The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie

Enlivened through Memory: Hunters and Hunting Trophies

Gar ry Marvin Enlivened through Memory Hunters and Hunting Trophies A ll of the animals explored in this volume have had afterlives that are longer, and more complex, than those of their species counterparts which died naturally, decomposed, or were eaten by other animals, or which were killed by humans and maybe eaten by them. Some of the animals discussed here, perhaps captured in the wild, did, once, have a natural life and were, once, wildlife. All of them, though (with the exception of the hen harrier), had cultural lives (albeit a short one in the case of the Thames Whale); lives lived in the presence of or with humans. They all had public lives which are now continued as afterlives in public, civic spaces, and it is fitting that the recording or recapturing of such lives is termed biography—life writing—for these were lives that were known. In my contribution, I explore the afterlives of animals that begin when they become the focus of human interest and attention in their natural habitat and when a hunter decides that a particular animal is huntable and killable. What I am interested in here is what the hunter seeks in the process, in the relationship with a wild animal, that brings about the commencement of its afterlife and gives value to it as a trophy. Although each animal, now represented as a trophy, might have been alive for many years before its fatal encounter with a hunter, the biography of that wild life is not captured in the trophy, for it is unknown. They had individual lives, but they had no specific, individual biographies prior to the moment of being selected for death by the Enlivened through Memory | 203 hunter. With their deaths, each animal becomes a significant individual, each becomes important for what they once were, and how they once were, as they were hunted. At the end of their life, a story can be told about that life; they can have a biography, albeit a short one, and this biography as an afterlife becomes inextricably tied to the autobiography of the hunter. The afterlives of most of the animals discussed in this volume have two aspects—how they lived when alive and how they lived on after death. The afterlives of hunted animals that have become trophies are somewhat different. How they actually lived, prior to being hunted, is irrecoverable—although it is perhaps imaginable. What is significant is how, at the end of their lives, they were brought into a relationship with a particular hunter. This relationship was not willed or sought out by the animal; but neither were any of the other relationships described by others here. It is, however, the creation of a particular relationship, through the gradual engagement of the hunter with the hunted, that is celebrated in the afterlives of hunted animals. This is not a celebration of how the animal lived; rather it can be interpreted as a celebration of the process of how the hunter was able to bring about its death. Such a relationship is a deeply personal one between the hunter and the hunted, and it is appropriate, or perhaps culturally significant, that the taxidermied trophy does not begin its cultural life in a public space but rather in the home, the private space, of the hunter. The trophy also begins a life in a collection, but in a collection that is very different from a collection of taxidermied animals in a museum. What unites the animals in a hunter’s collection is not that of any scientific or taxonomic ordering; rather it is that the collection is linked to the autobiography of their hunter. Fundamental to the creation of such a collection is that all the individuals have been hunted by that hunter, and they have become his or her animals. What is crucial here is not that trophies are possessed but how they have become possessed by the hunter; the manner of their acquisition is inextricably tied to their hunter. As I explore in this essay, it is not so much that they were killed by the hunter that is significant but that they were hunted by that hunter. The argument I seek to develop here is that hunting trophies as material objects are primarily markers of what developed between the hunter and the hunted, the experiences of the hunter prior to the death of the animal. Their significance does not principally reside in what they are in...