Crappy Taxidermy

About

Crappy Taxidermy is a single topic blog that highlights photographs of bizarre-looking or poorly stuffed animal skins. Since its launch in 2009, the site's popularity has led to the creation of similar online projects devoted to crudely taxidermied creatures.

Origin

On May 26th, 2009, the Crappy Taxidermy^[3] Tumblr blog was launched, which highlights humorous photos of taxidermied animals. The blog's first post featured a mounted squirrel with a menacing expression and sharp, jagged teeth (shown below).

Spread

On August 10th, 2009, a Facebook^[4] page titled “Crappy Taxidermy” was created with images taken from the Crappy Taxidermy Tumblr blog. On March 30th, 2010, the “Crappy Taxidermy” group was launched on the photo-sharing site Flickr.^[8] On May 1st, 2011, the art and design blog TrendHunter^[9] published an article about the Crappy Taxidermy blog. On March 6th, 2012, the tech news blog Complex Tech^[7] listed Crappy Taxidermy as the 56th best Tumblr blog of all time. On February 20th, 2013, BuzzFeed^[10] highlighted 13 examples of “taxidermy gone terribly wrong.” On February 21st, 2014, the “Crap Taxidermy” Facebook^[2] page was launched, gathering more than 105,000 likes in the next two months. The first post on the page highlighted a photograph of a stuffed donkey missing both forelimbs.

On March 11th, the @CrapTaxidermy Twitter feed was launched with a photograph of a poorly-stuffed wild cat. In the first month, the feed gained over 85,000 followers. On March 31st, BuzzFeed^[6] highlighted 19 notable tweets from the Twitter feed.

On April 3rd, the publishing company Cassell Illustrated announced in a press release^[12] that a book based on the Crappy Taxidermy Tumblr blog was scheduled for release in Autumn 2014. On the following day, CNN^[5] published an article about poor-executed taxidermy photos, which included interviews with the Crappy Taxidermy Tumblr founder Kat Su and the @CrapTaxidermy Twitter creator Nish. On April 8th, Slate^[1] published an article titled "Crappy Taxidermy Internet Meme is Really sort of Sad," which examined the history of poorly-taxidermied animal photos on the web.

Notable Examples

Depression Dog

Depression Dog is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photograph of a taxidermied dog with captions that typically present bleak situations with a downtrodden outlook.

Stoned Fox

Stoned Fox (Упоротая лиса) is a Russian photoshop meme in which a cutout image of a stuffed fox is superimposed into different base images of various humorous contexts. The nickname has been approximately translated as “Stoned Fox” and “Autistic Fox.”

Search Interest

External References