Assignment 6

 When I had first started reading the article, I felt a little confused on what she was actually trying to get at. I read it several of times and still didn't understand, until we had discussed it in a group. After listening to different theories or opinions, I started to pick up on things I hadn't noticed before. When I first read the article I felt that is was a journalist tone I was getting. I thought it was a journalist tone due to the fact that so much information was presented in the beginning and there was little to no emotion coming from Orlean herself. Orlean didn't use much emotion throughout the whole essay, which made me to believe she was forced to do it. In the beginning it was boring because you don't want to have to read something that someone was forced to do because then it would have no emotion to it. It would then make the writer themselves not care about it. I never really cared much about taxidermy and thought it was just hunters just going out to kill animals. But Orlean’s essay had informed me that, there was much more to it than just killing the animals. But after reading Orlean’s article I found out that some of the animals died of natural death, then the taxidermist’s would take the body and mantle them into a pose. A lot of people would just assume that they would kill the animals due to the fact that mostly deer pop up in the images and hunters kneeling next to the deer with his or her gun in the other hand, stating it was a good kill, and then mantling them up on the wall. Due to that knowledge I don't see taxidermy the same way I use too, which changed the way I felt and thought about it and also Orlean. As I read further into the text I thought it had changed when I started to notice some of her emotions coming through and feeling the passion that the people had for taxidermy. "Taxidermists seem to make little distinction between loving animals that are alive and loving ones that are not. “I love deer," one of the champions in the whitetail division said to me. "They're my babies."(Orlean) Even though this person would most likely come off as a crazy person it shows how much love she has for animals alive or dead. But on the other hand some would consider her obsessed with the animal, like a “cat-lady” having so many cats and caring so much for them. Should we expect her to become a taxidermist? She is no different from the “deer-lady.”

The very last paragraph of the essay was the one that caught my attention the most it was basically the last sentence talking about a still born Bengal-tiger cub. "Otherwise, the room was Biblical 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." (Orlean) The words that crushed my heart "Alive-looking although it had never lived." As an animal lover one of my favorite animals so happened to be tigers and I felt my heart break into two. I also think that , that last sentence also shows the Orleans feelings towards Taxidermy, even though it doesn’t have the word “I” in there , but the structure of the sentence made it seem like it was a personal sentence coming from the heart.