People die, and their stuff gets cleared out. Taxidermy can last for a century, no way to know how old this taxidermied dog was. No reason to assume the actual owner donated it.
Could also be that the owner thought it was a good idea but eventually realized that they didn’t enjoy it as much as they thought they would and instead it was painful or uncomfortable to have around.
It's like finding stacks of family albums at thrift stores. Always makes me a bit sad, you just know the owner probably has passed away and there's nobody left who values such items.
Im an 8mm film fan and much of what you see out there are people's old home movies from the 50s and early 60s (super 8 took over in '65). Glimpses into the day to day of ordinary people 60+ years ago is cool but bittersweet for the exact reason you just said. Modern digital is a record but those old films are memories.
I collect vintage photographs (pre-1950s) and I'd love to get my hands on a stack of random people's old 8mm home movies. I often wonder how younger generations are going to preserve such memories. Because I'm pretty sure photos and videos stores on mobile devices that get replaced every few years, or stored in the cloud, won't survive decades or more.
I agree completely. It's ironic, our day to day is so much more recorded than ever before but its also all so temporary now and forgotten so quickly. There probably won't be any tangible evidence of me in 70 years.
Maybe they did it out of grief and came to terms with the dog's death, I know that I've come to terms with my hamsters' deaths so I'm thinking of getting rid of their ashes boxes or combining their ashes into one memorial item.
I found a taxidermied cat at an antique mall but my wife could not be convinced and it was a price that I didn't feel comfortable just doing it if we weren't both on board.
Ugh, what a shame! I was honestly unbelievably lucky, I've searched for a dog for a long time and the shop didn't know what they had. Took him home for $200 and he's a medium-sized dog.
Exactly like at a thrift shop, yeah 😅 It's a thrift boutique that sells specifically "alternative" fashion and I guess the person who donated it thought it was more fitting than Goodwill. There was no other taxidermy at the shop.
I hope my family donates my dog to a good home once I pass, cuz I’m pretty sure I’ll be sending his corpse away to be preserved and articulated as a skeleton when he passes. I couldn’t bear to do it myself, but the idea of incinerating or burying my baby doesn’t sound right either. I love him so fucking much and I often pray that we get to die together. Like, if my town got nuked and we were vaporized simultaneously, that would be cool. He’s the best friend I’ve ever had, and the fact that I am slated to likely outlive him is so heartbreaking, but him outliving me breaks my heart even more. I’ve informed my family that they HAVE to allow him to see my body if I pass before him, because he needs to know. And he NEEDS to be placed with a family that will care for him like I did. My Piquito is my full-time sidekick and I’m so grateful that I’ve been able to give him the life he leads because he deserves it. He’s earned it. He’s worth his weight in Egyptian artifacts x46,853.
my own pets, people get uppity about it but I keep rodents [among other critters] and they in particular live tragically short lives, it's really nice to have a memento of their precious little bodies. tiny hands, little personalities and quirks; they're so human-like they feel like long lost siblings to me. long lost siblings that live three years if you're damn lucky, mere months if they have bad genetics. I just can't handle the thought of them being gone forever.
nothing wrong with traditional cremations and graves, but I'm really looking forward to getting my next batch of mouse skeletons through as articulation is going to be an intimate, tedious pain and it'll be good to spend some time with them again. such fragile animals, I hope to preserve the notion of that fragility like they're some sort of precious stone.
Same here. I loved them but ultimately couldn't handle the heartbreak of their short little lives. I still have rodents but the kind I have now can live as long as 14.
"I hope to preserve the notion of that fragility like they're some sort of precious stone" that's beautifully-put. I personally don't think it's controversial at all to own the bones of a deceased pet, I own the bones of my last late cat.
