The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 319: Stuffed

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with John Hayes, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson, Seth Morris, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.Topics discussed: An interest in falconry spurred by sorcery and Dungeons & Dragons; the artist vs. the shady taxidermist who takes your money, doesn't make your mount, then disappears; eagles and lead; Missoula as the Paris of West-Central Montana; when dogs attack wild game and Brody catches a bunch of shit about it; Southerners from southern Illinois give Steve shit; spearfishing in parts of southern Michigan that aren't great; what to do with over 150 mounts; Harry Potter taxidermy; bear rugs with closed mounts; patenting a filler vacuum; pioneering the squishy coyote pillow mount; how fish taxidermy is basically a painting; how to properly skin out deer and bears for mounting; Cal's scalpel kit; how it's gotta be clean before salting; the full sneak and the semi-sneak; the taxidermist's catalog; when your taxidermist turns you in for poaching; when your Ma tags a lot of deer; the funkification inside horns; bad rugs for bad people; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Turn the machine on, Phil. I'll say a bold statement. Machine's on, Steve. You want to hear a bold statement? Start the show out? Most people I know this to be true because of anecdotal

evidence. So it must be true. It must be true because it's Andal Evans. Most people, like a majority of people who are into falconry came to it not through an interest in

hunting. They came to it through an interest in Dungeons and Dragons. I, I, listen.

This is a true thing. I've got like probably my left big toe kind of dipped into that world, Steve, and that's

absolutely true. Yeah. Yeah. My brother, Danny, and that's absolutely true. Yeah. Yeah. My brother Danny used to live up in Alaska. He lived with some falconers, and they had gotten into huge snakes. They were way into D&D. That's what they called Dungeons and Dragons when I was in high school.

And then got into falconry. all out of like sorcerer stuff these are people that like to dress up like it's shakespeare and go to the park and joust it's called larping oh is that right that is called live action role playing yeah what about uh what about your uh buddy the world's greatest small game hunter didn't he engage in some he did yes but he's an exception to the rule. Okay. I said a majority, meaning if you had 100, 51 of them came through D&D. All right, I'm going to find some exceptions to the rule.

I know some exceptions to the rule. Phil, just so you know, when I go hunting and don't successfully kill anything, I just tell people I've been LARPing. Got all my stuff. Go creeping around. They just feel bad for you and kind of noding. Got all my stuff. Go creeping around. They just feel bad for you and kind of nod. That's all. That's great, Cal.

Right, exactly. John Hayes from Hayes Taxidermy Studio. What do you think about that? You got any strong opinions? You don't want to alienate potential customers. See, he's going to start dogging on D&D people, and then some guy was going to send over his rabbit or whatever. It's all full of talon holes.

And then he's like, well, I'm not sending it to him now because he dogged on D&D. You got to stay in good graces with everybody, don't you? Try to keep everybody happy. Yeah, as a taxidermist, you can't afford to alienate people. Man, me and Seth know about a taxidermist here in town that has really alienated some people. Just talked to him this morning.

Oh, you did? Did you ever go up and beat up other taxidermists and get people's stuff back and then seize the business for yourself? It's amazing how much stuff I've had brought to me from other shops over the years. It surprised, I didn't like know that was really like a thing.

I've had it where they- But why would they bring it to you? Because they're like, I just can't. The guy just pisses them off, finally to the point where they just don't want to deal with it anymore. Dodging their calls, takes payment in full, doesn't complete it in a timely manner. And then they go get it and bring it. Yep. And it's just sitting in a freezer for two years or something.

Or tanned or in a freezer or yeah, or ruined. Back in the guiding days. Or ruined. Yeah, or ruined. Hear that, Seth? Oh, dude. I'm fully accepting the fact that it's ruined. Oh.

Yeah, not just him, man. Other friends of mine. I feel horrible about it. Oh, no. Paid in full, too. Couple friends of mine. We had a taxidermist that we worked with for years and was, you know, very, very good, very reliable. And then we referred all of our clients to this

this guy too and you know so i have like an unbelievable amount of store credit to a store that doesn't exist anymore because one day where do i take this credit now? Yeah. One day, right? Yeah. It was just like, a guy just up and left the whole business, the whole deal. Just walked away. Yeah. Yeah, but he ain't got no. Isn't there a recourse for this? No offense, dude, but people in your business, like, I don't know where they find them. Oh my God, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm always like, yeah, I'm a taxidermist, and I'm always waiting for some sort of response or the stories start coming out. I knew this guy, and I'm like, oh, shit. Yeah, we need to establish John as an upstanding member of the taxidermy community. Oh, that's what I'm, he's got a whole box of my stuff.

He's got my boy's mule deer. He's got my bear, which looks beautiful he's got my bear which looks beautiful well my bear skull i already got my bear rug back the bear skull looks beautiful that'll be another question for you later is um uh why sometimes but i'm not saying it's not out of laziness but a great question that people think people have for tax nervous is um what is the hold up sometimes well you can think about it you can answer now if you want okay, um, what is the holdup sometimes? Well, you can think about it. You can answer now if you want. I don't care. I can tell you what the holdup's been the last year is, uh, the tanneries with COVID. I actually just received four goats back. They got brought into me in fall of 20. I just got them back.

So not even your fault. No, no, it's just, uh, we have stuff that's been out for a year and a half and it's, it's still there. It's being processed, um, and everything's coming back fine. But yeah, I'm definitely starting to, uh, get the phone calls. We're like, are you sure it's okay?

I'm like, I'm sure it's okay. It's just, there's nobody there to man the tannery for so long. They're short staffed. Very short staffed. We finally split it up between four tanneries this year just to try to not overwhelm one place and so we can get our turnaround times a little better.

Do you ever have tanneries lose your stuff? No, thank God. Knock on wood there. I haven't had that happen yet. I've had that happen before. It's hard for them to lose stuff these days. You know, like we'll have a seal put in it that's got our name and our code on it. Then it's punched with our invoice number.

