Mostly wanted to read this one because of the person who wrote it, Carl Akeley. As some of you might know, I'm very interested in taxidermy and occasionally mount something myself as well. Akeley is actually considered the father of modern taxidermy. The artform goes back many thousands of years, but Akeley really made it what it is today: trying to preserve animals in a realistic-looking way.
So let's read about his exploits in Africa. Yes, this book (and thus, this review) contains mentions of animal death and racism.
The book honestly just details some of Akeley's backstory and how he revolutionized his craft, before we travel over to Africa. From there, most of his stories are about the animals he encounters and, yes, unfortunately it has him killing a lot of them. Unlike some hunters, he does seem to have a genuine respect and awe for the animals, but he's in the end still just killing them for his mounts in the Field Museum.
I get it, education is important and this can be done through taxidermy mounts in museums, but like, maybe they could've used dead zoo animals for this or something? I do like reading about the encounters Akeley has with these animals, how he studies them, but even with his whole "respect nature" attitude he still ends up killing a lot of them.
Heck, even his most famous and "badass" exploit, him killing a leopard that attacked him with his bare hands and living to tell the tale, is because he shot at the animal first, thus provoking it. Just...not very cool, especially if you're an animal lover like me.
I am not 100% anti-hunting, don't get me wrong. I do think that if the animal is used properly and people get something out of it (e.g. food and using the pelt for leather or whatever), it's appropriate to responsibly hunt now and then. And of course population control killing has to be done sometimes, especially for invasive species that don't have any natural predators. But this does not include killing for sport or stuff like that.
And, again, Akeley does seem to have more respect for the animals he's hunting than some other hunters whose lives I've read about (e.g. John Henry Patterson), and he does use quite a bit of the animal (skins for taxidermy for the museum and he gave some of the rest of the bodies to the natives for food), but it still feels wrong to me to just kill so many to fill the Africa Hall in the museum, especially when zoos are and were a thing back then. The animals there would've died eventually anyways, so why travel all the way to Africa to kill shit there and bring it back for taxidermy? Just feels like needless killing to me.
Oh, and I haven't even brought up the treatment Akeley gives the locals yet. This book is about white man in Africa in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Yeah, you pretty much know what to expect from here. Variations of the N-word are sometimes used to refer to the locals, and to my horror one of the people on these expeditions where Akeley and his crew would encounter dangerous animals was a 13 years old local boy. He didn't even bother learning the boy's actual name in his native language, instead choosing to continuously refer to him as "Bill". Just...fucking yikes man. I get it, different time, different standards, but calling these people slurs like this and especially endangering local children like this? The hell man?
So not a good read, skip this one. The only chapters I genuinely liked where the ones where he actually talked about what made me read it to begin with: the taxidermy aspect. The first few chapters detail how he got into the craft and even at such a young age tried anything to get better results (because, spoiler alert, before he came along taxidermy wasn't all that great), and those were honestly the best.
The only two points I'll be giving this book is for me learning how he revolutionized taxidermy and some of the (pre-killing) encounters he described with the animals. But this is still a definite skip. I'm sure better books about taxidermy and exploring Africa (without killing everything that moves and being a racist fuck) have been written.
Rating: 2/5
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