A former dancer and mom of two is raking in more than $120,000 a year by selling dead mice. Katie Hardwick, 38, is a full-time taxidermist who sells her creepily adorable (and often hilarious) creations for anywhere from $67 to $246 each. However, not everyone is happy about her newfound livelihood.
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- Katie makes about five mice a day. However, she’s not just stuffing the mice and selling them on. Instead, she creates amazing mini-scenes, putting the mice on stripper poles, having them practice yoga, and even making them part of the circus.
- She gets a lot of angry comments from online trolls. Katie, from East Sussex in the UK, admitted that there are a lot of people who hate what she does. “People love it or hate it and I get a lot of angry vegans on my case,” she said. “Some people have told me that this mouse didn’t die just to be immortalized as a stripper!”
- It’s really not that serious. As Katie added, her work with the mice is just a bit of lighthearted fun. “It’s all just a bit of fun – it would be a very different practice if I was working with a rare elephant’s head,” she explained. “All of my mice are purchased from the Pet Shop as they are sold as reptile food – they are already dead and frozen.”
- Katie’s new career started as a joke. Five years ago, her husband, James, gave her a ‘Taxidermy Your First Mouse kit’ for Christmas. She did it and soon became very interested in making more. Soon after, she launched her own Etsy store, where she’s already sold more than 3,400 mice. “After a bit of practicing, the house was getting filled up so my husband suggested that I try selling them online because people love a bit of bad taxidermy,” she recalled.
- Her work is incredibly skillful and difficult. Taxidermy on a mouse isn’t easy! “So many think that I spend my day covered in blood whilst I’m wearing a surgical mask and rubber gloves but it’s not as messy of a process as some people might think,” she said. “To make the mice, I defrost it first then take the skin off. I give them a borax treatment which gets rid of bacteria, then make a little head out of clay and then I shape the legs and arms out of wire before. I do it all on my dining room table and use a magnifying light – my husband is disgusted that I take over the table.”
Sounds pretty awesome!
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