Any distinguishing marks we always document. So if they sent me the wrong thing back it'd be pretty obvious yeah i want to be one of the top crises in the taxidermy world right is cape condition yes and and making sure it's my cape yes yep and so the punches and the seals that that helps make sure that that's accurate because i I, I remember a long time ago, we did one and mounted it up for a guy and he came in and he was like, oh, it looks great. Comes back the next day and he's like, this isn't my deer. And we're like, that's your deer. And he brought a picture out and yeah, the capes got switched around. And he's like different haircut.

That was babies. I didn't know I had your capes. Yeah, it was totally different. So at that shop, I was working at that time. That's when we started implementing the seals, not just a punch. You can tell already this guy's reputable. Yeah.

I one time sent. Despite his occupation. Despite his calling. His crowd. I sent a coyote that was like super red one time to the tannery. It looked like a red fox, but it was a coyote. And a couple months later, I get my coyote back in the mail and open it looked like a red fox but it was coyote and uh a couple months later i get

my coyote back in the mail and open it up and it's freaking gray as gray can be you gotta wonder like how much when you bring meat to a processor because you got no way of knowing yeah right like there with a cape or a bear or something you'd be like look man the bear i shot had a big white splotch on his chest and this bear bear is red. Yeah. Right? But, like, how much meat? They're like, I don't know. It's elk. Just give him an elk. Yeah.

Yeah, it's from that person's over there, but whatever. Yeah. Like, that elk rotted. He'll probably never come back for it. Give that guy that elk and that guy that elk. Probably happens all the time. Oh, man. And tell the guy who's calling right now that we're really backed up.

Because of COVID. Oh, when people hear this, I'll be $1,000 richer. Why is that, Steve? Well, I'll tell you why, because I'm going to win that derby tomorrow. Ducks on ice. Oh, yeah. You could be $2,500 richer if you catch the biggest fish of the whole damn thing. Oh, there's a side pot.

There's a side thing. If you're fishing. A snag or carp. No, no. It's between burbot, walleye, and perch. If you happen to catch the biggest fish out of the entire derby, you win $2,500. Well, why would we not just spend tomorrow tip-upping for burbot and win all that money? Well, I mean, that could be your strategy.

It could be. The timing for bourbon is not good. You can't start until 8. Well, I tried that last. I tried that on my birthday, and let me tell you how that went. Right. That was a long day. You were not eating Flag City.

We were running, what, 19 tip-ups? 20, 18, 20, something like that. Salmon belly, salmon fins that I brought back from Alaska, like the little, what do you call them? Little pectoral fin. We had, I don't know, 20 acres covered in tip-ups. And you lower that thing in and just oil comes off it. Soccer strips that I bought off my kid. Not a flag.

Well, no, one falls trip. Yep. Probably some trout dicking. At the time of year when it's supposed to be on fire. Well, a year ago, a year earlier, 24. Yep. We went from 24 to zero. Man, Canyon Ferry, in my opinion,

I don't know what's different this year, but. I think they should just. The water is super low. I think they should just blow the damn drain the whole thing now it's useless yeah tomorrow's gonna be the worst day in the world i think they should fill it i think they should manage it for but i'm still so everything other than trout yeah man like it's so weird there like if you catch a perch it's gonna be bigger than a walleye that you catch, more than likely. So strange. My daughter yesterday said, I've memorized it,

she said, would you stop talking about that? No one even knows what a derby is. Now I'm thinking I should go tomorrow. You're like, it's how daddy's going to make his living. I thought you couldn't go. I thought it was Sunday, not Saturday. No, you can still go buy the thing. It's $40 to get in how daddy's going to make his living. I thought you couldn't go. I thought it was Sunday, not Saturday. No, you can still go buy the thing. It's 40 bucks to get in.

This is for Ducks Unlimited. 50 bucks at the door. Yeah. I might join. Well, I just to, I don't mean to moral, to out shoot you morally, but I also included a $5 donation. I did tamp.

I'll include tamp. You did tamp. He's always got to outdo everybody. No, I was like. He's always got to outdo everybody He's always got to outdo everybody I was just trying Just a modest little you know nod I was so shocked that I wasn't buying it at the door That I was actually

I was like I'm going to give them that at the door I'm going to pay like it was normal Which normally I would do just at the last minute Yep I might join Oh Cal hit us real quick with I know it's like early and you haven't read everything yet, but the eagle study that's sure making its rounds right now, man. What's your take? What's your take?

Half of all eagles? but you're only reading headlines, it would seem that there's a bunch of anti-hunters out there that came out with a study that said hunters are killing all the eagles in the U.S. Half of them. And as with studies, they can be applied in certain ways. And what this was, was they did a study in the u.s of uh eagle health and can i interrupt you for saying yes it's bald and golden bald and golden yeah okay so both of them and uh you know i think there were like 1500 eagles captured um or or analyzed in the study and and then that right is like and then if you applied that to the entire United States,

that's, this is what you could get, um, for, I guess like the dose of reality is, uh, do not pay attention to things that, that's, uh, compare the effects of lead on people to the effects of lead on birds. Uh, it turns out we're very different, uh, compare the effects of lead on people to the effects of lead on birds. Uh, it turns out we're very different, uh, aside from the flying. And the highly acidic stomach of a. The highly acidic stomach. So.

The feathers throw me off too. Yeah. You know, um, I've seen some people eat in similar ways, but, uh, you know, lead does have a fast and oftentimes deadly effect on birds that eat carrion. And, you know, that is the truth. So, you know, the other thing to look at here, though, is eagle populations in much of the country are actually expanding and growing and so it comes down to this conversation that you'll hear many many times like the individual versus the population are we having population level effects and where those things

are overlapping would be like the case of like the California condor, right? Where if you were to kill an individual, that individual's death could then have an overall effect on the population. So, um, I'm going to do more of a in-depth go through this thing, um, on the week in review.

