I was nine years old when my dad brought home his first dead animal. He didn't kill it himself – which would perhaps have been more normal in the region of rural north Nottinghamshire where we lived. Now I come to think of it, I was almost certainly the only kid in my school to have a stuffed ocelot in his living room, but I don't remember being too alarmed. I suppose I was used to this kind of behaviour from my dad – a man so enthusiastic about the animal kingdom that he'd once driven the family car into a ditch, from which it had to be winched out, due to excessive staring at a bull. There were an initial cursory couple of questions from me about the ocelot's name and origin, a long-suffering look from my mum, and a hiss from the family cat. After that, it settled in pretty contentedly – until it was replaced by equally inanimate and often even more exotic peers. A stoat. A koala.

These days, taxidermy is almost as much a hip lifestyle statement as it is a pursuit of the socially inept. It's been branded "in" by the New York Times, with former sparrows and ex-rabbits increasingly present in the background of design magazine photoshoots. That was simply not the case in 1985. Then, perhaps even more than now, there was a certain type of provincial British man who would keep a dead badger in his freezer with no real concern for what society might think. Elsewhere in his house, you'd find sinks lined with a thick film of old hair and window ledges supporting an inexplicable quantity of empty milk cartons.

My dad was not this man. Nor was there anything self-consciously eccentric about his newfound interest in taxidermy. That year, he had accepted a somewhat vague part-time position as the artist-in-residence at an educational resource centre just outside Nottingham. Farnley House was a large Georgian building resembling the lair of some shut-in Victorian philanthropist. Down its corridors could be found rooms full of all manner of animals, only some of which – including Fred, the judgemental pet eagle-owl of in-house taxidermist Ben – were alive. Since it was relatively rare that Nottingham's schools took advantage of this zoological bounty, my dad would simply make the creatures in question feel less neglected by taking them away on breaks – either painting them at home or using them as props for his other job, as a supply teacher in some of Nottingham's roughest secondary schools.

After half a decade in education, my dad had realised that supply teaching was a bite-or-be-bitten world, and the stuffed beasts he brought to his classes from Farnley proved an invaluable distraction: by being Stuffed Animal Guy, he could avoid being Persecuted Supply Teacher Guy. Teachers at his regular schools got used to seeing an inert fox or a baby capybara in the corner of their staff rooms. Though during Ben's day as guest speaker at one school, the deputy headmistress let out a shriek when she witnessed the large dead owl on the table next to her slowly swivel its head and offer her a single, ominous blink.

Ben's taxidermy wasn't just limited to dead creatures, as I discovered one day when I came home to find my dad crouched in front of the living room coffee table, on which sat a hard white blob about the size of a builder's fist.

"TOM! COME 'ERE AND SEE THIS," said my dad, whose standing as one of the five loudest men in northern Britain was even safer when animals were the subject.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Ssshhh. You've got to be really quiet or you'll wake him."

I could now see that the white blob had legs and eyeholes. "Is that … a toad?" I asked.

"Yes. He's got his protective winter coating on. Pick him up if you like but be very careful, because he might get angry and break out of it. Like the Incredible Hulk. Then he will bite you."

After I'd lifted the white blob and ascertained that it contained only air, not amphibian, the full story emerged. That morning, a bored Ben had ventured out into the woods behind Farnley, found a toad, snuck up on and chloroformed it, and taken it back to his workroom. He'd covered it in dental putty, being careful to leave a breathing hole, and allowed it to set for the next few hours. At the end of the day, he'd gone back to the woods, cut the dried putty and released the toad, who'd wandered off into the woods like the drugged hostage of some unexpectedly kindly terrorists.

Over the next couple of years, the animals kept coming home – some for good, when Farnley moved to smaller premises and they were up for grabs. Though we'd had it to stay with us for a short while, in the end Farnley's polar bear went to live with the janitor – a man I assume wasn't subject to many lady-callers – in a small flat in central Nottingham. Strangely, it has taken me over two decades to realise there's anything truly odd about having a polar bear temporarily guarding your entry hall, and with that comes the inevitable other questions. How exactly did my dad fit it in the boot of a Morris Marina? When Paul Abbott's mum called my mum to say Paul couldn't stay that time, was it really just because Paul "didn't like sleeping in a new house with the light out", or was there a (giant, furry) hidden subtext?

My parents don't own any stuffed animals now, and part of me mourns that fact. The various Farnley residents who came to stay for good – a fox, an African mole rat – became casualties of several house moves, or were passed on to friends. Last to go was not a wild animal at all, but a wonky-jawed West Highland terrier who, after his stuffing fell out for the last time, was transported to the local recycling centre. Before that, he put in many unstinting years' service as our guard dog – the only blip being when we returned from Italy to be informed by our ashen-faced neighbours he had "not moved from the window sill" for an entire fortnight. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to get a replacement of my own – but on a dark night, when it's rowdy outside and my cats are being particularly arsey, I find that, in a small way, I kind of miss him.



Talk To The Tail: Adventures In Cat Ownership And Beyond by Tom Cox is published by Simon And Schuster, £12.99 or £10.39 at the Guardian Bookshop

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