"LifeLike"

"LifeLike"

“Lifelike”

After reading the article known as “Lifelike,” I felt a little disturbed by it. The article described how the author of the article felt and saw at Taxidermy Championship. I had no clue what a Taxidermy Championship was so I had done some research and had looked it up on Google (Google is great). Taxidermy is the art of preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of dead animals for either scientific study or just for show. In this case due to the article a lot of it is done only for show. Which I felt kind of disturbing…

I had a very hard time understanding what the author’s purpose was. It seemed like the author enjoyed the craftsmanship of the dead animals but and the same time felt a little bit of disturbance and a little saddened. In the beginning of the article she goes on about the way thetaxidermist talk amongst one another. She had introduce a website “Taxidermy.net” and found some statements that I found pretty disturbing. “I am in need of several pair of frozen goat feet!”, “Hi! I have up to 300 sets of goat feet and up to 1000 set of sheep feet per month. Drop me an email at frozencritters.com ....or give me a call and we can discuss your needs.”. Those two statements had really sent chills down my spine. I mean how weird is it to have “300 sets” of goat feet frozen? I believe that she admires how much these taxidermists put into the mantle but I also feel like she is saddened by it. I felt that moment of sadness in the last sentence of the article. ”Otherwise, the room was Biblically tranquil, the lion at last lying down with the Corsican lamb, the family of jackdaws in everlasting, unrequited pursuit of a big green beetle, and the stillborn Bengal-tiger cub magically revived, its face in an eternal snarl, alive-looking although it had never lived.”  The very last statement, “Alive-looking although it had never lived” At this point she was referring to the baby Bengal-tiger cub. That was the moment where I had felt the sadness. If we were animals and killed as a young cub how would we feel being killed to only be shown off to others?

Although I am uncertain about her motive or purpose, I still felt that interested yet then quickly turned to sadness feeling. She started out the article as a information and an exclusive seat to see what taxidermy is all about. That was when I felt interested but then that last statement as I mentioned before made it become sad. 


Questions
1.) How was your reaction to the text, and what do you think the authors purpose was?
2.) Does being an animal lover make you rethink what is going on in this text?