This is like broad strokes. It's Cal's Week in Review, ladies and gentlemen. Cal's Week in Review. Every Sunday. I feel like anymore you can't drive like 10 miles without seeing a bald eagle. They're everywhere. No, their PR person screwed up.

You just get all excited seeing one. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Um, so yeah, some of these headlines are very misleading as per usual. And as per usual, good, you know, good science should be applauded.

And lots of people can take that good science and apply it in ways where it's like, but if, and that's why you got to read this stuff thanks cal we'll be following this one listen i'm gonna crystal ball it for a minute and this is gonna make everybody all mad this issue is here's my crystal ball this ain't going away and stop this discussion is not about to end it is not about that's my crystal ball prediction and you know i always say like you have a choice as a hunter to uh purchase non-toxic ammunition um and you know non-toxic ammunition the variety that's on the shelf right now is way broader and way better than it's ever been.

And if you choose to hunt with that stuff, you're not going to have these secondary effects, right? You're going to kill the thing that you're shooting and not the things that are eating the leftovers. Yeah, I don't want to equate it to like uh spanking little kids but it's just fading out sort of in its own way you know um like when i was a little kid every kid got spanked all the time now there's not that many kids get spanked anymore and i feel like a lot of people are just no one made a law about it right but i just feel like more and more people i know regardless of whether they're thinking about raptors or whatever are for big game at least shooting model copper bullets

did you see the article a couple weeks ago on uh the phasing out of whaling due to the market right like the market dictates oh like people are buying less whale oil. Yeah. Or whale products, right? Yeah. And, or the industries that still use whale oil for stuff. Uh, and you think about, you know, the crazy

screaming bloody murder on, on the whale topics and, you know, like there's alternatives hitting the market every day type of thing. And that's what is ending whale industries in certain areas. Hey, Corinne, why did you, why did you decide it's not, is it because it has nothing to do with our subject matter on this podcast that you removed the COVID Yankee Candle review? That's so funny. Article, which is the funniest thing I've read all review. That's so funny. Article, which is the funniest thing.

Okay, let's hit it. But yeah. So everybody knows that Yankee candles are sort of like, like if your grandma has a candle in her house, it's probably a Yankee candle. People like them because they have a very potent, potent candles.

No, nothing subtle about them. And someone, I haven't even totally explored it but someone tracked covet outbreaks with reviews of bad reviews of yankee it has no smell whenever there's a big spike in a covet outbreak there's a big spike in yankee candle reviews that it doesn't have any smell. This candle sucks. That's just so damn funny, man.

And really the graph tracks. You just lay both charts on top of each other. Oh, yeah. Over at Yankee Candle, we're like, this is going to be a rough week, bro. Customer service. Cases are spiking. People are not smelling their candles uh oh so brody got i don't want to say it was a not like a pr crisis because it's like a not very widely viewed thing

but brody has now developed a track record of being something about his tonality when discussing dog issues. With dogs, yeah. If Brody gets to talking about dogs, Corey gets to getting emails of people that are mad at him. Yep. And I'm a dog owner. I love dogs. You've always had dogs.

Yeah. Yeah. You guys had hunting dogs. Yep. Yep. First one was Booty Chacoon. People really think he's like a bad dog person. These people got madder than the golden retriever owners.

Eventually this will get to PETA, I feel like. So Brody observed. Did you catch what they called you? Did they call you a jack wagon or an ass hat or something like that? It was along those lines. Something in that vein. I think both. A category of insult.

Brody said, Brody observed. Yeah, we were talking about. Dispassionately observed. Yes. Going back, we were talking, a gentleman wrote us about he had an injured deer in his yard. His dog went out and injured it further. Yada, yada, yada. Added insult to injury.

Yes. And we were chatting about it, and I made a comment that, I made the comment that. This is on the skip the flip. Episode 314. In certain states, if you see a dog chasing deer, harassing big game, attacking big game, attacking big game. It is legal to shoot the dog.

That got extrapolated out to me condoning the killing of domestic dogs. No, it's this. It is reported. This is on a thing called a Facebook group called Army of Orange, which I like that. I like that. It is reported that this jack wagon, this being Brody Henderson, it is reported that this jack wagon spouts off

encouraging the shooting of domestic dogs. Yeah. Yeah. Let him and his sponsors and his publishers know how you feel. What's funny is the guy making the post hasn't listened, obviously, because he just says it is reported.

Yeah. He's, and he provides a link and he's already calling for a boycott. Yeah. And basically what I was doing was making the case that you should train your dog not to chase deer, right? Because bad things happen when dogs chase and

attack deer. And in a lot of places, pet dogs kill a lot of deer. I had a grade school biology teacher here in Missoula, Montana, who was like, I see a dog chasing a deer, I kill it. That's right. That was like fifth grade growing up in Missoula, Montana, which for those of you unfamiliar with Montana would be seen as the liberal part of the state. It's the Paris of West Central Montana. Yeah. That would be the other thing you hear often. You hear that often.

That's what I was thinking right away. Especially from folks in Libya. Oh, one of those Frenchies from Missoula came up. His concern is legitimate. Sure. His concern is, hey, man, there's a lot of states where you're allowed to legally use dogs to hunt deer, which I support. Where that's legal, I think it should stay. Where it's legal and has been legal, I think it should stay legal. And he points out that a lot of hound hunters

are very reluctant to let their dogs work on public land during deer season for fear that vigilante people such as Brody will gun them down. I don't actually hunt deer, I hunt dogs. But every dog hunter... He just now gets an incidental deer. Regardless of if you've trained your dog to run deer, every dog owner has a long list of serious concerns for different times of year on like where you're going to take your dog.

