Drawing on three illustrative examples—a sixteenth-century collection representation, a curious pre-modern lion mount, and a glance into contemporary art—this introductory chapter outlines the thematic scope and temporal framework, key research challenges, methodological approaches, and guiding questions of the volume dedicated to pre-modern animal preparation. By bringing these examples into dialogue, the chapter highlights the aesthetic, material, and epistemological dimensions of preserving, collecting, and displaying animals, and traces how practices of preparing, arranging, and representing animals before 1850 have shaped artistic and scientific modes of knowledge. Starting from an art historical perspective and engaging with recent scholarship in the humanities, the introduction contextualises the study of pre-modern animal preparation within broader debates concerning the relationships between humans and other animals, art and science, as well as materiality and representation. Besides offering an overview of the individual contributions and situating them within this shared conceptual framework, the introduction discusses the challenges of approaching the aforementioned material objects themselves—hybrid entities, which resist stable categorisation and thus are neither flesh nor fowl.