"What's different between this deer and a real one?" Bantley mused, explaining not only what taxidermists think about when they lie awake at night but, more important, what will be on the minds of the judges the next day at five P.M., the start of the competition.
"When you go into that room, you're looking for that topend deer. I'm looking for something that pleases me and that's your top-shelf deer," said Green. "That's the drawback to this whole thing. There's some interpretation in it."
Taxidermy is so outsider, it's not even included in Outsider Art fairs. Competitions are where taxidermists have always demonstrated the potential of their art. The first American taxidermy competition was held in 1880. It was organized by the Society of American Taxidermists, a brotherhood of scientists, professors, museum men, and taxidermists who wanted to elevate taxidermy from amateurish craft to professional-grade fine art by proving that it could be both scientifically sound and artistically evocative. No longer would the isolated taxidermist, too "jealous" to share his knowledge and too steeped in "conceit" to seek it out, languish in anonymity. Instead, taxidermists would "throw open their studio doors to the public until the only secret left was to imitate nature." Or, as G. E. Manigault, an honorary SAT member from the Natural History Museum at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, put it in 1880, "There's no reason why the taxidermist should not hold his head as high as any man. He is eminently a student of nature, and when, as a result of his observations and skill, he is able to produce a counterpart to life itself, he is entitled to rank on the same level as painter or sculptor."
Getting from point A to point B, however, took years of determined struggle by these talented artisans, who would eventually transform Chicago's Field Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the Smithsonian Institution, the AMNH, and other museums into grand galleries of artificial realism. But of course, this being taxidermy, the momentum gained in the 1880s had all but evaporated by the mid-1970s. By then, taxidermists had forgotten the whole "good PR" thing, and their mounts were crude and sensational (with some exceptions). Predators baring sharp teeth and suffering from gaping arrow or bullet wounds glamorized man's dominance. Some taxidermists also had apparently stopped studying anatomy and turned out bobcats with stumpy forearms, deer with misaligned joints, and other monstrosities. Scientists, curators, and other potential employers stayed away. Soon taxidermists faced a pre-1880 dilemma: where to demonstrate their expertise to a public that equated their craft, through years of negligence and unscrupulous taxidermists (who preferred shotguns to binoculars), with shooting Bambi's mother.
In 1974, a taxidermy maverick name Joe Kish, disappointed by the mounts he saw at a National Taxidermists Association convention, believed that taxidermists needed to improve their craft. So he decided to host the first American taxidermy competition since 1880. Kish is an industry insider who ran a taxidermy magazine for nine years. When I met him in Springfield, he was living on a three-hundred-acre exotic-game ranch in Mountain Home, Texas ("Texadermy" to Kish). One night Kish and I met for a beer in the hotel bar. Smiling under the brim of a stars-and-stripes baseball cap, he explained how taxidermy had been slumping in the 1970s. By then, most museum workshops had shut down, and the 1973 Endangered Species Act was, taxi-dermically speaking, limiting available subject matter. People were trading in shotguns for cameras. Kish has an impressive résumé—Carnegie Museum, Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Jonas Brothers, and Cabela's hunting stores—but in the 1970s, even as he was doing top-notch work, he feared that his profession was becoming obsolete. Remembering how the SAT competitions had revolutionized taxidermy in the 1880s, he organized his own competition, hoping for similar results.
The first SAT exhibit, a six-day event, took place in 1880 in Rochester, New York, then the taxidermy capital of the United States. Rochester was where the famous specimen emporium and museum supplier Ward's Natural Science Establishment was located. Founded by Professor Henry Augustus Ward in 1862, Ward's hired the best taxidermists, including the seven SAT founders. Ward's resembled a college campus—except the entrance gate was adorned with massive whale jawbones and every building overflowed with treasures that would eventually form the core collections of the Field Museum, the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Princeton University, and many others. In the late 1800s, famous taxidermist-explorers from Europe passed through Ward's, talking of grand expos in France, England, and Germany where taxidermists displayed futuristic mounts to a public hungry for sensational renditions of nature. In spite of this, Professor Ward was profit driven and reluctant to change (to become too artistic) at a time when museums had no dioramas. Taxidermy was then primarily a tool used for comparative morphology (the study of the form and structure of an organism). Birds, for instance, were stuffed, tagged, and lined up in uniform rows for comparison by type.
Forty-four members from seven states—the largest gathering of taxidermists ever—and hundreds of eager spectators attended the first SAT show. What they saw inside that gaslit hall dazzled them: staggering creatures from the farthest reaches of the earth, everything from bison to iridescent hummingbirds. Most of the mounts were crudely executed, typical of the era, but then there was William T. Hornaday's A Fight in the Tree-Tops.
Tree-Tops wasn't a single menagerie specimen stuffed with straw and hemp until it bulged, but a rain forest melodrama in which two male Bornean orangutans viciously fought over a female, while swinging from artificial vines! The larger of the two males had bitten off the middle finger of the other, and the victim's face writhed in agony as blood oozed from his mutilated hand. Hornaday himself called the apes "hideously ugly" and the display a "trifle sensational." That was intentional; he wanted to create a stir similar to the one Parisian taxidermist
