ABSTRACT
Animals were both commodities and decorative objects used for social purposes as pets, as zoo-dwelling creatures for education and as taxidermic ornaments and museum exhibits. Animals were widely used for work and entertainment, often in cruel and appalling conditions, and this promoted an increasing concern about animal welfare. In 1887 Mrs Haweis pointed out that ‘Stuffing is better done now, but it is ever an art more fitly relegated to scientific museums than used for home decoration, because decoration implies beauty, and beauty means pleasure; and death, to those familiar with life, is not a pleasurable idea’. The two texts that follow represent some of these ideas, with Dante Rossetti’s eccentric collection of exotic and other animals contrasting to the unnerving specimens of the taxidermist’s art that were employed in the furnishing of houses in the later part of the century.