Right. So it's like that's not especially. In the winter, it'll get tangled up in a snare. Yeah. So his point was good. But then what's funny is he gets riled up and he's like, if that's true, I want you to post the law. Right. Probably someone post law.

Yeah. From Brody State. Read how they word it, Brody. You want the general rule. Yeah. Someone's like, someone pointed out, someone points out, he's like, he didn't say you should. He's just saying it is. And they're like, well, it's not.

Yeah. And then someone's like, well, no, it's statute, he didn't say you should. He's just saying it is. And they're like, well, it's not. Yeah. And then someone's like, well, no, it's statute, blah, blah, blah. I was saying, if you don't want that to happen, teach your dog not to chase deer. 84 relating to declaring dogs, public nuisances may be killed by any commission officer at any time or by any person when the dog is found to be in the act of attacking a big game animal. And you're then supposed to report it. Yes.

Then you get a call in, uh, any person who kills a lice. This is, this is crazy. That's if you kill a licensed dog. If you, you could kill a non-licensed dog and nothing happens in Pennsylvania. If you kill a licensed dog, you shall notify the owner or a commission officer within 48 hours after the dog was killed. Now, I really do want to point out that I'm in favor of this law and probably you're coming out on record he wasn't even he didn't even pass he didn't pass not for the reason that you're

thinking i'm in favor of this law because there are so many shitty dog owners that's right and oftentimes i have been able to say uh you know, you should really teach your dog not to run deer or go under the three strand barbed wire fence and chase most crushed individual you have ever seen if somebody were to shoot my dog. I can attest to that. Which is why I trained my damn dog. And you still think people should be able to shoot your dog? Yes. It's up to you. Responsibilities.

Bold statement from Cal. I want people to know that that was not Brody. Because Cal said it. No one's going to you. Responsibilities. Bold statement from Cal. I want people to know that that was not Brody. Because Cal said it. No one's going to care. But Brody, they're like, Brody and dogs. Here goes that Brody spouting off about them dogs. We're getting Brody a golden retriever for Christmas. What was the last thing you said that was real bad?

That a golden retriever is the dumbest dog on the planet? I still stand by that. We're launching a new series where Brody has to train it. He's got to train a golden retriever next year. There'll just be a show we should drop every Friday night. It'll be like, Brody with 10 new things about, 10 new

opinions about dogs. You're going to have the picture over your shoulder. Don't like that. Remember Letterman's list thing? Top 10 list. Top 10 things on Brody's mind regarding dogs. This actually needs to be a formalized segment. A weekend update segment.

So there's that. Moving down. Oh, if you do in Pennsylvania kill a dog who's attacking a big game animal, the owner, if the dog was licensed, the owner is allowed to get the information about the time place and circumstances relating to the death of the dog and they're allowed to learn the location

well that's kind of included in place uh also angry listeners no no not angry listeners. No, not angry listeners. I explained why when you're from Southern Illinois, you are not Southern. And some people got mad about that. He said, one guy writes in, I promise you, that is the most inaccurate thing you've ever said. That's a bold, bold statement. He invites me to come down and hunt deer, squirrel, or turkey in Pope County, Illinois,

and then come see for myself if the people there are Southern or not. I think you'd be amazed. He says, we are the furthest possible from the people who ice fish up in Chicago. Steve, I was on your side until I actually looked at a map, because I did not realize how far south Illinois goes. Land of Lincoln, bro. You can't be from the same place Lincoln was from. Michael Waddell said it.

And from the south. And we had an actual southerner, Michael Waddell, agree. If you can ice fish, you're not from the south. In Georgia, he said, I've never laid eyes on a man ice fishing in Georgia. It's on the same latitude as Virginia. It's south of St. Louis. It's not far from Nashville. It's pretty far south.

It's down there. You gotta draw a line somewhere. You gotta draw a line somewhere. But if you notice, if you go back in your history book, the Mason-Dixon line did not follow a latitude. Borders, right? It was like cockeyed kind of line.

Do we still use that? I feel like that's not a good way to measure this. No, I'm going to make a line. We should just draw it up. Someone could draw it up. If you ice fish in that state, and then you draw a line at the bottom of the state, and it'll zigzag, and then you'll know the south

from the north. That's all. We'll work on that. Put it on a t-shirt. I'm looking at a picture here that shows the Mason-Dixon line being south of the Illinois border. Because you can ice fish in Illinois. But it's funny because that's how they drew fish in Illinois. But it's funny because it

That's how they drew the line back then. It's funny because it includes Missouri, which the line shoots up over half the distance of You probably think a Missouri compromise is a mullet. But the Missouri compromise was actually

about that very issue. I would love, love nothing more than to go into a barbershop somewhere and see the Missouri Compromise as like, you point to the picture. Oh, you want, you want the embassy? That's the haircut I want. Here's the big news I've been following. And that was actually, you know, I actually wanted to do, I wanted to do like do the public comment thing,

but it was really hard to do the public comment thing when it was time to do it. Like an in-person public comment. Is they've opened up spearfishing for a number of game fish in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, which is great for me in Michigan, but they've drawn it in like a weird way. Um, the areas they've opened up, it's almost like they thought to themselves, what would be the area that someone would be, would be least likely to enjoy success. And that will be the walleye Northern pike spearfishing area meaning what it's like south

of the southern pier in grand haven for lake michigan and lake here you're talking about like the distribution of the species doesn't they didn't open up any inland see like everything the great lakes are inland but like a term would be sort of like inland being not the great they didn't open up any non-great lake waters great lakes proper right and then they drew a line where like they opened up lake michigan in michigan waters south of the southern pier where the grand river flows into lake michigan if someone said like, hey, you can now spearfish for Northern and walleye in Michigan, that would be the last place I would, that would ding in my

head is where I'm headed to. Does that have something to do with musky populations? No, I don't think so. I think it just has to do with the people, people, the rod and reel crowd of which I'm a member. Most of them are real fired up about this. They're like, oh, they rod and reel crowd of which I'm a member, most of them are real fired up about this.

