How Taxidermy Works

and I had cold sweats and I got nothing. Ever, everybody sweats. Uh yeah, nice, Thanks Chuck. Um, you want to know what I came up with. I think it would be appropriate, Chuck, is your favorite use of Texader me in a movie? That's what I got. I'm gonna go with Psycho Psycho. Yeah, that's the one I mentioned article because you know Norman Bates had that creepy office

full of foul and beast mounted beast. Yeah, you know, we're talking about Texas mmy and I think one of the themes that will keep coming up is that depending on how you pose an animal, it can either be very cute or very menacing, and if you fill an office as Norman Bates did with a bunch of menacing looking stuff, dead animals, it's gonna be creepy. It's curtains for you. Yeah, it is shower curtains. That's awful. This is a listener request, and uh it's a Chuck Bryant article.

So I'm just gonna kick back and go yeah, right, yeah, but thank you Scott and Los Angeles, who was inspired by this query when he visited the Bass Pro Shop in Rancho Cucamonga and he was a little taken aback by all the stuffed and mounted I'm sorry, mounted animals. Yeah, and you're welcome. Best pro shops for that free plug, Yeah, we have one here, you know. I've I'm going I'm

hoping they'll send us some free poles or something. So, Chuck, when you wrote this article, did you know much about text jermy already or was it just pretty much relegated to psycho Psycho although my dad is a is an enthusiast, Holy cow, I can't believe this. I do have a great intro. Okay, let's hear it. I totally forgot all right, let's try it again. In so like, now, I think we should keep the first one. Yeah, let's do both.

The about Oh, I don't know. Three or four months ago, you and I were coming home and she went around the front to get the mail, and I was coming in the back, and um, as I was unlocking the back door, her baby baby no, and I stopped and she thought somebody had broken in because the window was broken. Front window. So we go and investigate. Right, there is a huge hawk. I actually measured it from tail to head. It was fifteen inches. You're kidding, an enormous hawk. Dead

is a doornail that is disco Right. How did this not come to you when you were thinking of an interest. I don't know. I mean, this is crazy. That's weird. So um, it was beautiful. Its neck was broken, but that was it. It was still warm, It was clearly in good shape, you know, well, aside from being dead, and um, we're Our first thought was we need to stuff this. This is this hawk came to us, gave its life so it could sit in our study. And um we looked into it and found that we would

have been arrested had we tried to. Yeah. Apparently in Georgia hawks are protected and We definitely had a hawk. It was a chicken hawk, you know, like the little chicken hawk and the fog horn leghorn thing. You're a chicken hawk and I'm a chicken right exactly, except this one. Actually it could have taken a chicken pretty easy. Um, but apparently they're protected and it'll raise a whole can

of worms if you try to get these things stuffed. Interesting, which actually goes into a point that you make in this article that if you have a hawk or a deer or a beaver or any combination of those, uh, and you take them to a text enrvous and you expect some, as you put it, uh, hill billy mad scientists, but the thirst for blood, you're going to be disappointed because most of them are very gentle kind, loving, crotchety artists. Yes, right, yes,

for sure. Let's talk about taxidermy. Where did it come from? Now? See man, what a great intro. Thank you. Uh. Taxidermy Josh began as uh out of practicality in England because of the need for leather, usable leather, So tanning hides was where it all started. Yeah, I'll tan your hide. Did you ever get told that? No, My parents were educated. Yeah, I think my grandmother might have said that. I should have said, look, do you want to make my button

to useable leather? She would have smacked me, she would have. So, uh, it was kind of borne out of that. And then also once the naturalist like James Cook and Darwin started collecting odd animals, they worked some of the early most the earliest taxidermists. Because if you're you know, Darwin, and then you're like, look this new species of turtle I found and killed, it's like six months ago, and yeah,

it's not gonna work. So yeah, you said that for they they started it for leather, Yeah, and to preserve specimens, right, yeah, which makes sense. So okay, so Texas Jeremy has legitimate origins, and uh, they were it was a little crude back in those days. They literally like gutted and removed the

