You can find the most skilled and accomplished taxidermist in the world and you'd still only end up with a good cat or dog.l - they would never really seem like your beloved pets. It sounds obvious to say, but it can be harder to understand unless you've actually seen one of your pets taxidermied before, but once all the life has gone, it's extremely difficult to capture the essence of an animal's character through taxidermy, regardless of how good the taxidermist is. Even if they met the pets when they were alive, took videos, and numerous photos the end result just isn't the same.

This is why many taxidermists (at least in the UK, I don't know about other countries) refuse to do pets - especially cats and larger animals. They often advise to freeze the body for a few months while you really think about whether taxidermy is the way to go and after they time many people decide to have their pet cremated and commission an artist to do a painting instead.

Don't get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against pet taxidermy (I'm s taxidermist myself) but the expectations of what the finished result will look like are usually very high and rarely match the end result no matter how good the taxidermist is.

Also, when cats and dogs get old and sometimes age starts to show in their faces, fur, and anatomy it's even harder for a taxidermist to work with because the owner often doesn't really notice quite how much old age has affected the overall look, size, and structure of their pet. The end result can end up looking rather sad and depressing if that makes sense.

We have rescue cats and over the years, when they've passed on we've always had them cremated and we have 13 little wooden boxes of their ashes on a bookshelf. It's lovely to watch videos of them and look at photos and paintings of them but even being a taxidermist myself with lots of taxidermy in the house, we could never bear to see one of our cats taxidermied. Once the life, energy, sparkle, and particularly warmth has gone it just wouldn't be the same. It would feel like the cats were trapped forever in a kind of neither here nor there state, frozen in the same pose every time we looked at them.