Portions of this book were written in and inspired by the company of taxidermy in museums, galleries, and archives across America and England: from the large institutional collections at the Nature Lab at Rhode Island School of Design, the Smithsonian, the Manchester Museum, London's Natural History Museum, and Oxford's Natural History Museum to the quirky Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, a taxidermy-crammed basement collection in Hackney buried beneath an absinthe bar.

Recently, I returned to Oxford's Natural History Museum—that treasure trove of taxidermy. I was delighted to find that the Museum encourages its visitors to touch some of its taxidermy specimens: a cute and very soft fox perched on the Welcome Desk, and two big brown bears flanked either side of the entrance to the main exhibition hall. My pleasure in touching taxidermy here was only surpassed by something I overheard while wandering through the upper galleries: a little boy loudly and passionately announced, “That's DISGUSTING!” in response to seeing a case of stuffed birds. I continued to wander through the museum, still savoring his response out of admiration for the beastly freedom of it in breaking the otherwise quiet, breathless space of the museum. After all, the wild child, as Kalpana Rahita Seshadri puts it, is the one who “surprises the law” (165).

My delight was sustained by a second encounter, also between a child and taxidermy. Just before exiting the museum, as I stood petting the taxidermied fox, a little girl and her mother came up to join. Despite the mother's cooings that “it won't bite,” the girl stubbornly refused to listen to her. The girl seemed paralyzed by the taxidermy, surely caught in what Kristeva calls fear's “fluid haze” (6), and refused to touch the fox, as if it might spring to life under her fingers and bite. These fleeting encounters remind us that something of the negative sticks to our experiences with taxidermy; sometimes, even realistic, neutrally staged mounts in institutional settings, such as a natural history museum, can still conjure up those “ugly feelings” of disgust, fear, and anxiety.