Stuff You Should Know - How Taxidermy Works

Episode Date: March 25, 2010

Josh and Chuck tackle taxidermy, the practice of preserving and mounting dead animal skins for display, in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant that would make this stuff you should know. Hello. Hey Chuck. Hi. Hey. What's going on?

Ah, you know. You know, I tossed and turned 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 nothing. Everybody sweats. You want to know the sad thing. Everybody sweats. Yeah, nice.

Thanks Chuck. You want to know what I came up with? I think it would be appropriate. Chuck. Josh. What's your favorite use of taxidermy in a movie? That's what I got. I'm going to go with Psycho.

Psycho? Yeah, that's the one I mentioned in the article because, you know, Norman Bates had that creepy office full of foul and beast, mounted beast. Yeah, you know, we're talking about taxidermy 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. Right. I mean, an office as Norman Bates did with a bunch of menacing looking stuffed dead animals.

It's going to be creepy. It's curtains for you. Yeah, it is. Shower curtains. Nice. That's awful. Yeah. This is a listener request.

Yeah. And it's a Chuck Bryant article. It is. So I'm just going to kick back and go, yeah, right? No. 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 Bass Pro Shops for that free plug. Yeah, we have one here, you know. I know. Up in Gwinnett. I'm hoping they'll send us some free polls or something. So Chuck, when you wrote this article, did you know much about taxidermy already or was

it just pretty much relegated to psycho? Psycho. Although my dad 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 then. So like, now I think we should keep the first one too. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do both. The about, oh, I don't know, three, four months ago, you and me and I were coming home and

she went around the front to get the mail and I was coming in the back. And 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? Bird. There is a huge hawk. I actually measured it from tail to head. It was 15 inches.

You're kidding. An enormous hawk. Dead as a doornail. Dead as disco. Right? How did this not come to you when you were thinking of an intro? I don't know. I mean, that's just crazy.

Yeah, that's weird. So 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 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 we looked into it and found that we would have been arrested had we tried to. Really? 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, leg horn thing. You're a chicken hawk and I'm a chicken. Right.

Exactly. Except this one was big and it could actually, it could have taken a chicken pretty easy. Um, but apparently they're protected and it, 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 taxidermist and you expect some, as you put it, uh, hillbilly mad scientist for the thirst for blood, you're

going to be disappointed because most of them are very gentle kind, loving, crotchety, uh, 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. I know.

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 butt into usable leather? She would have smacked me. Yeah. She would have tanned your hide.

She would have. So, uh, it was kind of born out of that. And then also once the naturalist like James Cook and Darwin started collecting odd animals, they were some of the early, uh, most, the earliest taxidermists. Right. So you're, you know, Darwin and you're like, look at this new species of turtle I found and killed on Galapagos like six months ago and things just like, yeah, uh, it's not going to work.

So yeah, you said that for, they, they started it for leather and to preserve specimens, right? Yeah. Which makes sense. Sure. So, okay. So taxidermy has legitimate origins. Right.

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. Yeah. Uh, but it didn't work too well because they didn't preserve the animal and like the eyes and the nose and the tongue would be on the teeth would rot. Yeah. So we would be like, like this turtle and people would be like, you know, 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 stayed the same from what is that the 18th, 19th centuries? Yeah. James Cook, he was 18th century, right? God, I hope so. I hope so too, Chuck. Um, it stayed pretty much the same.

Uh, I mean, they, as far as what they would do to the, 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, got to preserve the tongue somehow or else 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.

Is that true? Okay. Got me. I feel like a sucker. Uh, yeah, dude, it stayed the same till the 1970s, which is kind of a long time. And then, uh, they began using, they quit stuffing basically and started using molds. Right. The taxidermy revolution, as it's called.

Yes. The great taxidermy revolution of the 70s. I think Hendricks wrote about that. Yeah, he did. So that's why they actually, if you, you don't say stuffed anymore, you say mounted. Right. Because they don't stuff them. They, they use, what did you say, a polyurethane mold generally?

Yeah. A lot of times it's a foam, a carved mold, which actually that brings up a good point. Taxidermists are artists. They're sculptors. They are craftsmen. They are carpenters. It's a mix of a lot of different disciplines, artistic disciplines. So.

Or industrial arts, you could say. Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. And Chuck, actually, it's a, 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. Right. You don't see a taxidermy shop on every corner. And I also got the impression, although you're kind enough to not say this explicitly, that taxidermy 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 and the Audubon Society and all that, right? Yeah, exactly. And that's a good point too. Cause a lot of the, a lot of taxidermists are, are 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.

