March 25, 2010 • 30 mins
Josh and Chuck tackle taxidermy, the practice of preserving and mounting dead animal skins for display, in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff You Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryant
that would make this, that would make this stuff you
(00:22):
should know? Hello, Hey, Chuck, h Hey, what's going on?
You know? You know I tossed in turn last night.
I'm like, I have to come up with a good
intro for this. I kept waking up in the middle
and I had cold sweats and I got nothing. Ever,
everybody sweats. Uh yeah, nice, Thanks Chuck. Um, you want
(00:45):
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,
(01:07):
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
(01:28):
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
(01:50):
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,
(02:16):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:57):
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
(03:18):
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
(03:41):
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
(04:04):
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
(04:27):
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
(04:48):
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
(05:10):
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
(05:31):
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,
(05:53):
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
(06:13):
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
(06:34):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:18):
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,
(07:39):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:22):
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,
(08:46):
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,
(09:08):
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
(09:30):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:12):
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,
(10:33):
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,
(10:55):
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,
(11:15):
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.
(11:37):
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
(11:58):
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
(12:20):
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
(12:41):
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,
(13:01):
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
(13:24):
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
(13:46):
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.
(14:09):
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
(14:30):
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
(14:52):
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
(15:14):
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
(15:35):
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.
(15:57):
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
(16:18):
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
(16:38):
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
(17:01):
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
(17:21):
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
(17:42):
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
(18:04):
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.
(18:26):
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
(18:46):
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.
(19:08):
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?
(19:32):
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.
(19:52):
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,
(20:16):
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
(20:36):
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
(20:57):
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
(21:21):
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
(21:43):
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
(22:03):
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
(22:24):
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.
(22:44):
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
(23:05):
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.
(23:25):
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
(23:47):
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
(24:07):
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
(24:30):
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
(24:51):
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,
(25:13):
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
(25:34):
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
(25:55):
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,
(26:17):
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
(26:38):
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.
(27:03):
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
(27:25):
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
(27:46):
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
(28:08):
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,
(28:28):
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
(28:49):
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
(29:12):
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
(29:32):
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
(29:54):
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.
(30:18):
Is it how stuff works dot Com. Want more how
stuff works, check out our blogs on the how stuff
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the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff You Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryant
that would make this, that would make this stuff you
(00:22):
should know? Hello, Hey, Chuck, h Hey, what's going on?
You know? You know I tossed in turn last night.
I'm like, I have to come up with a good
intro for this. I kept waking up in the middle
and I had cold sweats and I got nothing. Ever,
everybody sweats. Uh yeah, nice, Thanks Chuck. Um, you want
(00:45):
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,
(01:07):
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
(01:28):
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
(01:50):
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,
(02:16):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:57):
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
(03:18):
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
(03:41):
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
(04:04):
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
(04:27):
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
(04:48):
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
(05:10):
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
(05:31):
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,
(05:53):
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
(06:13):
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
(06:34):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:18):
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,
(07:39):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:22):
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,
(08:46):
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,
(09:08):
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
(09:30):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:12):
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,
(10:33):
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,
(10:55):
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,
(11:15):
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.
(11:37):
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
(11:58):
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
(12:20):
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
(12:41):
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,
(13:01):
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
(13:24):
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
(13:46):
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.
(14:09):
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
(14:30):
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
(14:52):
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
(15:14):
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
(15:35):
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.
(15:57):
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
(16:18):
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
(16:38):
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
(17:01):
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
(17:21):
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
(17:42):
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
(18:04):
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.
(18:26):
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
(18:46):
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.
(19:08):
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?
(19:32):
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.
(19:52):
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,
(20:16):
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
(20:36):
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
(20:57):
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
(21:21):
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
(21:43):
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
(22:03):
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
(22:24):
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.
(22:44):
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
(23:05):
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.
(23:25):
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
(23:47):
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
(24:07):
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
(24:30):
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
(24:51):
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,
(25:13):
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
(25:34):
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
(25:55):
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,
(26:17):
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
(26:38):
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.
(27:03):
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
(27:25):
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
(27:46):
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
(28:08):
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,
(28:28):
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
(28:49):
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
(29:12):
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
(29:32):
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
(29:54):
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.
(30:18):
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
the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
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Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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