It is salutary to consider that the ultimate intended destination for Cecil the lion – and all his hunted companions – is to hang on a wall.
Salutary, since taxidermied specimens now adorn hip galleries, restaurants and homes, from east London to Brooklyn and Barcelona. Stuffed animals have become the lingua franca of a contemporary gothic, an eerie, Game of Thrones-ish design evocation of the mythical, the eldritch and the cabinet of curiosities.
What’s the fine line between righteous indignation at Cecil’s fate, and our own assimilation of animals as decoration? As fur continues to contaminate fashion catwalks, and Gucci makes goat-hair slippers that resemble guinea pigs, artists stuff animals and install them in galleries as an ironic comment on the human condition. Damien Hirst has much to answer for. In London’s Soho and elsewhere, taxidermy classes offer the ability to stuff your own “ethically sourced” mice for sixty quid, or a crow for £180.
There’s more than an echo of our colonial past in this trend (as some commentators have noted, Cecil’s own name appears to have been inspired by Cecil Rhodes, the imperial rogue of Rhodesia). It is evocative of Victorian museums, which were stuffed with such specimens. In the UK you only have to wander down the corridors of the Natural History Museum in London, the even more quirky Grant Museum, part of the University of London, or any number of local collections such as Bournemouth’s Natural Science Society to witness row after row of glassy-eyed and threadbare birds and beasts.
The Natural History Museum makes a political point of its rather tatty taxidermy, noting that, in the 21st century, it would not be ethical or even possible to replace its pangolins, quaggas and thylacines. It wasn’t so sensitive in the 1930s, when it commissioned the biggest game hunt of all, sending out a Norwegian whaler to harpoon a blue whale with the intention of displaying it in their Whale Hall. It took the museum’s resident taxidermist, Percy Stammwitz, to point out the impracticalities of the proposition.
Nor do the niceties of this question seem far removed from a colonial mindset that hunted human beings such as the San people in South Africa and Aboriginal Australians. Truganini, an indigenous Tasmanian from the mid-19th century, lived in fear of becoming a museum exhibit after her death. As indeed she did. In the South Seas, the demand was so high for eclectic specimens that slavers ordered human subjects to be decoratively tattooed, then killed, before preserving their remains for sale. Back in London, philosopher Jeremy Bentham, inspired by Maori methods of preserving human heads, ordered that his corpse should be stuffed after death, and his organs displayed in jars at his feet.
Bentham would have had something to say on this subject. His utilitarian world-view equated the abuse of humans with the abuse of animals; the enslavement of both were equally unacceptable. “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but, ‘Can they suffer?’,” he wrote in 1780. “Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?”
What do we want animals to be? YouTube performers or emblems of wonder? The storm over Cecil the lion continues to produce understandable, if self-righteous, indignation. It is somewhat ironic that protesters arriving on the doorstep of dentist-turned-global villain Walter Palmer leave behind piles of stuffed animals, soft-toy simulacra of those sawdust-filled specimens, themselves symbolic of our anthropomorphic appropriation of the natural world. Meanwhile – adding layer upon postmodern layer to the story – Cecil is himself turned into a Beanie toy.
Yet out of this mediated sentiment may have come a greater good. Like President Obama’s final declaration of his environmental credentials, Cecil’s story might just possibly indicate that we have reached a tipping point, where outrage tips over into game changer for the game hunters, in the way that animal circuses and dolphinariums are now widely regarded as unacceptable. The Dodo website is already declaring that Cecil the Lion and Tilikum the orca have “changed the world”.
Is this that historical marker? Are we at that moment of change? Or will we continue to tell animals to get stuffed?