They're like, oh, they're going to kill them all. So I know they're going to kill like five of them, but, um, uh, tribes didn't want it. Uh, a lot of the rod and reel crowd didn't want it. Spear fishermen had been putting, so they did like this experimental spearfishing

season in places that seem not great now hopefully there's some guy in michigan thinking like no you got it all wrong and he'll write in and tell me how i'm all wrong but then we'll go check it out invite you to come out there and there's one guy that's been sending me emails about this and he's been following it and he did testify on it and he still views it as a win. Oh, you also, you got to like fill out like a report about what you did and didn't do. He views it as a win because it's, it's expanding areas for spearfishing. It's open.

Because he's part of the spearfishing community. It's the first time in Michigan you can spear what would be called a game fish. Ah. So they've, and what, what my guess is what will happen if, if the, the good, if the goodwill on the part of the fisheries managers extends like, well, let's see. My feeling is that the way they've done it, they are not going to find that all of a sudden there's an overwhelming harvest by spearfishing. Yeah.

If you were, if your goal was to kill a shitload of walleye, like to get a shitload of walleye like to get a shitload of walleye spearfishing is probably not no no you know no or lake trout for that matter yeah i'll tell you to change the physique of a lot of walleye fishermen sure need a heavy dive belt oh yeah lead prices are going to go way up trying to sink all those but it is weird because because uh you know in saltwater you can spear all kinds of game fish yes fresh water it's just never been a thing fresh water spearfishing i think is the new frontier man yeah and it's like good but i just feel like it's great that they did it. Being from there, I was excited. And then I saw what they're opening. And I was like, ugh.

Like, I was ready to make a special trip, right? Then I saw what they're opening. I mean, I go there to see my mom anyways. And this border is very near my mom. An hour drive from my mom's place. But when I saw what they opened, was like i'll wait i don't know so maybe someone will write in and they'll be like no you got it all wrong dude but you think it's more of a like is there a poor it's just a poor spot for the fish to be or uh is there like

water clarity issue uh seasonal clarity issue but in the spring you'd have good in the spring you'd have great clarity it's just a matter of like where they're gonna be concentrated and when they're gonna be there and that you're it's just like a basin you know i mean it's like an open sandy basin and a lot of those big bays that have more sort of identifiable structure in places you'd go like be like this would be a great place to look for walleye a lot of that stuff lies north of there there might be stuff i'm not thinking of is it deep south of there you know what's funny is it's like it's super predictably deep like if you go six miles out, it's 250 feet deep. You know what I mean? It's just like, it's so gradual the way it was carved out.

Oh, it might be. Yeah. Up shallow. Like again, I don't, I don't know it well though. In the spring. But if you just. It greatly behooves you to stack the deck in

your favor as much as possible. So if you're going to a spot where, yeah, there's a few fish around, um, that's going to be a tough day of spearfishing. The upside is, at least this year, when you show up down on the bottom, the last thing on his mind is going to be that you're going to shoot him. You know what I mean?

There's no marine mammals. It's just like a big walleye, just nothing ever happens to them. There's no reason to run from anything. And then all of a sudden. There's no catch and release with spearfishing. And I mean, my goodness, like the rod and reel angler, you got to accept the fact that once you let that fish go, there's a lot happening below the surface that you just have no idea about. Whereas somebody with a spear. You kind of live it personally.

Yeah. You're very familiar with the fate of that fish. Man, I don't even know. I want to talk about this one, but I don't even know. It's like, I can't tell. Do you want to talk about this one i don't even know it's like i can't tell do you want to talk about the oregon thing it's sad or no get out it's like i don't even know if it like if it's if it fits so a guy in oregon i'll read the headline oregon man accidentally shoots brother while fending off bear then kills himself so fending fending being

uh that's a verb right yep um no yeah is it a verb i know but when it's got an ing is it still a verb yeah of course it is so it seems like i don't really know but looking at it seems like, I don't really know, but looking at it seems more like they saw a bear out in the yard on their property. One of them runs and gets the gun and then in the loading manages to kill his brother. So I don't know like how, whether they're fending off a bear or just. Fixing to go get a bear. Or just getting excited with a gun because there's a bear out in the yard. The tragic thing is then the guy was so distraught, shot himself. Moving on.

Anything more to say there? One of those we'll never really know. Yeah. Oh. Oh, oh no. Cal would love to know if, if ODFG, Oregon Department of Fish and Game had been called previously regarding a property destroying or threatening bear.

Questioning like, was it a black, was it like a black bear threat? Just a weird story. I'm sure more details. Yeah. Like were they all super on edge? Cause it's like, oh, the, the crazy marauding bear is coming back or I, you know, it's like, oh, the crazy marauding bear is coming back.

Or, you know, it's just there's some context there that would make this a little more relatable, I guess. I mean, it's just sad. Got two. We're moving into taxidermy now, John. Were you getting bored? No, not at all. I want to talk about our calendar, and I want to ask your opinion about our calendar,

but first I want to hit you with a listener question. Okay. A listener wrote in with a pressing question. What do meat-eater folks expect from their mounts when they die or pass them on? My grandfather had over 150 mounts in his basement.

I always wish I could do that better. That's a small museum. It's been a nightmare for our family, he goes on to say. His basement, all of his stories, made up or not, were the highlights of holidays and the grandchildren's dreams. Now that he has passed it seems to be a nightmare to be rid of them in context before he passed he told me personally i really enjoy looking at all these animals i've collected in my basement but when i die good luck

it's not my problem anymore does he want to see what the? Holy cow, he's got a lot of crazy stuff. Yeah. Well, the problem is that they got to get rid of this stuff because I imagine, you know, they want to sell the house or. Yeah, but how is that a nightmare? It's a gold mine. But is it though? That's the question. Is it a gold mine?