organs and stuffed it with like straw. But it didn't work too well because they didn't preserve the animal and like the eyes and the nose and the teeth would rot of course, so it would be like like this turtle and people be like you exactly, I don't know what a turtle is, but I don't like it. Uh so, yeah, that's how it started. Nice and it's kind of stayed well, it's stayed the same from what is that the nineteenth centuries? Yeah, James Cook, he was eighteenth century, right, Um, it's they

pretty much the same. I mean as far as what they would do to the specimen, they would stuff it. Yeah, the process right, Um, it became a little more refined as they figured out how they you know, I got to preserve the tongue somehow, Charles get rid of it all together. Yeah, that's what I would have done. Yeah, you can. You know, with the advent of plastics, that's what plastic was really created for plastics and rubber tongue removal, well,

to create substitute tongues for taxidermy. Interesting little known fact that I just made it is true, Okay, got me I feel like a sucker. Uh yeah, dude. It's stayed the same till the nineteen seventies, which is kind of a long time. And then uh, they began using they quit stuffing basically and started using molds. The taxidermy revolution as it's called, Yes, the Great taxidermy Revolution of the seventies,

I think Andrix wrote about that. So that's why they actually if you you don't say stuffed anymore and you say mounted, right, because they don't stuff them. They use what you say, a polyurethane mold generally, yeah, a lot of times it's a foam carved mold, which actually that brings up a good point. Taxidermists are artists. They are sculptors, they are craftsmen, they are carpenters. It's a mix of a lot of different disciplines. Artistic discipline so or industrial arts.

You could say yes, sure, absolutely and chuck, Actually it's a um, I don't know if it's a dying art. I don't get the impression from the article, but it seems like the taxidermists are few and far between, especially really skilled ones. Yeah, it's not the most common. It's not like a Starbucks. Let's say, you don't see a taxidermy shop on every corner. And I also got the impressionel that you're kind enough to not say this explicitly,

that texidermy exists in sort of a graduated level. So you've got you know, you're the guy who started out as a hobbyist maybe who's starting to make money on the side, um doing taxidermy. For local hunters or fishermen, and then you go all the way up to the people who are just at the peak of their craft and they're working for like natural history museums in the

Ottumn Society and all that, right, Yeah, exactly. And that's a good point too, because a lot of the a lot of taxidermists are our big time animal lovers, and they some of them don't even work with hunted animals, so they'll they'll do like roadkill or like you said, work for like Fernbank Science Center because they need their you know, Red Fox, not the comedian. That'd be kind of cool, though. Is he what museum is he in? Uh? He's in the Museum of Dirty Old Man. Yeah, that's good.

If my mom would never let me watch Sanford and Son because she thought Red Fox is a dirty old man. Well, his stand up was very dirty. Yeah, Sanford and Son wasn't very dirty, of course. It's mainly just him faking heart attacks. Wheezy. Uh So, where are we, Elizabeth? Elizabeth, I'm coming to join you. You're right. Where did I get wheezy? Okay? God, it's awful. Uh So where are we? We are all over the match? Uck? We are you said it's it's slow process. That's true, and that's for

a couple of reasons. Um, mainly, like you said, because there's not a lot of taxidermists. So it's not like it takes a year to necessarily mount your red fox, but it's going to take a year for you to get it. Probably, Yeah, sometimes because they have a you know,

a freezer full of dead animals. And then another reason is because a lot of these guys, especially I imagine with deer and other larger animals, Um, they send the skin off to be commercially tanned, right, yeah, but just because it takes up a lot of space and imagine that in and of itself as a whole other art and science. Oh yeah, definitely right. Yeah. We won't get into tanning a whole lot because I don't know whole lot about it, to be honest, I don't either. We

could do that for a podcast. We could. That's coming up, Tested and Report two tanning. Uh, we should talk about cost a little bit before we get into the nuts and bolts of the process. If you want a bear skin rug, let's say, if you've shot a bear and you're a bad person and shot a bear. Uh, you can have a bear skin rug for about a grand, which is not bad. No, have you ever laid naked on bear skin? It's worth a grand? Uh my dad has a bear skin rock, so I imagine you have

