Abdul Rehman, the only living Taxidermist in a population of 4.2 million in Peshawar

Peshawar: There is no doubt that no human can give life to the deceased animals but the art and the handsome hands of a taxidermist can surely bring life to a dead body of any animal.

The art of portraying dead pets in a life look state and the process of preserving the hunted animals is called the art of taxidermy. This strangely beguiling art is used to memorialize pets and preserving of an animal body for the purpose of display. It can be said that a taxidermist has ability to put a new spirit into the body of a dead animal and its overt and covert that anyone envisages and his presumptions can derail him as these hypothetical bodies are alive. Taxidermists are highly trained in schools and empirical centers and when they are done, their master pieces of great norm are displayed in natural history museums. In these natural history museums, deceased animals become alive to never die again. In many countries, the annual competitions are also being arranged to encourage and prompt the art of taxidermists.

But if we talk about Pakistan, the list of good taxidermists is astonishingly very short. The trend of stuffing pets in Pakistan is very less as compared to the other countries. The reason is that the training and empirical centers here can be counted on fingers. Moreover, there is lack of reluctant materialized integral professional tools and commodities in these centers. Therefore the pet owners of Pakistan are deprived of this unique facility to evoke their pets and the rationality is to let the dead pets on their fatality.  But in the city of 4.2 Million people, Peshawar also has honor to have only one professional taxidermist in its lap.

51 years old Abdul Rahman is stuffing animals and mounting hunted trophies from last 30 years.  He has mounted almost each and every animal found in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He got his primitive indispensable training of making taxidermies in Lahore and then started practicing in Peshawar. Abdul Rahman is nowadays employed with Khyber Pakhtunkwha government and loves his work from the core of his heart. He says “The art of preserving the animals and turn them into taxidermies is onerous as t it takes 7 days to first dissect and then make them eccentricities mounts because I believe orchestration is one of the hardest works in the world”.

He feels proud that he is the only professional taxidermist of Peshawar but the good thing is that simultaneously he is now transferring his talent and art to his son as heritage and he hopes that his son will earn good name in his field in near future.