Not necessarily. Can you take a look? Yeah. See what they have. What are they sitting on here? There's a nice wall I mount there. You can send that to me if you want to get rid of it. John's going to give you a very accurate

estimate of its value right now. I mean, his stuff doesn't look all rotten and falling apart. Is that a great horned owl in that picture? Yeah. That might be part of the number. I have to explain that part of the problem.

You know, uh. Get close to your mic there. The biggest thing I see when I look at these pictures like this, um, a lot of personal trophies, but for highly resellable, you're basically looking at something that has Boone and Crockett value. If, if, if granddad had shot, you know, five,

250 inch mule deer, those would be really easy to move. Just your average little stuff that just meant something to him. It's very difficult to move. And then as they get older, yeah. A lot of, I get this a lot. People call me constantly asking, Hey, how can I get rid of this stuff? Where do I sell this stuff at? Certain things require permitting. And if the permits don't exist, you have to go back through and refile for stuff. It can be a nightmare, I would imagine. Did you notice the bobcat lounging on the TV

in the lower left-hand corner? No, I just got all messed up. I lost my place on it. Where the thing moved or something? What happened to it? I don't know. Oh, what the hell? Corinne't know. I didn't do it. Corinne ruined it. I didn't do anything.

I can't do it myself. It looks to me like you could just send this picture around to like every... I'll just put it back. I hit control Z and it magically reappeared. Any kitschy restaurant, bar, you know, restaurant, bar, you

know, whatever. That's always an easy place to try to unload a lot of that stuff. He's got a beaver gnawing on a stick. I want to see a, I want to see a bigger version of. The axis deer where it's got. Why can't I get a big version of this?

The rest of the hide over the top is the, like that thing belongs in some crappy bar in a ski town. He's got an Wolver of the hide over the top is the, like that thing belongs in some crappy bar in a ski town. He's got an Wolverine in front of the fireplace, it looks like. That axis deer says to me, expensive cocktails could find better elsewhere. And the looks change so much over time.

Oh, that's a good point. You know, I mean like stuff I did when I was in high school compared to now, I mean, I couldn't give that shit away. Do you notice he has an airplane hanging from the ceiling too? I said, yeah, I noticed that. A model airplane.

That really throws the whole thing off. Unless he was a bush pilot. He's got a couple of them. Yeah. Yeah. So he does have, the family does have a problem. They'll have to, uh, definitely search around and try to find places to just give a lot of that away. Really? Yeah. So he does have, the family does have a problem. They'll have to definitely search around and try to find places to just give a lot of that away. Really?

Yeah. We got a letter from a guy one time that took his grandpa's stuff and made a pyre, P-Y-R-E, and torched it all. Because he's like, it just seemed like, we didn't know what to do with it. It just seemed like a way to just. Send it along. Send it along. Yeah. Do people come to you to try and offload old

taxidermy? Yeah. And usually unless I'm buying antlers off something I don't. Yeah. Or, or like a sheep if it's pinned and I know it's legal, something like that. I think the big question here is not what

happens to the taxidermied items, but what happens to the taxidermist when somebody like this dies? That's a cash cow. Oh. Right? Yeah, like his business is drying up now. Oh, boy. Yeah. You can tell John's like, shit, I hope that's not my client.

What about the rogue taxidermist who will come in and put one head on another thing and attach some flamingo feathers? Oh, we're going to talk about that next. Harry Potter type. Harry Potter type tagsters. That's my thing. That's what Corinne's into? Yes, she was explaining that to me a little bit. Yeah, like making like Harry Potter animals. It's quite popular.

She doesn't know it. She's tiptoeing in that direction. Hey, well, it seems like John's got a little vein of that in him too. You need to pay this guy a visit, Corinne. You'd have endless opportunity. You could make a beaver fish. Get your hands on a, is it a narwhal that has the horns and make yourself a unicorn? Oh, yeah.

Corinne, you could go apeshit with all this stuff. You make a lion with steel head for legs. I don't know. Totally. That's too bad i want to see i thought all that stuff was valuable and in fact i'm faced with a similar situation my father had my father had the first uh fawn first deer he ever got which was a whitetail fawn that looks like it was mounted 70 years ago um uh he's, another whitetail buck. He's got like a shoulder mount of a black bear.

Right. Mm-hmm. And I'm like trying to figure out what I'm going to do with it. Like when, uh. I want it. My grandfather's whitetail, his best whitetail. Um, I just took the antlers off and redid it.

With a new cape. Yep. New cape, new form, new style. Gotcha. You know, so keep it in the family. You know, the grandkids off and redid it. With a new cape. Yep, new cape, new form, new style. Gotcha. You know, so keep it in the family. You know, the grandkids all know the story from their parents and the uncles that were there and stuff. So just refurbish it, you know, take it back down and put a brand new look back on it. That is the thing that's hard to get across on taxidermy. I've, you know, known a lot of old codgers

over the years and they can look at a mount and know the entire story. Like recount the whole thing. The whole thing. Like, oh yeah, this is. This time of day, we were right here. Yeah. Even if they're pretty fuzzy on just about

everything else. Yeah. All right. So let's do one last, for instance. Is that a sailfish? What is that thing? No. Yeah, some sort of a billfish.

Yeah, that billfish, that's a sailfish. No, no, no. No, that's a marlin. It's a marlin. Guy walks into your studio. No, that's a bad example. Oh, no, let's do this one. Check out this black bear.