Right. Cause they need their, you know, Red Fox, not the comedian. That'd be kind of cool though. He's stuffed too. Is he? What museum is he in? Uh, he's in the Museum of Dirty Old Men. Yeah, that's good.

My mom would never let me watch Sanford and Sun cause she thought Red Fox was a dirty old man. Well, his, uh, standup was very dirty. Yeah. Sanford and Sun wasn't very dirty. No, of course not. It was mainly just him faking heart attacks. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so where are we? Elizabeth. Elizabeth. I'm coming to join you. You're right. Where'd I get wheezy?

Jeffersons. Okay. Yeah. God. It's awful. Uh, so where are we? We are all over the map. Chuck.

We are. You said it's a 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 cause 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. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Just because it takes up a lot of space. And I 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 a whole lot about it to be honest. I don't either. We could do that for a podcast.

It's coming up. Taxidermy part two, tanning. We should talk about cost a little bit before we get into the nuts and bolts of the process. Yeah. 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 rug. So I imagine you have laid naked on bear skin. No, 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, um, guess in a pose like, ah, that kind of thing. Like I'm going to butcher you.

Sure. Uh, 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.

You have high ceilings. You're set. That's true. In an empty corner. Yeah. Uh, then these are ballpark figures. So if you're a taxidermist or an enthusiast and you say, no, actually that would cost this, we're, we did our best here with the numbers.

Chuck did his 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 650, 500 to 650. Yeah. Um, the thing that surprised me was that a fish costs about 18 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 it. Yeah. Let's get into this. Why, Chuck, are 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 deer, uh, skin around the mold, that's pretty much it. But you have to literally paint the fish. All those little scales by scale, right? It's a lot of scales. Yeah. That's a lot of skills. It's a lot of time and work for 18 bucks an inch. Yeah.

I would 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? Yes. So a fish like bass is going to be largely what you bring in, uh, as far as, you know, the reality of it goes, right? Right.

Like the bass you bring in and then the bass you get mounted are going to be pretty much the same thing. Yeah. But with a saltwater fish, these things are basically the taxidermist takes a photo of the fish you brought in. Yeah. And then completely remakes it out of synthetic materials. So yeah, the fish you brought in is no longer with us.

Yeah, like if you see, you know, the Marlin and TGI Fridays on the wall, that's almost a hundred percent 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. Right. Um, this is really popular among, uh, catch and release sport fishermen. Yeah.

Right. Or guys who want to eat their fish. Sure. I didn't mention that, but. And why wouldn't you? The Marlin that you caught with your bare hand through noodling, you know? Oh man. Can you imagine?

Uh, so should we talk a little bit about the, the fish process? Yeah. Uh, what you do, if you, if you've got the, um, skin mount is what it's called, which is what you do with the bass, you, um, remove the inside of the fish, all the meat and bones that you can. And except for the head, 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.

Um, and, uh, what you do then is you inject, um, like borax and salt, uh, preservatives into the meat that you can't get out to keep it from spoiling. Right. And, uh, again with the, uh, I think cold water fish and 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 a warm water fish, like with maybe hard peck 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? Right.

And I would say, well, because it's mounted jerk, my impression is too, with the, um, 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 going to have to make the polyurethane 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 going to find intricately carved muscles. Yeah. Uh, bone mass. Yeah. Veins. Yeah.

Uh, that's pretty serious stuff, right? Yeah. I'm 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 you also have to salt the fish skin on the inside because if it dries out too 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 pen 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. There you go. 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 going to like sum that up in four and a half minutes. Right. The one thing that you're, uh, you're going to 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 then what you have after you skin the deer is a cape.

That's what it's called. Right. Yeah. Mystically. Sure. Like, look at my deer cape. Right. I don't know how many taxidermists have that joke.

I bet a lot of them do. Yes, Josh. And the goal here when you're, uh, skinning the deer, if, if you're taxidermist, you want to make as few cuts as possible, but that still allow you to get the, uh, organs and the, uh, carcass and everything out. Because if, if, if you're, let's say you can't get your deer to the taxidermist 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 going to make it really hard for the taxidermist. Right. The more incisions you have, the more sewing the taxidermist has to do and the angry of the taxidermist 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, uh, areas around like the mucus 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, we're also around the nose and

between the toes or I guess the hooves. Yeah. I saw that you said toes and I was like, did deer have toes? I did say toes. Didn't I? You did. I think that should probably be changed. It should be like a little Easter egg that only stuff you should know about.

