‘Go on,” said Michele, “this will be the only chance you’ll ever have to pat a lion.”
She was quite right. I reached out and tentatively stroked the big chap’s head. So far, so good. Then I ran my fingers through his gingery mane. Lovely. Soft, but oddly sort of coarse as well.
The lion, a handsome fellow, though they all are, remained quite unmoved by my attentions. But then he would; he was quite dead and extremely stuffed.
We had long hankered to visit the Kahutara Taxidermy Museum, a private collection of hundreds of local and exotic insects, birds and wild animals, after reading about it yonks ago in the local paper. Taxidermy animals are very much a thing of the Victorian age, so I confessed to being somewhat in two minds about them. But I do have a stag’s head in my garage, a gift from Blokesy Stokesy. And Michele claims she once encountered – and patted – an enormous stuffed polar bear at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris.
We are both long-time enthusiasts for what one might call offbeat museums. My favourite is the Elvis Presley Memorial Record Room, a vast treasury of merchandise, collectables and vinyl celebrating the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. It is found not in Memphis or Tupelo, but in a garage in Hāwera in Taranaki. It was collected and is proudly owned by a painter and wallpaper hanger called Kevin. It is brilliant, and will definitely leave you all shook up.
The Kahutara Taxidermy Museum was put together over four decades by what I take to be a similar obsessive, this one called John McCosh, known locally as “Tuatara Ted”. His rather mad miscellany is housed inside a proper log cabin built by him and his wife Karen on their rural property in the wilds of South Wairarapa.
It is visited by appointment only, so I made one for King’s Birthday weekend. Sadly, though, neither Tuatara Ted nor Karen were about when Michele and I pulled into their driveway; they were down at the Log Building Association’s annual conference in Twizel. Instead, a friendly neighbour opened the place up for us.
John, now in his 80s, apparently got interested in taxidermy about the same time he got interested in hunting, so his collection features plenty of mounted deer heads and antlers. There are also scores upon scores of stuffed birds and mounted insects, some that John inherited from other collections, and upstairs in a loft area, a puzzling collection of stones and gems. There’s even a pet rock called Hopeta, apparently a piece of “Wairarapa greenstone” from a reef under Lake Wairarapa. The sign said Hopeta “likes to be patted and stroked” so I obliged.
However, it’s the full-sized exotic animals that get the old heart pounding, including a couple of lions, a leopard, an arctic wolf and something (it didn’t have a sign) that appeared to be the model for Stitch from Disney’s Lilo & Stitch. Evidently, John acquired many of these animals’ skins through Wellington Zoo, which used to give him a call when one of their own had fetched up and died and needed stuffing. Though presumably not its old zookeepers.
Standing in a room full of wild-if-stuffed animals, some appearing to leap out at you, some roaring, some needing a dust, turned out to be rather more unnerving than either of us anticipated.
You can’t help being ever so slightly concerned that, à la the film Night at the Museum, they might all suddenly come alive, decide to have a piece of you and chase you out the door and down the driveway. Which was perhaps why, when I needed to use the facilities, Michele didn’t want to be left alone with them and went outside to stand in the fierce nor’wester.
It only occurred to us after we’d left Kahutara that really, after the loss of Sqweaky and Elizabeth Jane in recent months, we didn’t really need to see more dead animals. But at least I can say I’ve patted a lion.