laid naked unbers and now I haven't. Actually I tried to walk around it as much as possible. Uh. If you want that bear standing up, and I would guess in a pose like uh kind of butcher, you sure? That'd be about two grand, which I found surprising. I mean, going from bear skin rug for a grand, which seems reasonable to me, to a full bear standing menacingly for just an extra grand. I think that's worth saving up for, don't you. Yeah, it takes up a lot more room,

though well not necessarily. I mean, if you have high ceilings, you're set. It's true in an empty corner. Yeah. Uh. Then these are ballparked figures. So if you're a taxidermist or an enthusiast and you say, no, actually that would cost this were we did our best here with the numbers. Chuck did as best here with the numbers, and bravo, Chuck. The thing that surprised me. Everything else sounded pretty uh, pretty standard, like a mounted deer from what shoulders and

antlers is about five to sift um. The thing that surprised me was that a fish costs about eighteen bucks an inch. They sounded like in this article the hardest thing to mount. Yeah, it is, but it's also small, Okay, so I don't think it takes quite as much time even though it is artistically harder. I think it sounds like, yeah, let's get into this. Why chuck our fish so hard to mount? Well, one reason, my friend, is that a

fish loses its color as it dries out. So the whole thing, it's not like you know, when they wrap a deer carcass I'm sorry, a dear skin around the mold. That's pretty much it. But you have to literally paint the fish all those little skills by scale, right, a lot of scales. Yeah, that's a lot of skills. It's a lot of time and work for eighteen bucks an inch. Don't think so. Yeah, I would think they cost like

standing bear type prices, you know. And there's different processes depending on the kind of fish, right, warm water fish like bass is going to be largely what you bring in as far as you know, the reality of it, goes right, Like the bass you bring in and then the bats you get mounted are going to be pretty

much the same thing. But with the saltwater fish, these things are basically the texidermist takes a photo of the fish you brought in and then completely remakes it out of synthetic materials, so the fish you brought in is no longer with us. Yeah, Like if you see you know, the marlin and T. G. I. Friday's on the wall, that's almost a chance that that's not a real marlin

at all. Right, And the cool thing about this is since it's all the same anyway, like you're not actually going to get the fish you catch, You're going to basically get a life size replica of it. Um. This is really popular among catch and released sport fishermen, right, or guys who want to eat their fish. Sure, I didn't mention that, but and why wouldn't you Why wouldn't you eat a marlin that you caught with your bare

hand through noodling? You know? Oh man? Could you imagine? Uh? So, should we talk a little bit about the fish process? What you do if you if you've got the skin mount is what it's called, which is what you do with the bass, you um remove the inside of the fish, all all the meat and bones that you can and except for the head that you can not get certain meat out of the head and tail area. You don't want to eat meat head or head meat head meat

and uh. What you do then as you inject um like borax and salt preservatives into the meat that you can't get out to keep it from spoiling. And uh again with the I think cold water fish. Yeah, the cold water fish, the skin will actually be the same that you brought in, right, But they're going they can't stuff it. It's not possible for them to stuff it, like they could have warm water fish like with maybe

hard pack sawdust. Yeah, cold water fish. Um like salmon, sure, uh they they it's so thin that you'll be able to see the sawdust, right, Like, why does your salmon have sawdust in it? And I would say, well, because it's mounted. Uh my impression is too with the the sawdust. I might be wrong here, but is that you You might use sawdust if it's just the straight fish on

a plaque. But if you want to show your bass with the curved tail leaping from the water in mid fight, then that's when you're gonna have to make the poly your thing mold and you know, carved into whatever shape that you want. And those molds in and of themselves are a work of art, especially with deer. Oh yeah right, sure. So like if you if you actually pulled the skin off of a stuffed deer, you're gonna find intricately carved muscles, bone,

mass veins. Yeah. Uh that's pretty serious stuff, right, Yeah, that's like big time sculpting. Yeah. And uh so did you like that transition to deer? I did? Are we done with fish? We're done with fish? I think, well we should just say they also have to salt the fish skin on the inside because if it dries out

to quick, it'll shrink, which you don't want. And you, like we said earlier, you need to paint the fish at the end, pop out the eyeballs because they will rot, and insert your little glass eyeballs that you stick in with a little pin on the back. Well, that's the real common theme of this podcast is the last step is taking out the eyeballs and putting in fake ones, right, and just about every single one of these pretty much. Yeah, same with deer. Yeah, that was much worse transition. So

