Will taxidermy become the new knitting?
by Adrienne Martini
Martha Stewart gets me into more trouble. If not for this legally dubious domestic doyenne, I would not have found myself staring at a half-cleaned boar skull, which was bubbling merrily away in a pot on a porch outside of Oliver Springs. Additionally, I would not be on the verge of tossing my cookies at the smell of said boar's head—an odor that can best be described as a heady cocktail of freshly-popped microwave popcorn that has been liberally doused in that synthetic butter, wet wool, and an organic, peaty note of meat that's barely on this side of being very, very bad.
My route to this particular career peak had two contiguous paths. One—odd as it may seem, I actually like Ms. Stewart. You may insert your own jeers here. I can wait.
Recently, her program did a lovely little piece on taxidermy.
You read that right—taxidermy, that mysterious process by which dead animals are preserved and displayed—was talked about in the same golden tones as rick-rack and monogrammed candles. Martha's subjects were a father and son team by the name of, I kid you not, Schwendeman, who mount animals for the American Museum of Natural History.
The segment itself got me thinking. Was home-taxidermy on the cusp of bursting in to the suburban rec room, where families could set up their own home taxidermy studio? Was it about to become the new knitting? Was a trend about to be born? I had to know.
The second part of the path to this particular mountain porch was dug by one of my cats, whose name is Mooch. Mooch is the feline equivalent of a Jack Russell terrier—full of energy, into everything, and amazingly annoying. He's gotten a bit chunky in his later years (to be honest, he resembles a nutria more than a housecat), but his 'tude has remained unaltered.
Shortly after the above Martha Stewart segment, Mooch was up to some mischief, as per his usual. I threatened to have him stuffed. And, so, an idea was born.
Brian Taylor, the owner of Mountain Dogs Taxidermy and Freeze Dry, has been in the business for ten years, with three of those logged in his current location, a modest house on Route 62 just past Coalfield. Taylor looks like the prototypical outdoorsman, wearing a baseball hat with his business name embroidered above the bill, a Ducks Unlimited sweatshirt, and jeans. He's a solid man and the sort you can imagine carrying a dead deer through the woods. Before taxidermy, he made his living selling hunting dog supplies and as a charter fisher.
I found Mountain Dogs not through some secret network of hunting enthusiasts but with a simple Google search. His site—complete with pictures of recent work and a price list—can be found at www.mtndogstaxidermy.com. And while there is a brace of local taxidermists, Taylor's motto tickles me. "Life's Short," his main page displays, "Mount Hard."
The physical business has a separate entrance from the main house, through what looks to be a converted carport. On the porch is a black and white cat, a live one, basking in the bright January sun, and a blond hound-ish dog who trots over to sniff at us. When you cross this threshold to the shop proper, you are greeted by glass eyes, which belong to a couple of deer, an elk, some waterfowl, a fish or two, a fox, a beaver, and a dang cute groundhog.
Just past the front counter lies the studio portion of Taylor's set-up. Here is where the artistic end of his work gets done. A deer shoulder mount—that is, the head and shoulder portion of the animal—is in the process of being painted, and several others queue behind it.
"You come in here in the summertime and I'll have fish all over the place instead of deer," Taylor explains. "In the spring, I'll get covered up with turkeys and fish.
"I wish you'd come about two months ago," he continues. "I can finally move in here, now. I had buffalo, moose and a bunch of elk. But I'm in the process of putting a bigger shop together. I need more room."
We push through the studio and on to the back patio, where there is a big plastic bin on legs, the boiling boar's head, and four or five very large bags of Sof-t-salt. The boar's hide, which is in the bin, is covered in it. Taylor picks up the hide and explains how it is prepared for salting, showing me the different cuts through the snout and ears and lips that must be made before salting.
"Then I run it through the salt solution and that takes all of the grease and yuckiness out of it," Taylor says.
"Is that the technical term," I say, "'yuckiness'?"
"Fluids," he grins. "Yeah."
Learning to become a taxidermist was a long process for Taylor, requiring a year of schooling in North Carolina, five days per week and eight hours per day. Not every would-be taxidermist makes it in the trade. Ten years later, Taylor explains, "there are actually only two or three of us who are actually still practicing, out of 40. There were a lot of people who just never could cut it. Some people, it just took them a long time or they couldn't deal with it or didn't grasp it. It's a lot harder then people think it is."
While Taylor was in school, he and his wife Gina lived in a trailer near the campus. While his current set-up is cramped, it is downright spacious compared to that arrangement.
"I came home from work early one day and [Brian] hadn't cleaned up yet," Gina, who works for an environmental clean-up company, recalls. "I'm looking around my kitchen. You would not believe it. It was pretty gross."
"You'd open up the refrigerator..." Gina's husband prompts.
"And it was horrifying," Gina says. "I told him when we moved out of the trailer, this has to go outside of the house. I can't do this."
I can see her point. Or, rather, smell it. As we stand on the porch talking about the taxidermy trade and watching Taylor's two dogs, two cats, and chickens cavort around the yard, I keep trying to shift upwind.
"One of the most unusual [animals] was emu. I had a bunch of emus here at one time. They were terrorizing the people who owned them and kept breaking out of their pens. The lady dropped them off back here. So I had them running around," Taylor says.
"I had some wild turkeys at the time—and the emus were killing my turkeys. And I said, well, I like my turkeys better than these emus. Emus are mean. They'll claw you in a heartbreak. So, I mounted them and put them on eBay. I wish I had about ten more. They sold like crazy."
Apparently, the internet has also been the home for discussion of the Martha Stewart segment.
"I didn't see it but I heard about it," Taylor says. "A woman on the internet was talking about it. I heard it was a good article and didn't put taxidermy down. They're some people who are really against taxidermy. You're not a PETA or nothing like that?"
I'm not, I assure him. While I'm not a hunter myself, I do eat meat and so don't really have a leg to stand on in the whole animal killing argument. Life is complicated, at best.
I ask him what he loves about his job, which turns out to be the process of crafting the perfect presentation for each animal. Plus, there's the added joy of being your own boss—even during the slow season, which tends to be August and September.
"That's the start of squirrel season," he explains, "and I do a lot of bow hunting. After that, I stick around here. It works out good. I'm not going to get rich at it but I stay busy. And I'm doing what I want to do. A lot of people get so restrained by their job schedule and it rules their whole life. They don't really have freedom. Nowadays, everything's so fast-paced. It's all about money, right? You know what I'm saying?"
I know what he's saying. And, while taxidermy is a little too complicated and, well, icky to ever make it on to my list of hobbies to try, I can't help but enjoy talking to a small business owner who has turned his love for the outdoors into a viable means of support. Taylor seems like a nice enough guy, even though his profession is grisly. If I did ever carry through on my threat to have Mooch stuffed and mounted—which I wouldn't, since deep down I do adore the damn animal—Taylor would be the guy I'd hand him to. At Mountain Dogs, cats run $500-$700.
"I'm not crazy about doing them. I'll do them, but I try to talk people out of it. Sometimes I think people have second thoughts. I've heard of people who had them mounted and they look at them for about two or three weeks, then they have them buried. That's kind of sad," he says.
When his own pets pass, Taylor won't preserve them.
"No," he says firmly. "They're my buddies. If they're gone, they're gone. I don't think I'd want to look at them all of the time."
January 16, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 3
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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