Here's a Cool Chick Who Makes Fancy Fur Accessories From Roadkill

Roadkill’s a bummer. But where you and I see mangled animals taken too soon from this world, one woman—a woman of VISION—sees muffs and hats and legwarmers that could be.

Meet Pamela Paquin, who’s recently started a line called Petite Mort Fur, which sells “accidental furs,” which are “loving resurrections of our fuzzy wild neighbors who have met with an untimely or natural death.” Yup, she takes those poor dead critters and transforms them into ethically-sourced fashion pieces. “These neck muffs that I make, I can literally take two raccoons and put them butt to butt and then they clasp neck to neck,” she told the Washington Post in a recent interview. She says raccoon fur is “luscious.”

This, despite a less-than-promising start:

She harvested her first roadkill last year with the help of a hunter and a shot of whiskey. “I got this crazy knife that was completely wrong for the task, got my hazmat suit on, took a shot of whiskey and just started doing it,” Paquin, 39, said….

That first animal, a raccoon, was unfortunately harvested “too early in the season” for roadkill. The animal was rotten and its insides had totally liquefied. Gross.

But Paquin climbed right back onto that dead horse. Turns out the guys at animal control and the highway department were tremendously helpful, giving her a holler whenever they came across a promising specimen. She processes the pelts with help from a taxidermist and a tannery, and she told the Post she’s already sold a few pieces.

According to Modern Farmer, Paquin formerly worked as global sustainability consultant, and, considering the massive number of animals killed by cars every day, considers her new project in the same spirit: “The scale of it is so overwhelming — you can’t possibly wrap your head around and the suffering that went into those numbers.” Plus those muffs look glam as hell.