we're we're at the deer. And I should say too, this is a broad overview. They write like volumes of books on how to do deer taxidermy, so we're not gonna like sum that up in four and a half minutes. The one thing that you're you're gonna find in every taxidermy book on stuffing deer is the first thing you have to do is skin it. Yes, you want to skin that deer. And what you have after you skin the deer is a cape. That's what it's called, right Domistically,

look at my dear cap. I do won'der? How many taxidermists have that joke? I bet a lot of them do, yes, Josh. And the goal here when you're skinning the deer, or if you're a taxidermist, you want to make as few cuts as possible. What that still allow you to get the organs and the carcass and everything out, Because if if if you're let's say, you can't get your deer to the taxi dermists in a few days, you have

to do it yourself as a hunter. And if you're not very good at it and you make too many cuts and you mangle the deer, then you're gonna make it really hard for the taxidermists. Right. The more incisions you have, the more sewing the taxidermist has to do, and the angrier the taxidermists is going to be. Right, And like you said, they're crotchety. So salt comes into play here too. Um. I guess they use salt to preserve just about everything, right, And like you said, it's

not table salt, it's like borax. Yeah. Um, So they use salt to preserve the areas around, like the mucous membranes that they can't really cut out without making the deer look ghoulish. Right, And it also tightens up the skin and the hair follicles, which is a good thing because you don't want the hair to fall out. And uh, we're else around the nose and between the toes or I guess the hoofs. Yeah, so that you said toes And I was like, did you have toes? I did

say toes, didn't I did? I think that should probably be changed. I don't know. I think it should be like a little easter egg that only stuff you should know. Uh, so you know, once the skin dries out, you've got to prepare your mold, or while it's drying out, you're you're carving your mold, which, like we said, is very like intricate sculpting. These are true artists at work, right, And remember the skin might not even be in the same place that the texta Germots may have sent it

off to a commercial tannery. So what what comes into play first and foremost is taking incredibly precise measurements, because imagine making a mold just based on measurements you took while the skin is not even there, so you can't just throw it over to to have a rough estimate of how you're doing. And as you put it, if you missed the mark by a couple of inches, you're gonna have a saggy deer. Yeah, that would be no good. So, yeah, you're right. Accurate measuring is is really the first step.

Then they removed the skull and discard it, and discard it because you don't need the skull anymore. You remove the antlers, but you hang onto the antlers obviously because you need to screw those back onto your foam head. It sounds really gross, it does, Yeah, I mean, if you really look too deeply into this. It's kind of ghastly. Yeah it is. Yeah, I wouldn't want to see it, and you know, in practice, but it's fun to talk about.

Uh So at that point, Josh, you have let's say you've got your skin back, you've got your mold done, and you kind of um slip it on over the mold as if you would be putting on a sweatshirt. Make sure it's all nice and tight. Sew it up skin sweats It's like buffalo bill, Yeah exactly, and you pomp in. You popped in the eyes, the glass eyes, which, as we say, is usually the last thing you do.

Then you um, once it's all sewed up and everything you mounted on a plaque, like you said from about the shoulder, and give it back to your customer and bing bang boom, bing bang boom, get your six fifty bucks, not bad, and go back to work on another one. It's never ending, like a bird. Let's say, yeah, nice, Should we talk about foul? Foul is the left broad category of things that are generally stuffed. Sorry, mounted, don't look at me like that. Right, I'll go to my

dad's house. You'd be surprised he's got raccoons and the bear thing hawk and flight. H he has a hawk? How does he have a hawk? Okay, yeah, he has a hawk in fight or maybe it's a falcon. See, I couldn't find any any underground taxidermist. And he's got a guy can't find those in the phone book. And he's got a bobcat. Of course, the bobcat is uh, you know they are so cute, teeth bared. This one's not. Does your dad hunt? Now? He just hits things with

