Taxidermy had its heyday in the nineteenth century, when an advance in preservation, a general fascination with the natural world , and rapid exploration of the world colluded to create cathedrals of taxidermied birds and animals. But even natural history museums are beginning to question the ethics of exhibiting dead nature. I recently visited the Natural History Museum in London, one of the oldest and largest collections in the world of all things natural. Scattered among the animals in their glass cases were apologetic signs explaining not only why the animals were so old and musty but also why the museum displays taxidermy at all.

What the signs are really saying is “don’t blame us; we didn’t kill them.” While the curators may no longer mount animals for public display, the museum, like all natural history museums, is constantly increasingly its collections of animal and bird skins and body parts, which are stored in temperature and light controlled cabinets in the backrooms. Museums, especially national centres such as London’s, still have the same mandate to ensure their collections contain as complete a record of the natural world as possible in part to identify any variation particular species might exhibit, changes in migratory behaviour, for example, coloration patterns, egg size, or in their physiological systems.

What is on display for the general public in the taxidermy halls, however, is the museum’s historical collections, which is to say, what is actually on view is not so much nature itself but another era’s vision of the natural world. The apologetic signs allow the museum to present a fresher, more ecologically sensitive outlook while still displaying the musty relics of a past generation. The effect is to turn the museum into a museum of cultural history, which in turn highlights the shifting meaning of the natural world.

Certainly natural history museums are experiencing an identity crisis. Taxidermy makes us squeamish; it is seen by many as a gratuitous spoilage of nature, and museums with nineteenth-century roots have been criticised as complicit with the colonial project. Their collections have been branded as an imperial archives of the natural world, materially displaying to an eager public the empire’s success and geographic reach by means of the stuffed shells of lions, birds of paradise, and koala. Natural history museums are also struggling legitimise their existence in a post-Discovery channel era, when wildlife videos can bring living, breathing, fighting, mating creatures into everyone home, no shooting or stuffing required.

Captain Cook's Mamo collected around 1778. Image taken
from The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures of the
Harvard Museum of Natural History. Perhaps it is because of these dilemmas that museum are increasingly presenting their taxidermy as cultural artefacts. A stuffed finch isn’t half so grisly if we know it was collected by Charles Darwin or some other notable naturalist. The Harvard Museum of Natural History has a pair of golden pheasants sent to George Washington in 1786 from the aviary of Louis XVI, a black woodpecker shot and stuffed by Meriwether Lewis on what has now become known as the famous Lewis and Clarke expedition, and an extinct black bird with yellow tail feather known as the mamo collected during Captain Cook’s third and fatal voyage to Hawaiian in 1779 – Cook was stabbed to death during fighting between the Hawaiians and his crew. The stories behind the specimens and renown of their collectors enrich the cultural value of the taxidermied birds immensely. But are the birds now documents of human endeavour? If “real” nature is something out there, beyond human contact and human history, the stuffed peasants, the woodpecker, and the mamo seem more like cultural artefacts than as pieces of nature.

The current ecological perspective emphasizes nature as a source of intrinsic value, truth, and authenticity. Nature is wild and pristine, untouched and timeless. It is unique, nonreplicable, prior to human culture, and uncorrupted by human desires. In short, nature in recent years has come to represent everything that our urban modern society is not. While a walk through a city park can be pleasant, real nature is far beyond city limits. It is there, surrounded by alpine meadows, violent rivers, or majestic forests that we find refuge from the turmoil of urbanism, commercialism, capitalism, and mass production. Out there, beyond any physical evidence of human contamination, nature will save our souls.

The extinct blaauwbok or blue antelope. Image taken from
Rosamond Purcell's book of photographs Swift as a Shadow:
Extinct and Endangered AnimalsMuseums are also highlighting the extinct and endangered animals in their collections as a means of accentuating their cultural and societal importance on a global and historical level. Tasmanian devils, great auks, passenger pigeons, paradise parrot, Labrador duck, quaggas, the Cape and Barbary lion have all disappeared from the world except for those which were taxidermied and preserved in museums. They have lingered on for decades and sometimes tens of decades, immortal and musty, bereft of their clan. What are they now but dark moral lessons of nature’s fragility, that is to say, documents of human transgression. Extinct animals are an extreme example, but can nature ever escape from human meaning? Is the natural world ever just nature?

Is the nature Out There, beyond city limits really beyond culture? Or is this vision of a pristine untouched eden a stance of anti-urbanism, anti-industrialism, and frequently anti-human? The more vociferously claims against human modification and manipulation of nature, the more those stretches of wildness become domesticated parks, managed, controlled, protected, and ultimately without meaning without human cultural politics and the more pieces of nature - killed, collected, stuffed, and displayed - become not documents of nature but moral lessons, artefacts from a human life, relics from past generations.