Meet the vegan taxidermist making a killing from making sporrans - out of ROADKILL

A vegan has set up a thriving business making luxury fashion accessories – out of roadkill.

Taxidermist Emma Willats makes sporrans, jewellery and sgian-dubhs, the small knife worn as part of traditional Scottish Highland dress using dead animals that have been hit by cars.

Friends of the 32-year-old will call her when they pass an animal that has been hit on the road and she now has a freezer full of corpses of foxes, badgers and hares which have been collected from the roadside or given to her.

Emma creates sporrans using the animals faces and the distinctive dresswear can fetch up to £750 each.

The sporrans made of faces, which take around a month to complete, pay homage to the traditional style worn by officers and sergeants of the military in years gone by.

But the vegan, who lives in Bridge of Marnoch, Aberdeenshire, said her taxidermy interest doesn’t contradict her lifestyle because the animals’ deaths weren’t deliberate.

“The way I look at it is that if something has been killed for me then that’s wrong,” she said.

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“But if it’s something that’s died naturally or been run over then we should try to preserve it in some way.

“It feels like a bigger waste to just throw an animal to the wayside once it’s dead.”

Emma said she wants to make sure she uses the whole animal rather than just the face, so is branching out into jewellery using teeth, bones and bird skulls to cater for a female audience.

The former oil and gas engineer started working out of a bothy at her remote home after her partner suffered a nearly fatal car crash and had to undergo life-saving surgery.

Worried about leaving him to go into Aberdeen for work, Emma decided to turn her taxidermy hobby into a full-time job.

She had taken a few classes in Edinburgh before her teacher suggested that she switch from stuffed birds and onto sporrans.

She added: “A lot of friends have been embracing my weird job and letting me know if they ever find some roadkill.

“I’ll either collect it or, in some cases, they’ll bring me the dead animal to see if it was something I could work with.”