In the same week recently, when an eruption of protests including a threat to burn the shop down occurred after an Auckland antique dealer displayed for sale a mounted giraffe's neck and head, a similar carry-on occurred in Suffolk. That was against a village butcher for filling his shop window with (presumably gutted) pheasants, rabbits and pigs. Two days later a furniture and homewares store placed a display advertisement in the New Zealand Herald showing a range of mounted deer and zebra heads for sale, all of which drew no protest.
All of this testifies to the confused standards in our approach to animals. For example, I have no doubt if we marched everyone through abattoirs there would be a surge in vegetarianism. Conversely, take a vegetarian camping, fry bacon outdoors and the aroma will prove irresistible, even to a vegan.
Subsequently, the English butcher was inundated with support and has continued with his "corpses" display, probably correctly blaming "townies" who only know meat as something in plastic-wrapped cartons. Reminding them that their meat purchases were once pretty creatures is understandably a reality they'd rather not know, and who can blame them?
"Giraffes are such a gentle animal," protested one Auckland complainant ungrammatically. Well so are deer yet there must be tens of thousands of mounted deer heads and antlers on display throughout the country, but I've never heard any protest. I have eight mounted trout on my billiard room walls which draw only admiration and are presumably socially acceptable for we collectively (and wrongly) treat fish dismissively as somehow not counting.
God knows who wants a mounted giraffe or zebra's head but neither are different in principle from my trout or an antlered stag's head. I've spent a good part of my life wading rivers pursuing trout which has brought me more pleasure than any other activity but, again contradictorily, I could never shoot an animal or bird. Indeed, I've only killed one fly in my life, this in 1971 after it followed me on to a Melbourne tram, into the hotel lift and into my room where it continued its malicious persecution. But afterwards, I felt bad about it for days.