The one standing up? Black bear standing up, beautiful white throat patch. Gorgeous black bear. Guy walks into Hayes taxidermy studio in libya montana says hey uh what's your best offer you would literally say zero dollars yep it's not my work most importantly and i don't sell anybody's work but my own you know and especially like the bears been working a long time we kind of have our own look good bad or otherwise is becoming more recognizable to my studio and i just don't don't have anything to do with other people's stuff well it's because your bears look like alive bears we're trying to get to that page yeah we could have we could open up uh we can open ourselves up to some taxidermy donations and then we can put those in

the mean eater house of oddities well that's the thing i was gonna say next is especially if it's fucked up old taxidermy because then we could have like a companion calendar that Seth curates the photos for with an actual live in the fake flesh version of the. I'm going to say this again. Let's find out where he is. Because maybe we just have to send someone over there and fly over there, get a rental U-Haul and bring it all back. Oh, hey. Or if they really want to get rid of it, package it up.

But I don't want Cren root around in there. Cutting stuff up. Trying to glue all that shit back together. Yeah, we should get it maybe. I'm telling you guys, I got a spot in Idaho that we're going to drive down to because everybody needs to see it.

The whole company will get all of our messed up old taxidermy photos that we need. And everybody will be in absolute awe of everything else in this spot. From one location. Is it a bar? It's unreal. It is unreal. We're doing, last year we did a calendar. I guess it was last year we did a calendar for this year called Fucked Up Old Deer Stands.

Yes, I saw that. Yeah. Great. All sorts from our community, our listeners. Seth's been overwhelmed by next year's calendar submissions, which is Fucked Up Old Taxidermy. How many have you got now, Seth? Oh, look. 2009.

2000. So it's slowed down because we haven't talked about it lately. Yeah. So now is this like novelty taxidermy or rogue taxidermy or just poorly executed traditional taxidermy? I prefer it to be.

Yeah. No Harry Potter garbage at all though in crin's honor on the last page of the calendar we might have a bunch of thumbnails like we might have a collection of harry potter stuff in the back but it's not gonna be tied to we won't be tied to a month it's it's preferably it's just yeah nothing like that what is that i don't know it just says taxidermy from hell yeah nothing like that we're looking for grandpa's i don't the perfect piece of old fucked up taxidermy would be that um it's stuff from hunters stuff from trappers that just hasn't like aged well might not have been done the best in the first place, was once loved.

Now it's neglected. Yeah. Like with the newspaper coming out of their eye and stuff like that. Like, yeah, just like great old bad taxidermy. Great old bad taxidermy. So funny. But not Harry Potter stuff. Sorry, I just...

So, John, if you're thumbing through that calendar next year and you find your own stuff in there, you're going to know it's going to be awkward. I'll be like, oh, that's awkward. We're going to cease... Just silence the conversation. We're going to cease and desist. Wait, hold on.

I really, anyone who just really is in a shitty mood right now or just is in a great mood but, like, wants to laugh, just Google old bad taxidermy and some real crazy shit will pop up and you will not be able to stop cracking up. No, I think it's going to be good. I think when we, like, really scour it, we're going to find some great months. Now, fucked up old taxidermy was seasonal. So if it was wintertime, there was an old deer stand during the wintertime. If it was spring, there was a fucked up old deer stand in the spring. This is going to not be as seasonal. Maybe we can find a seasonal element.

Nah. No, probably not. We need a good representation of different species, though. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew.

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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Why'd you become a taxidermist, John? Taxidermist. My family always had taxidermy growing up. Like got it done. Yep, had it done. And then one day I finally was old enough to go pick up a deer head with my dad, and I was about eight years old. And I went over to one of the local shops my dad to pick pick up a deer head with my dad and I was about eight years old and I went over to one of the local shops, my dad to pick it up and I was just blown away. It was just amazing. I just was absolutely enamored by the whole

thing. Just the smell. Yeah. Everything, you know, just like. Like a little bit of rot, a little bit of formaldehyde. There's some Bondo fumes in there. Yeah.

And I'm walking out the door, I was like, I'm going to be a taxidermist. My dad was like, oh, cool. You know, whatever. So on and so forth walking out the door, I was like, I'm going to be a taxidermist. My dad was like, oh, cool, you know, whatever. So on and so forth it went, and first job I got was a taxidermy in a shop. Really? Yeah. As soon as I got a driver's license when I was 15, I just kept pestering the guy until he finally gave me a job.

What was the job he gave you? Shop bitch. Basically sweeping the floor, cleaning the blood up, And finally I worked up to skinning and prepping hides and prepping forms and stuff. What, uh, when you were skinning, you were just skin like Cape and deer. Or he start you on the bad stuff first. We did a lot of, uh, lions back then.

Like, uh, they were really avid lion hunting back up in Libby at that time. It wasn't a special drawing. So anybody that wanted to shoot one could get a tag just over the counter. So it wasn't uncommon to skin 30, 40 mountain lions in a season. No kidding.

Hmm. Yeah. So lots of lion skinning, um, lots of bears for springtime up there. Um, and then lots of deer. Guys bring in the whole line. It's, yeah. Most of the time when I get a lion brought in,

it is the whole line. Wow. I'm always just hoping that they didn't ride around with it on the dog box for two days to show everybody what it was. And then it shows up and it's bloated. How do you skin a lion? On road dirt. Right. How do you skin a lion if you're going to like do a full body on it?

Do you go down the back? So yes, you can, depending on the pose you want. But ultimately on a life-size anything, your skinning pattern is not as critical as, say, a rug. Okay. Because you're just sewing the two pieces back together. So like that symmetry you're looking for on a rug where you want to be 50-50 on your split so your legs aren't wonky and you have equal amounts of belly on each side. That's critical for a rug. Life-size mounts, if, if the artist is, prefers the, uh, dorsal cut, um, like if a cat

was stant like that bear, you know, or the show side is the belly. Mm-hmm. Um, a dorsal cut's okay. Um, but I, I don't really do dorsal cuts on anything anymore. Okay. You still have to cut.

