You know the feeling when every time you thought "now I've seen it all"
something new comes around and proves you wrong? Well sometimes it's something
nice or astounding that makes you stare - alas mostly it's rather sad or cruel or
downright disgusting.

Unfortunately the latter was the case this time again: people started making
soft toys out of animals. I mean they buy a pelt of fox, coyotee or whatever,
stitch it together and stuff it to make a "realistic" toy out of it! It just
gives me the creeps.

Given, they are soft and cuddly and their fur-colors look so natural. But they
are just a twisted image of what they were before. They are corpses - you can't
make toys out of them!

Many of those "artists" claim, that the pelts they use originate from roadkills
or naturally died animals. Yeah - right. From what roadkills I've seen (which is
far too much actually) you wouldn't want to use those furs anymore, sometime you
could hardly recognize the species the poor creature was before. But even if
it's true... can't you just let them be? It's bad enough they died in such a
way. Maybe we should start making dolls out of children who died in traffic
accidents? They would look so much more realistic!

They claim, that they want to honor the animal, whose pelt they use, to give it
a "live after death". Please - never honor me. Please.

Some, after some flaming going around in journals not only on DA, admit that
their pelts originate from farms, but that they only use the craps, that
otherwise would be wasted. This might in some cases even be true (though there
are farms where you can pre-order the pelt of still living animals) but still with
this, the profit of those sickening farms are increased - great honor to the
animals.

They say, nowadays there are "humane" fur farms. Good joke. I mean, what do you
think you have to do to let them get thick wintercoats? Exactly! Put them each
into an own cage and put those to the coldest and most draughty place you can
find. And how do you kill an animal without damaging the pelt? Well... there are
several options - one of the most common is to force a metal stick into its butt
which is then used as electrode for electrocution. Humane? Like hell!

And they say, that fur farming is no different to farming for food, cause the
dead bodies are used as pet-food or fertilizer. Yeah - crushing the animal into
a puddle of mud and throw that on a field really honors the animal. Besides
that, it's common practice to just burn the heaps of pelted bodies...

Make no mistake - I'm not ranting against everything which has to do with
taxidermy. I see there is a need for educational purposes and even if old granny
gets her beloved pet stuffed - everybody deals with loss differently - I still
don't like them though. But toys?! *sigh*