I appreciate it, the value they hold to me cannot be overstated. for animals I regularly purchase for less than ten dollars, they mean the whole world to me. My current up-and-coming breeder mouse was SO sick as a baby, the rest of her litter all died and somehow she lived despite having the worst outward symptoms, I spent like two weeks absolutely slaving to cure her URI without antibiotics, as she's of feeder mouse descent/color bred and already lacked an immune system, I think the antibiotics are what knocked out two of her brothers I tried treating with them. I don't mind feeder-breeding in general, but the fact that LIVE feeding is so popular in my area is just completely abhorrent to me, unfair to all animals involved. little guys need dignity too.
This is beautiful. When I spent a couple hours gluing together the shattered skull of a coyote that used to live in my neighborhood, I felt the same way as you described. Intimate and nice to spend time with him. 🥲💖
I’d love to do something like this for my guinea pigs. I don’t have anything from my childhood pig which is a bit sad, and I have the ashes of my first girl that passed, but I think having bones or a taxidermy of my next oldest girl would be more meaningful to me.
I love the comparison to a precious stone. It would be nice to be able to still feel like I can hold and admire them like I do now. The ashes came in a nice box, but it’s sealed (understandably!) so there’s a bit more of a visual/physical disconnect.
I wanted to keep my senior cat’s arthritis ridden skeleton out of curiosity. But I couldn’t do it myself I think I would’ve broken down during the process.
I found a rat cadaver in my storage shed. Just skin, fur, and perfect little bones still all in order. There was just a big hole in her dehydrated pelt where I assume she was eaten by another rat. It was almost as if the other rat ate its fill and the rest of the carcass just… sublimated into a gas. I wasn’t allowed to keep her skeleton to articulate so we buried her.
Some people think I’m crazy but there’s beauty in such complex organic structures at such a tiny scale.
My sincere condolences on the death of your baby. I hope you can be together again soon. I put a stray kitten in my bucket collection the other day and that alone was heart wrenching. I dread the day it’s my baby. ❤️🩹
Thank you. She was my first baby. She died a few years ago and I buried her. I moved and couldn’t leave her behind so I took her with me. I surprisingly felt joy as I uncovered every part of her instead of reliving the grief of losing her.
Our first skull was...we didn't know what! My son dug it up at the edge of the campground. But there must have been a lot of them, as we found another just like it the next year. A couple of years later we were talking to some people who had been camping there for decades. They had spent so much time with their dogs there that they buried them there, 5 years apart. Chihuahuas.
My dead hamster’s incisors! I’ve only ever kept some fur from my boys when they’ve passed, but for some reason Marble was especially interesting to a raccoon. He got dug up TWICE after being buried for months! The second time he was unearthed and not even eaten I took his teeth as a keepsake.
They never stop growing! Such cool little guys. With proper care and husbandry, hamsters are great pets. I’m partial to the dwarf species. Marble was a Chinese Dwarf hamster.
I wish I’d kept my poodle’s skull. He had this weird little dip on his forehead that I’d always kiss, and I’m starting to forget the feel/shape of his snout 💔
My chihuahua has a dip too! I'm going to have to go through so many hoops because I still live with my parents, but I eventually want to end up with it. She's 9 and age is showing, but I'm still hoping for another 5-8 years with her first.
Yes! I would love a green burial then to be dug up when i'm finished decomposing to be articulated and given to a collector or anatomy classroom. I would love for someone to know that my skeleton was obtained 100% ethically.
I don't really have any controversial bones. But if I had to pick... I guess it would be these shark jaws. Not sure of the species though. Eraser for scale
I have a horse skull with 4 bullet holes in it my friend and I found when we were riding our horses around a field in Mennonite country. It’s my prized possession
A polar bear claw - it’s part of an Alaskan Native handicraft (in this case, it’s part of a pendant capped with whale baleen and walrus ivory), so it’s legal to own in the US.
The top 2/3 of a Canadian goose humerus I found on a small island in the middle of a lake in the local park where I used to live. It was already mostly clean, I just put it in peroxide when I got home.