Right. Cute, cute little deer toes. Yeah. 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. The, the taxidermis may have sent it off to a commercial tannery. So what, what comes into play first and foremost is taking incredibly precise measurements. Yeah. Because imagine making a mold just based on measurements you took. Yeah. While the skin's not even there. So you can't just throw it over to, to have a rough estimate of how you're doing.

Sure. And as you put it, if you miss the mark by a couple of inches, you're gonna have a saggy deer. Yeah. That would be no good. No. So yeah, you're right. Accurate measuring is, is really the first step.

Uh, then they remove 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 cause you need to screw those back on to your foam head, which sounds really gross. It does. Yeah. I mean, if you really look too deeply into this, it's kind of a ghastly. Yeah, it is.

Yeah. I wouldn't want to see it in, you know, in practice, but it's fun to talk about. 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 sweatshirt. It's like Buffalo Bill.

Yeah, exactly. Are you size 14? And you pop in, you pop in the eyes, the glass eyes, which as we say is usually the last thing you do. Then you, um, once it's all sewn up and everything, you mount it on a plaque, like you said, for about the shoulder and give it back to your customer and bing, bang, boom, bing, bang, boom. Get your, what, 650 bucks?

Yeah. Not bad. And go back to work on, uh, another one. It's never ending. Like a bird, let's say. Yeah. Nice. Should we talk about foul?

Yeah. Foul is the last broad category of things that, uh, are generally stuffed. Sorry. Mounted. Don't look at me like that. Right. I'll go to my dad's house. He'd be surprised.

What does he have? Uh, raccoons and, uh, the bear thing. Hawk in flight. Uh, I think he's got a, So he has a hawk. How does he have a hawk? Shhh. Okay.

Yeah. He has a hawk in flight or maybe it's a falcon. See, I couldn't find any, uh, any, uh, um, underground taxidermist. Yeah. He's got a guy. I can't find those in the phone book. He's got a bobcat. Nice.

Of course the bobcat is, uh, you know, They are so cute. Teeth beard. This one's not. Does your dad hunt? No. He hits things with his car a lot. No.

He's an animal lover. And when he will see some roadkill, he would, uh, clean up the roadkill and then, uh, get the taxidermist and it's just a theme in his house. He's a, he's a country guy. That's cool. Yeah. Or is it? Well, 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. No. Like we said, you go to a natural history museum and you're not going to say these people are awful for. Butchers. Yeah. Mounting this fox.

And you forget we exist pretty close to the center. Yeah, that's true. On a lot of stuff. All right. So we're at foul, Josh. The first thing you do with foul, like with the rest is skin it, uh, take out all the meat and bones, but you leave the feet and talons because you don't want to recreate those.

Right. And you, and then I actually saw a video and this is literally what they do. They wash in just like a tub with dishwater. They wash the, the feathers and the skin. Yeah. 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.

Sure. And for cooking purposes. Oh yeah, man. There's nothing better than duck fat. That's true. You dry it with a, with a hairdryer, 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. Right. You stuff the head with a non-trinking clay and so you've got a little hard headed bird now with a clay head, then you make your neck and body again with the urethane foam. You stretch it over, you put wires under the wings, under the skin of the wings, tied off with dental floss because you want to keep, keep the wings, you know, stiff, I guess. Sure. Oh, actually we should have said that with the, with the fish fins.

Yeah. 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 looking too. Right. And when, when they're dried and preserved with salt, can you take the tacks out? Well, yeah, but then that's when you put the resin over it, which is the, the final step and that keeps everything, you know. You should like it.

Yeah. That's why it's shiny. Uh, where are we here with the, with the, uh, with the foul? I think you just sew the little sucker up once everything's in place. Don't forget the last step. What's that? Other eyes. You remove the eyes 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. Sure. Then that's what you do. Yeah. And then you get your what, like 250 to 400 bucks, I think. And then you go work on the next one cause it's never ending.

And you might think that, uh, 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? Uh-huh. Before grand for taxidermy school. Yeah. Right.

