There’s a museum in Churchill, Manitoba (“the polar bear capital of the world”) with about half its floor space devoted to polar bears and traditional methods of hunting them. They have a series of extremely young cubs, stuffed, from a few days after birth up to a few months, in a display illustrating polar bear development. There’s no explanation that I saw (a couple of years ago) about where those specimens came from; they had to have been collected from a den in winter, as polar bears give birth while hibernating.

I’ve also seen stuffed polar bears (and other fairly rare species) in large hunting / outdoors stores in southern Canada, such as at the Bass Pro shop in Vaughn, just outside of Toronto.

I saw Body Worlds 3 when it came through Vancouver several years ago, and I thought it was fascinating and very well done. But, I’m a biologist and I don’t consider myself squeemish or easily disturbed. I would like to see more stuffed or plastinated or skeletonized or otherwise-preserved humans, one of the great things about the Body Worlds exhibit, to me, was the presence of a wide variety of human body sizes. Most of the anatomical-training skeletons I’ve seen have been plastic versions of the skeletons of relatively small people, often women who would have stood at around 5 feet tall in life. I’m 6’2″, and my hands are at least twice the size of the usual plastic hand models / hand skeleton models I’ve seen, which makes it much more difficult for me to experience that wonderful feeling when one realizes one contains something very much like what one is examining. Several of the plastinated humans in Body Worlds 3 were of similar dimensions to myself.

In this situation there’s the possibility of some good coming from Knut’s death. Many people would never have thought about polar bears at all if not for him and after death, his remains may be a useful tool to keep some sort of interest alive. It’s ironic to think of the future of the planet’s apex land predator hinging on a stuffed carcass but it may be the only hope there is; I have doubts about the long-term survival of zoo populations.

As to why we do stuff animals and don’t generally stuff people, there’s a simple explanation: People are people and animals are animals. That’s harsh in some ways but true and hopefully people will grant more respect to creatures who can’t argue for their own survival.

A final thought. It would be vastly helpful if people received more education in basic biology and stopped deciding which species are worthy of survival on the basis of how cute they are because a creature’s place in the ecosystem isn’t determined by appearance.

In any case, there’s that german guy who “plastinates” real bodies of real people after death, so whether it’s an indignity or not, it is also applied to humans.

Well, von Hagens (the anatomist who does the plastinates) is a highly controversial figure, but mostely for the fact that tere are rumors that not all of his human subjects were donated by the realtives or did so themselves during their lifetime. It kind of reminded me of the stories from 19th century Edinburgh where they paid grave-robbers to get some corpses for the anatomy class.
And of course the very religious are also very much against him.
But his latest exhibition was about animals, it’s still touring zoos all over the world, and it all started in my little home-town, because the two biggest exhibits, the elephants came from here. And there was a lot of outrage among the locals because they felt that “their” elephants were not treated with dignity and respect (I’m sure many of them found comfort with a nice steak).
So, if you be chance go to see the exhibition, say hello to the elephants from me.

Also – a revolutionary thought, I know – dumb animals are just dumb animals, not members of human society.

In any case, there’s that german guy who “plastinates” real bodies of real people after death, so whether it’s an indignity or not, it is also applied to humans.