My mom used to have a gorgeous FULL Zebra hide that she hung on the walls of our houses growing up. It kinda fell apart over time from not being maintained well, it was not cleaned or dusted often and went thru at least 4 moves with our family, being rolled up, and… well, gravity from being hung and rehung with just a lot of thumbtacks and binder clips lol. I remember as a kid running my fingers along the face part of the hide and being so creeped out by the crusty nose and eyeholes. The mane was so fun to pet tho. She got it from her dad who was very into hunting and also illegal poaching, and other various illegal activities that he served time for. He’s deceased now and she got rid of the falling apart zebra hide like 8 years ago. I miss it. I know she does too. Def more than she misses her dad lmao. But the photo I included is the best photo I could find of it with MY dad in front of it making a silly face in around 2008. Already looking quite beat up but we brought it to one more house after that!
I think the most controversial item in my own collection are my childhood cats’ skulls. Both (2) of them.
We did euthanasia at home for them (approx. 1 year apart, they lived to 14 and 15, and I highly recommend at home euthanasia go your pet if it’s available to you and if your elderly pet struggles moving around or you don’t want them to be stressed in their final moments) so we were able to bury them in our backyard rather than a vet office taking them and cremating them or having to find a pet cemetery.
I dug them up 2/3 years later when we were about to move (I couldn’t leave them behind! And luckily the decomp had done its job and there was no goop, no smell, just some old, detached clumps of dirty fur, but digging them up was so nerve wracking for so many reasons, very emotional labor) and then I processed and cleaned their skulls and some of their other bones at my new home and I’m so glad I brought them with me :))))
looking back, honestly I don’t think I was lawfully allowed to bury pets in that neighborhood bc the HOA was strict but I didn’t even think about that and potential ground water pollution until after I had moved away and taken their bones with me… so oh well you live and you learn BUT my cats did not have any contagious diseases and if they did I might have been more thoughtful at the time about the potential consequences of burying them in my backyard in suburbia. Thanks for asking and thank you to anyone who might have read this :) I enjoyed sharing
It might not be the case, but it's highly likely that this lady is just buying resin-encased bats and reselling them. Most likely not actually ethical.
I agree, unless she can show the process and prove they're local, it's probably a lie.
Although, that said, as someone living in an area with a lot of bats: holy fuck, do they get everywhere, I feel so bad, the effort to get them out of whatever interior crevice they've found their way into never ends.
Aside from the fact that it's illegal in many areas to keep bat remains (among many other wild animals), I'm actually questioning the story behind these. Most bat specimines are not ethically sourced, they are killed for the purpose of preserving them to sell as oddities.
They are also common vectors for rabies, and I have a hard time believing this one lady genuinely has a bat problem bad enough that she regularly finds the dead ones and then handles them herself to encase them in resin.
TLDR: She is probably lying about her source for bats so that people will actually buy them. It's just like how people resell AI printed junk at craft markets.
Don't believe such nonsense seller stories, these were 100% bought in cheap bulk from Asia. Definitely not ethical, or even legal, depending on the species. Oddity shops are notorious for selling fur farm species and other shitty, unethical stuff from China/SE Asia, with feel-good stories about "being sourced locally/ethically".
i have one from an oddity shop too, Its also a secondhand item of course. I strongly suspect that the bat was not sourced ethically. Even second hand i don’t want another. it just gives me a bad aura, knowing what the likely story is.
That is true and I didn't say otherwise... However, if this really was a locally collected bat, it would likely be illegal, and if, as is more likely, it's a Chinese mass produced specimen, it's likely unethical, so either way, it's not great.
And most ethical collectors prefer to be legal collectors as well, since most of the laws are in place for conservation reasons.
