I came across this interesting contraption at the Musical Instrument Museum in Scottsdale, AZ. It’s a bagpipe made from a calf. While I was aware that animal skins were used to make bagpipes, it was still a little unnerving to see the entire animal like that.
It got me thinking: Someone must have had the ingenuity (or insanity?) to look at a calf skin and say “I bet that if I stuck a few pipes in that thing and blew, it would sound good.”
Then again, it may not be that big a stretch. After all, someone with similar ingenuity must have once looked at the udders of a cow and thought “I’m going to drink the first thing that comes out of those things when I squeeze them.”