his car a lot. Now, he's an animal lover and when he will see some road kill, he would uh clean up the road kill and then get the taxidermists. And it's just a theme in his house. He's a he's a country guy. That's cool, yeah, Or is it all as long as he's not killing them? No, of course not. And you know he's not. Yeah, I see, there's nothing wrong with that. Now, Like we said, you got to a natural history museum, and you're not gonna

say these people are awful for mounting the spot. Some people would you you forget we exist pretty close to the center and a lot of stuff. Alright, So we're at foul Josh. The first thing you do with foul like with the rest is skin. It take out all the meat and bones, but you leave the feet and talents because you don't want to recreate those. And you and then I actually saw a video and this is literally what they do. They wash and just like a

tub with dishwater. They washed the feathers in the skin because it's greasy and they don't want that. No, although if it is, if it's a duck, you better be keeping that fat for cookie purposes. Yeah. Man, there's nothing better than duck fat, that's true. Um. You dry it with a with a hair dryer, which will fluff up the feathers again. And then you salt the remaining moisture like with everything else, because the salt will dry it

out real good. You turn it inside out. You stuff the head with a non shrinking clay and so you've got a little hard headed bird now with a clay head. Uh. Then you make your neck and body again with the eurothane foam. You stretch it over. You put wires under the wings, um under the skin of the wings, tied off with dental floss because you want to keep um, keep the wings you know, stiff, I guess oh, actually we should have said that with a with the fish

um uh fins. They they spread those out and tack them to a cardboard backer, because you want your fish fins to be all spread out and cool. Look into right when when they're dried and preserved with salt, can you take the tax out? Well yeah, but then that's when you put the resin over it, which is the final step, and that keeps everything you know, lack it. Yeah, that's why shiny, where are we here with the with the uh, with the foul? I think you just so

the little sucker up. Once everything's in place, don't forget the last step what's that? And put in fake ones and then you shape it. Once everything's in there, you kind of shape it if you want, you know, bird in flight or bird pecking it at seed? Imagine they

have little titles like that. Then that's what you do, and then you get your what like two four hundred bucks I think, and then you go work on the next one because uh, and you might think that Chuck just gave you everything you need to know about taxidermy. You're wrong, you're wrong. You can actually go to school for this, right, two to four grand for taxidermy school. Yeah. Right,

there's a lot more to know about this. As Chuck said about with just deer alone, the entire books are written on the subject of how to how to mount them properly? Right, Yeah, and um, I also make the point if you're interested in having if you see some road kill and you're like, wow, I would love that muskrat in my office, do your homework and go visit the taxidermist and check out their work. Like with anything, you get what you pay for. And there are a

lot of bad taxidermy jobs out there. I saw some photos in the research is pretty funny. And don't just carry it around in your pocket until you go to the taxidermist showing it to people people don't like. That's good. There are some things that you will want to do if you do come across some roague killer. However, you come upon a dead animal that you want to stuff right mount Mount um like, for example, you if you have a birth. I thought this was very clever and

it makes a lot of sense say that. Um I would have been able to have that hawk mounted. I should have put it in a stocking like pantyhose keeps the feathers from moving about that plus is sexy. Uh, if you if you have a deer that you don't want to drag your deer through the woods if you can help it, because that'll a lot of the hair will fall off and we'll mess that up. You want to do that, But unfortunately, most motorists who pick up

road kill aren't familiar with how to field dressed a deer. Yeah, that's true, but if you're a hunter, you're probably pretty good at it, unless you're a lousy hunter like you're new. But if you're a lousy hunter, you probably wouldn't hit the deer anyway, that's true. They say not to wrap a fish in newspaper because it will soak up the moisture and you want to wrap it in a wet towel with the fins very smoothed and in place. We need to talk about the jack lope. Well, yeah, rogue

taxed ermy right. Yeah, Well we'll go ahead and tell what a jack o lopez. Some people might not have seen these. Really you think everyone has seen one? But I think everybody's seen a jack lope. But okay, alright, Uh, jack lope is a shoulder mounted rabbit shoulder ahead with antlers attached. Yes, that's a jack lope and it came about in the nineteen thirties by a couple of amateur taxidermists in Wyoming, Right brothers, Right, Yeah, that's the story.

