffing a small bird or feline to stick on the shelf seems entirely different than slicing off an elephant head and and hanging it on the wall.  And preserving animal skins in earlier times, when it was difficult to travel to zoos and museums and circulate photographs, was a different, nobler project.  At Deyrolle, the famed taxidermy shop in Paris, a fire in 2008 destroyed some of the most significant pieces and threatened the centuries-old business.  It was a tragedy.  But, when looking at photographs of the charred animals and birds, captured in arresting, life-like poses, it smacks of divine retribution.  There’s little about taxidermy that makes sense.