
A few weeks ago my fangirl status increased when I decided to visit Beth Beverly, a taxidermist based in Philadelphia and one of the contestants from Immortalized. When I walked into her studio she was sitting at her desk, which was cluttered with sandpaper scraps, rabbit paws, and guinea hen feathers. The blood and flayed carcasses I was expecting were nowhere in plain sight. I took a seat across from her as she rubbed black epoxy clay onto the eyelids of Tyrone, a small mixed breed dog she was finishing for a client.Beverly keeps most of her dead specimens in a red-and-white striped freezer where they lay frozen, waiting to be stuffed. The freezer was so packed that the lid was weighed down with a metal toolbox. Inside, there were mostly medium-sized rabbits that had gotten into pesticides. She usually procures ‘naturally deceased’ animals from a farm in Cobleskill, New York, where her friends, Thomas McCurdy and Bailey Hale, raise goats, pigs, rabbits, and chickens. She just mounted the head of the couple's beloved sheep, Orka, who died during childbirth, as a gift for their recent wedding. She’s never hunted, but she told me about a visit she made to the farm last year that inspired an entirely new relationship to her specimens. It happened the moment she scooped up a young rabbit. She cradled it in her arms. She stroked the soft, brown coat and the pliable ears, and talked soothingly to the animal as she looked into its unblinking brown eyes. Then she snapped its neck.
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