Of course it’d be pretty horrific to see a stuffed deer head mounted on the wall – amongst a group of anthro deer especially, but amongst ANY anthro character too, I’d imagine.
But of course it all depends. Whenever we consider such things in an anthro universe, it inevitably comes back to this question of which creatures are “people” and which ones are “actually” animals. Feral versus anthro, I suppose.
My favorite example of this is: consider how the wildebeest in The Lion King aren’t people – they are just a mindless herd of animals into which Mufasa falls and then he’s stampeded to death.
I don’t really have a point here. I just wanted to share a thought that I had while writing my story, which is a setting where birds and fish are NOT anthro, and that’s why it’s “okay” for the seafood restaurant to have a giant swordfish mounted on the wall.
Fully agree with you here. It’s only anecdotal, but my own experiences with monkeys/humans was that for the longest time I hated monkeys because some of them were a little bit too similar for comfort. And the thing is, in hindsight, humans and monkeys aren’t even that similar. We’re certainly not more similar than a feral and an anthro foxes or wolves.
I think that including and handwaving it (or not mentioning it at all) is a perfectly viable solution, but if it’s mentioned too much without proper handling, it will end up becoming weird, and possibly even an obstacle to proper reading (for example, if you keep referring to feral foxes and anthro foxes as just “fox”, you either need to always be explicit (“the feral fox” and “the ??? fox”), or risk confusing readers).
Plus, and this is probably just be me, but I think it would be weird to include that detail, and even call attention to it, but never explore it.