THE TAXIDERMIST'S DIARY
Thirteen-year-old Lucy loves animals, and she worries about the state of the planet. Why aren’t adults doing more about climate change? Even she and her friends are busy planting guerrilla gardens beside the parkway. But when school ends, everyone has other plans. Lucy feels guilty leaving her seriously uncool friend Marco to do the weeding and watering, but she’s off to the family cottage, like every other year.
Back with her cousins, the old magic takes over. Phones are off-limits, but the upside is carefree, unwired summers like ones her parents and grandparents enjoyed. But this summer takes a dark turn. Her beloved great-grandfather suddenly looks very frail. Endless sunny days turn to drought, and the air is toxic with smoke from wildfires in the far north. Her cousin Marla moves on a boy Lucy has always liked.
When her cousins gleefully take up the grisly pastime of taxidermy, Lucy is appalled. They don’t see the problem. Taxidermy was once a family hobby. Their grandfathers and uncles were avid hunters: they didn’t even use roadkill!
Lucy feels alone in her concern for the natural world, and while she’s sidelined by an epic case of poison ivy, her cousins are having a ball stuffing squirrel skins and putting glass eyes in dead fish. When uncool Marco suddenly shows up, they welcome him into their fold.
In the end, Mother Nature shows everyone who’s boss. As the community’s worst fears come to pass, Lucy sees what is really important, and that maybe humans aren’t the worst thing for the planet after all.
Here's an excerpt from Chapter 2:
Way back when I was in grade 5, Ms. Anfetti showed us a horrible video of a turtle with a plastic straw stuck up its nose. The straw was in extremely deep, and someone pulled it out with pliers. Blood and pus came out too, and the turtle made a very sad noise. I decided then the world didn’t need plastic straws that much, and Emmaline and Mary Kate and Marco and I had a campaign to get the school to ban them. Barney Meldrum thought that was hilarious, and he and his goony friends stole plastic straws from the cafeteria and stuck them in their noses. They stuffed straws up our coat sleeves in the cloakroom, and when we put our coats on at recess, straws fell all over the place.
Like, what was that about? It didn’t even make sense. But our school banned plastic straws, so the good part was, we won. Animals won.
My whole life I’ve loved animals. I had pet rats since I was three, the sweetest little creatures you can imagine. Rats are affectionate and emotional. They can laugh, only at too high a frequency for human ears. The sad part is, rats don’t live very long. I had five, and one lived for four years but that was the longest. Every time one died, it broke my heart, so no more rats for me. Now I have a cat.
I became vegetarian when I was eight and figured out eating meat was eating animals. When I was ten, I figured out that being cruel to animals (like, eating them) was connected to destroying the planet. If you think it’s okay to kill animals for human benefit, that’s not much different from thinking it’s okay to screw up the environment for our own good.
People used to believe that animals don’t feel pain, which is stupid. Just ask Willow if you accidentally step on her. But every 10.5 seconds, an animal dies from research. Scientists infect chimpanzees with AIDS and then watch them die. In one YouTube video I saw, scientists sprayed pollution into rats’ windpipes and killed them afterwards by lethal injection. Then they took lung tissue samples and found out the rats’ lungs were damaged by the pollution. What did they expect?
The point I’m leading up to is that taxidermy isn’t the same as research on animals, but they do have something in common.
For people to do them, animals have to die.
(Interested? To find out more, email me at maureen@kingston.net)
