would you keep your dead mouse in your living room?

Haha. I have preserved mice in jars on my entertainment center.
As well as some freezedried mice here and there. I have one brown mouse, fully freezedried, that is in a flying pose, and has a set of zebra finch wings attached! :lol:

I think there's nothing wrong with any of it. As long as you don't go around bashing animals in the head just to wear them, or decorate your living room with them.
Like if you kill a deer, eat all of the meat (not just the tenderloins, people), save or eat many of the organs, and save or sell the hide for leather / taxidermy.

Sarah - You'll be surprised to know that farming mink is much more dispicable than trapping them. Mink are usually caught in live box traps, or quick kill traps. Mink in farms, are usually raised in the absolute minimum space, with minimum food, and absolutely no care when killing.

Trappers are much more skilled, than farmers, and are much more delicate that the farmers because they know that their animals can be worth more, when better cared for. The farms just want to send out as many as possible.
Which is why many are shut down here in the US, and others go into hiding, because they just treat the animals so terribly.

Jodiee182_x said:

I think the difference with leather and feathers and stuff is that you don't really realise where it's all come from.

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I realize it.

That's why I don't wear or eat any of it (although I do own a feather duster made from ostrich). A cow is philosophically the same as a rabbit or a cat or a poodle.

The thought that, "Eww! Dead mouse parts are creepy but dead cow parts aren't," is very often a culturally-engrained, accepted-on-faith view which hasn't been thought through to its logical conclusions, I think. I try to aim for intellectual consistency: either making use of (and potentially wearing) all dead animals, or accepting and making use of none. I can't arbitrarily pick and choose which animals are ok and which ones aren't without somehow seeming inconsistent to myself.

I don't mean to sound judgmental of any particular person--it's just that the reasons (or lack of reasons) that people have for this sort of thing has always fascinated me. Ever since I was young, I've wondered how is a dog philosophically different from a cow, or a mouse different from a chicken, and so forth. This especially applies (and gets interesting reactions!) to the field of taxidermy.