Vegan turns people's dead pets into bizarre fashion accessories - including sporrans

A vegan is making a killing from dead animals she turns into luxury fashion accessories.

Emma Willats' unusual form of taxidermy sees her use the bodies of animals such as foxes, badgers and raccoons to make an array of accessories - including sporrans.

The 32-year-old's passion for resurrecting dead animals has reached such a level that friends go out their way to donate roadkill to her.

In other cases, people have handed over the corpses of their dead pets so the animals can live on in another form.

Ms Willats, from Marnoch, Aberdeenshire, turned her taxidermy hobby into a full-time job shortly after her partner suffered a near-fatal car crash.

Since then she has started using foxes, badgers, hares, raccoons and other animals to ply her trade.

With a freezer filled with corpses, Ms Willats fashions the bodies into sporrans - a traditional part of male Scottish Highland dress - jewellery and sgian-dubhs.

Faces of animalsused as a flap on the traditional Scottish attire fetch up to £750 a piece.

Ms Willats, who took a handful of classes in Edinburgh, insists that her interest in taxidermy does not contradict her vegan lifestyle if an animal's death is not deliberate.

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

"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. It's better to use them in taxidermy than have some council employee just discard them."

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.

"I don't think I'll ever get bored of taxidermy."