A recent television commercial for cheese depicts an elderly couple feverishly overhauling their adult son’s bedroom. Their inspiration seems to have been 70’s motel décor: jaundiced floral wallpaper, a brown and yellow bedspread, a Hawaiian flavoured lamp, various tacky paintings, pillows, and knick-knacks, and an enormous taxidermied moose head mounted above the bed. The parents hoped to finally get their son to leave home by redecorating his room, but their plans fail: the son would rather - literally and aesthetically – eat cheese.

[Here’s the link for those of you without a television: [http://www.cossette.com/affiche/works/affiche3.asp?lg=en&idRealisation=3274]

While the mammoth moose head dominates the room, it blends seamlessly into the decoration scheme. You might even say that the moose matches the bedspread. Wall coverings, interior design, and lamps go in and out of style, but when does nature become tacky? Surely the moose head is a piece of nature and not part of the world of fashion. Or is it?

In contrast to a trophy head displayed in the home of the hunter who actually killed the beast, when rummaged from yard sales, purchased from a legion, or found in an alley, hunting trophies lose their significance as souvenirs. Strangely enough, as the details of the kill are lost or forgotten, the head also loses its connection with the natural world. The trophy is no longer a particular creature shot by a particular hunter, and without the hunter’s memory of the living animal, the head becomes just another cast-off in a junk store.

But as cast-offs, heads take on an entirely new meaning. In the North American imagination second-hand trophies have long been synonymous with all things hick, kitsch, or tongue-in-cheek. Dusty heads and antlers mounted in restaurants, gas stations, and bowling alleys are as much a part of the backwater-American landscape as plastic pink flamingos and velvet paintings of Elvis. Like the cheese commercial’s moose, the heads are not really part of nature anymore, but have become belovedly crass relics of an outdated or outmoded lifestyle. What remains is that particularly American flavour of cheese: the Daniel Boone aesthetic. Part tall tale, part Old West, part diner décor, the Boone aesthetic belongs to log cabins and hunting lodges, red plaid shirts, lamps made from deer hooves, and of course tacky taxidermy.

Perhaps the king of the Boone aesthetic is the jackalope, which you can buy on ebay for about 60$ US. A mock totem of the Old West known as the “warrior rabbit,” the jackalope is a rare breed of jackrabbit endowed with antlers indigenous to Douglas, Wyoming. Stories of its particularities abound. The jackalope has an uncanny knack of mimicking the human voice and in the old days was known to join in around the campfire to sing sad cowboy songs. It is highly aggressive, but can always be mollified with whisky. You can also purchase a jackalope hunting licence from the Douglas Chamber of Commerce although regulations stipulate that hunting can only occur on June 31^st between midnight and 2am and the hunter must have an IQ lower than 72. [read more about jackalopes +]

While purchasing an actual head is perhaps only for connoisseurs of kitsch with the darkest irony, the Boone aesthetic lays at the heart of several plastic adaptations of the traditional hunting trophy. The most well known is Billy Bass, a plastic fish mounted on a wooden plaque, which was suddendly in every hardware or gag store. Press a button, and Billy flaps his tail and croons out “Take Me to the River” or “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”The idea of a fishing or hunting trophy - that is, an animal which was ripped from life, shot, stuffed, and put on display - contentedly singing is supremely ridiculous, and Billy had an admittedly short lived gag appeal, but the mockery has recently been repackaged in the form of Buck the Animated Deer, a plastic replica of deer’s head which will jovially lead a group of drunkards in a delightful karaoke session.

The difference between Billy and Buck and the jackalope is, of course, that the jackalope or rather the jackrabbit was once a live animal that has been shot and stuffed. Yet, such harsh realities are softened by the mail order delivery (no hunting necessary), the hoax legend, and add-on antlers. Whether plastic or not, the comic take on a hunter’s tall tale squelches in the pleasures of bad taste, and most of us – even if we are against hunting – cannot help but smirk. It is this smirk that the advertising agents for the Dairy Farmers of Canada were counting on. Reactions to the commercial’s moose head are not “disgusting: you’ve killed a moose,” but rather “disgusting: what bad décor.” We interpret the moose head not as a piece of nature but as a pleasurably tacky decorator item: a triumph of the Daniel Boone aesthetic.