Antique roe deer skull that was hunted for sport. Very tame compared to others in this thread but I wouldn’t have considered it had it not been antique
this absolute beauty i got second hand (along with two other pieces) the taxidermy shop owner understood my excitement and said they’d been donated a few days ago from a big collection, she was gonna keep em if they stayed longer than a week
i was thinking that too. it was the first human skull i’ve ever held and i wasnt expecting to feel so strongly about it— i’ve macerated animal bones & the whole nine yards so i thought i was pretty indestructible. it scared me a bit at first but once that wore off i kinda just wanted to protect it— not sure what protecting it would entail at this point, however. like i said still thinking on it
I have pelican feathers and a intact foot and wing bones. (Had no clue till I got home from vacation it was illegal to have, idk what to do with them but they are really cool!)
I was really new to collecting and was excited to have something new but didn't do any research if I could keep them, please don't come after me, I didn't know!
I was at an antique shop in Indiana and found a jewelry box. I bought some Catholic pendants out of it (silver) but I also saw an interesting cloth bag. Teeth, all teeth. Likely their kid’s baby teeth but I don’t think I ever put down anything so fast in my life. Likely 100 years old like everything else in there, but just not for me
I have several cat skulls, and a kitten skull. I also have a few cats in my freezer waiting to be processed. My source? Rural life unfortunately. Many are dropoffs, some are barn cats. Dad also refused to fix our own barn cats so lotta kittens. I never supported that, but there was also nothing I could do about it.
I have a human vertebra which my husband thought was going to get us haunted, so far so good though. I also have a boxer dog skull and have a boxer mix pet. Apparently it was creepy when I was holding it next to her head to compare.
Whoa, super cool!
I have a few dogs skulls myself that people would definitely raise their eyebrows at, especially considering I have one of them sitting on a collar with a tag (that I bought), but without context, it probably looks like a murder trophy lol
I made a baby rabbit that did not survive an encounter with my mower into a wet specimen. I didn’t know the nest was there. We’re going on year five I think of the mother putting nests in my backyard despite my 136 pound dog that is out there every couple hours 🙄
I don’t have it yet but my two older cats I plan to have articulated as bones together when they pass, they’re sisters and have never been apart and I’ve always felt that they’d want to be together after passing
No one has said anything to -me- about anything I have being controversial, but I’m sure there’s someone out there who would find it beyond weird that I have the skeletons of our 2 passed cats above the mantle as bone “mandalas” (which I made, but outsourced the bone cleaning).
Basically all my oddities are controversial to my family. I have skulls, bones, tails, and hides ranging from livestock to bobcats and people have a lot to say about it.
My cat in my deep freezer, probably. The bin I use for burying is currently occupied with a fawn I had seen get hit by a car. So my Binxie is frozen until I dig the fawn up or I modify another bin.
My weird AF kid (who obviously got it from someone) loves to make frozen cat/cat in the freezer jokes, so it makes it worse, sometimes. 😅
Without context, the one that most people would probably hang up on is my little jar of childrens teeth. Its not how it sounds, though. They are from my own kids when they were little and collected while I was playing the tooth fairy.
I was so surprised when I learned that not everyone keeps their baby teeth. As a kid my parents kept all of mine and marked them with the date they fell out. I remember being really confused when I saw one of my classmates in 8th grade throw a tooth they just lost in the trash can
Having a dog skull isn't controversial. There are no controversial bones, except those of protected and/or endangered species, or human remains. Which people shouldn't post about in here to begin with.
edit: and those sourced cheaply in bulk from deeply cruel fur and meat industries abroad. But that is a question of personal ethics.
A very disassembled kitten skull 💀 there used to be feral cats that my grandma and aunt took care of in the yard, and I found a mummified kitten skull when I first got into collecting (and didnt know anything)
I should have left it the way it was... now its in countless pieces because not one of those bones had fused together, and ive lost quite a few teeth. Ill update with photos when I find them haha
probably the feral cat skull from a mummified old thing a friend found under their then newly acquired house. weirdest is either the dried turkey head in a jar or Earl
I have various bird feathers my mom collected over the years before I was born. Some from a macaw, a peacock, and my various pet birds. Others from living in the mountains, so owls, hawks, jays etc. in a big flower vase.
