I am not a taxidermist (IANAT?), but if I had to guess dead animals look nothing like their living counterparts when given a few days to decay. Taxidermists probably do a ton of work reconstructing things like their faces and that requires knowing what the original face looked like for the model to be accurate. In the works of fiction where I've encountered taxidermy it tends to be treated as something of a morbid art.

They were also blind.

Do these people not know what a dog looks like?

A lion really isn’t that far off when it comes to proportions, closer than whatever the fuck this is at least…