Of course it’d be pretty horrific to see a stuffed deer head mounted on the wall – amongst a group of anthro deer especially, but amongst ANY anthro character too, I’d imagine.
But of course it all depends. Whenever we consider such things in an anthro universe, it inevitably comes back to this question of which creatures are “people” and which ones are “actually” animals. Feral versus anthro, I suppose.
My favorite example of this is: consider how the wildebeest in The Lion King aren’t people – they are just a mindless herd of animals into which Mufasa falls and then he’s stampeded to death.
I don’t really have a point here. I just wanted to share a thought that I had while writing my story, which is a setting where birds and fish are NOT anthro, and that’s why it’s “okay” for the seafood restaurant to have a giant swordfish mounted on the wall.
It’s an interesting concept to explore. Certainly, it would probably be macabre for an anthro deer to see a deer mount on the wall, akin to visiting Buffalo Bill’s house in Silence of the Lambs and seeing his sewing room. Real life analogues do exist though. David Sedaris, the famed humorist, once wrote about trying to acquire a real human anatomy skeleton he found at a shop in France for his husband. That guy who died at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky was kept in a glass coffin for viewing (for a fee), as was Lenin’s body. I once personally encountered a shop in Hampden which centered itself upon the sale of the macabre, and while I don’t believe they were for sale (I honestly didn’t think to ask), did have several (allegedly) real human skulls on display in amongst the antique surgical tools and vintage taxidermy.
At its core, its the “Goofy/Pluto” dichotomy. It’s Mae in Night in the Woods seeing a fat raccoon in the center of town, when she herself is a bipedal talking cat and bipedal talking raccoon characters exist in universe. I think it’s hard (if not impossible) to really fully imagine the mechanics of how an anthro world would be constructed from our vantage point as humans. Despite the fact that, at our core, we’re just smarter apes, we’ve so removed ourselves from the natural world that there’s us (“people,” who are intelligent, reasoning, and thinking…allegedly), and then there’s “animals,” which is every other living creature on the planet over which we hold dominion. Trying to create similar structures and analogues is hard because of how/where to draw the line. To us as “people” it seems rather clear. To us as imagined “animal-people,” it’s much more difficult.
In my opinion, it’s also difficult to create settings that feel “alive” (for lack of a better term) without wildlife of some sort. I went the same direction you did with a story I wrote once where birds, fish, amphibians, ect. were a natural part of the environment as “animals,” and then most mammals (like canids, felidae, cervidae, mustelids, whatever possums are, ect.) were “animal-people.” In my head, those rules made sense based upon the relationship between those two “classes” (for lack of a better term) of animals, so that fish and birds could be guilt-free food and I could populate creeks and streams with crayfish, salamanders, ect to give some texture to my rural setting. I also felt like it was easier to write about critters with paws which could be used in an analogous manner to hands and with biologies similar to ours.
An example that went the complete opposite direction would be Bojack Horseman, with critters of every kind being anthropomorphized in that show. It played with that concept to great comedic effect and handwaved the rest, which worked perfectly for the setting the show had created (at least in my opinion).
I think either way works as long as there is some sort of framework or rules that doesn’t trip the “Goofy/Pluto” dichotomy. That’s my $0.02 worth.