It maybe legend, but apparently the Mayor Rick brothers legend has it. They went hunting, came home with a rabbit, flew it onto a table and it slid over to where it ted met two antlers that were laying on the table, and they went, hey, man, we should do that, like it's a real thing. And they did, and they did and called it the jackalo and it took off from there, and as I said, it gave birth to a type of taxidermy called rogue texermy. Right yeah, also

called carcass art. Carcass art. I have a website who to mention? What's that? It's called Crappy Taxidermy dot com. Oh, is that what I was talking about with the bad taxidermy jobs. No, actually, it's a terrible name for it. I don't know if they originally started out with like just terrible taxidermy or whatever, but the images are showing on the site they were like incredible text ermy. But it's all carcass art. It's all rogue taxidermy. Oh that's

where you can see like a goat with wings. Yeah, definitely stuff like that. Um. They had one a woman was wearing a hat and I don't know how they did it, but it had three birds like pulling at her hat above, hovering above the hat. Wait, the hat was the art, or they stuffed the woman, the hat was the art. Okay, it was a live woman wearing it, presumably unless this was some sort of snuff picture. Um. But the birds were off of the hat, hovering over it,

pulling at the hat, and it was just amazing. I don't know how long this would have taken somebody. But my favorite is this one. It is a bull calf standing on top of a puma standing on top of a falcon. Really, for some reason, that reminds me of a tur ducking. I don't know why. Yeah, interesting with the tur duck. And then you take it and to smush it all together. Why didn't you send me a picture of this? I don't know. We should have one in this office right now, framed, which I agree. So

is that it that taxidermy? Seems like it. That's uh that's the broad scope. There's a lot more details in that, and we'd like to hear from taxidermists if you're out there. Nice article, but oh, one more tip, don't bug your taxidermists. Oh this is where the crostity part comes. Yeah, they're notorious for like if you call and say, is my is my bobcat ready, sir? They will will not be They don't take kindly to that. Apparently they don't because

they're you know, they're stuffing things all day. Where do the wise Chuck Bryant nicely done? Would you want to pick up a phone? If you're like inserting an eyeball from some yokel that's like, do you have my red fox ready? Sir? What is it with you in red foxes?

I don't know. I guess because my dad has one. Well, if you want to learn more about taxidermy, right, and you want to see some pretty cool photos with hilarious captions underneath, you can type taxidermy in the handy search bar at how stuff works dot com, which means that it is time for listener mail. Yes, indeed, Josh, I'm gonna call this sorority thief all right? And I did get permission to read this because I was. I'm not sure if they wanted us out there, Josh and Chuck.

I have recently become a huge fan of the podcast, or huge if you're from New York. I have a story about kleptomania. I'm currently an executive member for a sorority at my university. Recently, girls have been getting their things stolen in their rooms in the sorority house. A few thousand dollars was stolen from the philanthropy account. That's just awful. Designer dress was stolen out of a girl's closet.

Not as bad, and a girl's eye touch was stolen, twenty capsules of a girl's A D D prescription meds, and the list goes on. Anyways, the other day, a girl left a note on another girl's door calling her a klepto and to see the sorority drama unfolding and some questionable names, causing a rather large uproar in the house. We had an emergency executive meeting, and everyone kept on

labeling this thief as a klepto. I finally sat everyone down and made them listen to a portion of your podcast in order for them to quit using this term in the wrong context and implement some comic relief in the midst of this feminine chaos. Could you imagine? Yeah, we ended up listening to the whole podcast, and afterwards we were able to lessen some of the drama. Although the identity of the culprit has not yet been revealed, we have startled, uh sorry, started implementing your podcast to

bring us together. This may be a little weird, but y'all have helped us come back together and stop being so caddie. Welcome to living in a house of eighty girls. So sweet. Yeah. Anyways, you guys teach us new things all the time. You make us laugh, you make as think. Thank you for all you share and y'all are awesome. Make more than just two a week from Julia V. Thank you Julia, thanks to your sorority? Which one can

we say? Uh No, she didn't actually say, or the university and uh I did tell her to keep in touch though, because I wanted to know who this thieving sorority member was. God so many. Do you have a standard plane email that you'd like to send us? You can shoot it to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot Com. Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the how stuff works dot Com home page. M brought to you by

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