There's a lot more to know about this. As Chuck said about, uh, with just deer alone, the entire books are written on the subject of, 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've seen some roadkill 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. Yeah. And those, and 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. That's no good. There are some things that, uh, you will want to do if you do come across some roadkill

or however you come upon a dead animal that you want to stuff, right? Mount. Mount. Um, like for example, you, uh, if you have a bird, I thought this was very clever and it makes a lot of sense. It, it say that, um, I would have been able to have that hawk mounted. Right. So you should have put it in a, um, stocking like pantyhose and keeps the feathers from

moving about. Yeah. Plus it's 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, uh, a lot of the hair will fall off and it'll mess that up. Yeah. You don't want to do that.

No. But unfortunately most motorists who pick up roadkill aren't familiar with how to field dress a deer. Yeah. That's true. But if you're a hunter, you're probably pretty good at it. Sure. Unless you're a lousy hunter.

Sure. If you're a lousy hunter, you probably wouldn't have hit the deer anyway. That's true. Uh, they say not to wrap a fish in newspaper because it'll soak up the moisture and you want to wrap it in a wet towel with the fins, very smooth and in place. We need to talk about the jackalope. Well, yeah, rogue taxidermy, right? Yeah.

Well, go ahead and tell what a jackalope is. Some people might not have seen these. Really? You think everyone has seen one by now? I think everybody's seen a jackalope, but okay. All right. Right. The jackalope is a shoulder mounted rabbit, shoulder to head with antlers attached.

Yes. That's a jackalope. And it came about in the 1930s by a couple of amateur taxidermists in Wyoming, right? Brothers, right? Yeah. That's the story. It may be legend, but apparently the Merrick brothers, uh, legend has it. They went hunting, came home with a rabbit, threw it onto a table and it slid over to

where its head met two antlers that were laying on the table and they went, hey man, we should do that. This is a real thing. And they did. And they did and called it the jackalope. And it took off from there and as I said, it gave birth to a type of taxidermy called rogue taxidermy, right? Yeah.

Also called carcassart. Carcassart. I have a website to, uh, to mention. What's that? It's called crappytaxidermy.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 they're showing on the site are like incredible taxidermy, but it's all carcassart. It's all rogue taxidermy. Oh, that's where you can see like a goat with wings? Yeah, definitely stuff like that. Um, they, they had one, a woman was wearing a hat and I, 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 a woman?

The hat was the art. Okay. It was a live woman wearing it. Probably unless this was some sort of snuff picture, um, but the, the birds were off of the hat, hovering over it, pulling at the hat and it was just amazing. Wow. 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? Yeah. It's for some reason that reminds me of a turducken. I don't know why. Yeah. Interesting. And then you take it and just smush it all together. Why didn't you send me a picture of this?

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. By the way, Chuck, oh, one more tip.

What? Don't bug your taxidermists. Oh, this is where the crotchety part comes in. Yeah. It's for like, uh, if you call and say, is my, is my bobcat ready, sir? They, uh, well, will not be, they don't take kindly to that apparently. No, 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, and do you have my red fox ready, sir? What is it with you and red foxes? I don't know. I guess cause my dad has one. Well, if you want to learn more about taxidermy, right? And you want to see some pretty cool photos with, uh, hilarious captions underneath.

You can type taxidermy in the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com, which means that it is time for listener mail. Yes, indeed. Josh, I'm going to call this, uh, sorority thief. All right. And I did get permission to read this because I was not sure if they wanted us out there. Uh, Josh and Chuck, I have recently become a huge fan of the podcast or huge if you're from New York.

Uh, 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. Uh, designer dress was stolen out of a girl's closet. Not as bad. And a girl's eye touch was stolen, 20 capsules of a girl's ADD 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. I can't just see the sorority drama unfolding and, uh, some questionable names causing a rather large uproar in the house. We had an emergency executive meeting and everyone kept on labeling the 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 started, uh, sorry, started implementing your podcast brings together. This may be a little weird, but y'all have helped us come back together and stop being so catty, welcome to living in a house of 80 girls. That is so sweet.

Yeah. Uh, anyways, uh, you guys teach us new things all the time. You make us laugh. You make us 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 feeding, uh, sorority member was. You got so many, I know, I know. If you have a, uh, standard, uh, plain email that you'd like to send us, you can, uh, shoot it to stuff podcast at how stuff works.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works.com.

For more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the house of works.com homepage brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you. You're ready to travel in 2023 and since 1981, gate one travel has been providing more of the world for less. Let gate one handle the planning for you with affordable escorted tours and your European Riffer Cruises.

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