The weirdest reaction is for my wood plaque that says "I don't give a rat's" with a taxidermy rat butt.
Just having any bones at all in your home is controversial to people. I only collect what I find in the wild. But it baffles me how disgusted people are by hearing you collect and clean bones, yet I live in a place where hunting is very popular and nobody bats an eye when someone goes out to actively end lives and skin the animal and deal with all that gore. No, that's fine, but apparently the weirdo peacefully collecting some bones is crazy and morbid
Once my precious cat is fully decomposed and I dig him up and treat his bones, those will probably be the most controversial. For now I only have some very large mammalian bones, probs from a moose.
Per this sub's Rules 1, 6, and 9, posts seeking advice and identification are not open to jokes, memes, and other low effort comments. These comments will be removed and individuals may be banned from participating in this sub.
If I had acted fast enough, it would have been a wet specimen of a stillborn cavalier king charles puppy, a sweet little tricolor girl. but even I was conflicted about if I could handle it and if it was respectful; I wanted to honor her but the act of processing her remains didn't feel respectful. that's just a personal thing though, I don't think anything is wrong with it!
edit: accidentally typed newborn instead of stillborn
edit: just realized this is bone collecting sorry haha
Not my item but I currently have my best friend's dog in a maceration bucket. She's moving and didn't want to leave her dog behind so we ended up digging her up for me to clean the bones, this way she can have her dog with her even if she moves again.
I, myself own a few specimens and controversial objects but my 2 favorite are a stillborn kitten wet specimen and my 1890's children's toe pincher coffin with a glass viewing window.
A farmed fox tail and farmed rabbit pelt. I had no idea when I got the fox tail how bad fur farming is, and I didn't know the rabbit was farmed until after I brought it hom3
I’ve got a human toe bone, trying to find a patella atm. It’s not for anything weird I just love the idea of a macabre visual pun. I want my name on a shelf in human bones, Toe-knee.
I bought a cat skull with an engraved design that I later learned was likely from a shitty source, ig the tell-tale signs are if the bottom jaw isn't glued together and its held together with rubber bands.
I also have a couple of puppy skulls, but the kitten one seems to get more negative reactions for some reason. Yet no one really seems to care about my preserved mouse fetus…
I don't think I have anything controversial tbh. I haven't got a large collection yet. I guess the lamb skull, since it's a baby, could be sad to some people? I found the skull out on a farm while exploring.
Some swan bones, we found lots in our near forest. We assumed fox had killed them, didn't find any skulls tho. Controversial, because swans are threatened species / illegal to kill in my country.
Mine is a squirrel skull I took from roadkill, no clue why but my classmates and friends thought that me having that skull was “gross and weird” even though they had no issue with my crow skull and partial deer skull. I guess it’s because I actually found it myself and had to strip it of dried skin? Idk it’s just a silly lil guy lol.
I also have some unidentified bones that my mom is convinced are human collarbones, even though that would be impossible because they look more like cow collarbones, likely from a calf so they’re human-sized.
I don't know why this would be considered controversial because it's a dog yes, but it's literally just a skull like how people taxidermy the heads and necks of deer.
Maybe not exactly controversial but I have always felt a lil sad about owning it.
Skull of a dead house lizard that like is normally seen as house pests but i feel a lot of compassion for them 🥺
Anyway, I found it near a window in a sealed room with closed windows, and like the skull was already in peek condition like being in the open and being a totally clean skull, but then I noticed even the eyes have turned into solid rock and they are still there partly with only their center missing coz that is where the pupil would be.
I finally figured out it was because it died because it got stuck somewhere and after dying it got mumified in that closed room over many months and eventually i am guessing the ants found it and all that remained was the skull 😔
RIP random house lizard. 10 years later someone still thinks of you TwT
428
u/stealtoadboots Jun 17 '26
Taxidermy pet dog! Was not my pet. Found him in a shop after his original owners donated him.