Everybody, I think, at some point thinks you just make an incision down the back and then slide it on the form, but the form is completely rigid. So if it's like this, you still have to cut every leg and cut completely down the back of it and sew it all up. So I just, I just prefer a belly incision. And most of the time the pose isn't just the belly. Would you prefer, like if you could blue sky world it, uh, would you prefer people show up with whole animals? If we're doing a life size, I don't charge any

extra to skin it out at the shop. No kidding. Because it saves you a little. When me and Clay brought you my bear, which turned out beautifully, were you happy or not happy with our skinning job? No, that was great. That was great.

You hear that? Yeah, it was just great. So you had a guy you worked for that got in a little trouble? Yeah, the first guy that I worked for. Did he get in like taxidermist type trouble? No, but yeah, before he got in taxidermist type trouble, he got into like selling fully automatic weapons to the ATF and FBI. That type of trouble. That type of trouble.

What would they want with those guys? He ended up, had a client of his and did a middleman, make a couple thousand bucks quick, and the agent showed up undercover and bought him, and then off he went. Off he went. When we were kids, it was a widely held belief that any semi-automatic, including our Marlin 22, two fed semi-autos, that any semi-automatic, including our Marlin 22 tube fed semi-automatics, that any semi-automatic was a few file strokes

away from being fully automatic. There was like some secret thing that if you just knew what needed to be filed, that was all that separated you from having a fully automatic 22 Marlin. Tube fed. Yeah. He filed the pin on it and like now his is fully automatic it's just like but just no one ever would show us what exactly one needed to file uh do you agree that um i don't know you, we're not going to talk, dwell too much on this, but like, in your opinion, why do people have sort of a, oh, it's taxidermist?

No, I mean, I do, uh, even having any involvement or affiliation with other taxidermists, I'm really standoffish until I know them. Cause I'm just, I like, I, a lot of, a lot of people just do stupid shit. I mean, like taking your money and not doing your work or just slapping poor work out or, you know, oh, I lost it. You know, I mean, just I don't know how many in our industry are like that. It's just mind boggling. I think it's got to be transition because I think at a time there was like so many people kind of like working out of their basement stuff right and now you sort of seems like i mean i i don't really know but it seems now you have like big taxidermy studio yeah like like you guys use like studio like it's like a business when you go you know i mean yeah it's like a full-on business with like paperwork and stuff right and i've heard you use the the word artist a few times too at what point does a taxidermist become an artist?

Honestly, that probably is individually based, I would say. Early on, I definitely wasn't an artist. I was just mechanically trying to put stuff together. But like the more you learn, the more you learn, right? And it starts opening up like a little door of creativity where you're like, oh, maybe I'll try that this time. And so I think it's a progression. At least it was a progression for me. I mean, I know a couple of guys that are just like, they were just naturals. I was not. You weren't yet to work for it?

I ground. Still grinding. Yeah. Yeah. I started to really appreciate John when we were talking, I can't remember how it came up. Oh, Y yanni yeah he's like man if i ever get a bear mounted i'm gonna get it mounted where it's not growling because he's like every bear i look at he's never growling right but then every bear mount they're growling and so we i was pointing out john like why are they always growling and it's just easier to make them

growling it is there's a lot more uh and materials available to make that look. And I said, can we do one where he just looks like a normal bear walking through the woods? Which is his mouth is closed. Yes. And you're saying that. Absolutely. When you go into your supply catalog, that's not in there. There's only just a handful of closed mouth in there. I would never use one for any of my work.

I know that. So we just make our own. Dude, they look amazing. That's how we, like when you were saying about the guy walking with the bear, that's why I wouldn't take his bear. Cause I'm really particular on what I'm using to get that look. Yeah. Try to try to be repeatable.

So it's not like a snowflake, like, oh, my bear looked great. And you're like, oh, my bear sucked. Got it. Trying to keep that repeatable performance out there. Uh, you know, the thing I wanted to ask you, you got into helicopter logging for a while? Yeah, it was kind of the path where the fork was like go to prison or go somewhere else. So I went helicopter logging when he left. Got it.

So let's make our fortune hooking logs. And that was up when that was still some timber business happening up. Yeah. You're out of Libby, Montana. Yeah. Yeah. That's dried up. You're on Libby, Montana. Yeah. Yeah. That's dried up, right? Oh yeah, completely.

High school mascots still the loggers though. It is the loggers. Loggers, loggers, loggers. You're in like a former logging community. Yeah. Yep. Very, well, that was the whole basis of the community originally was basically logging and

then a little bit of mining, but logging was the staple. And you guys are doing like, you're doing like select cut helicopter stuff. And for the helicopter, mostly we traveled. So we'd log in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Montana, anywhere where the train warranted using an aircraft.

What was your role in that? I was a hooker. So a choker setter or a hooker. Oh, I was like, John. Didn't make much money. That's why I had to get back into taxidermy. I knew those logging towns were rough. So what's the hooker do?

You're the external load person. So when the helicopter would fly over, they'd lower a line down to you and you would select a weight of logs. So you'd look at them and guess about how much that would weigh and then put those together on chokers and attach it to the load beam on the hook. Then the helicopter'd fly it off. That was near our fish shack. They were doing a helicopter logging for a couple summers.

And I pictured it being that, I mean, this is like old growth cedar, western red cedar, hemlock. I mean, these trees are no joke. They were probably running big aircraft up there, weren't they? Yeah, huge. Like big twin roller things. But I thought they'd lift a tree out, right? I couldn't believe when it'd come up out of those trees with a bundle of trees you can't put your arms around.

Right. And then lay them onto a barge. When they picked them up, those things never touched land again, man. It was amazing. Lay them on a barge. The infrastructure they would build for logging one area around your shack. Yeah. Roads and not a town, but a big big ass camp for all the people to stay at.

That's when they're, that's when they're doing like the logging, like where they actually do a beach landing. Yep. But the helicopter stuff is very like discreet relatively. But I tell you what, man, it's hard to go through the woods when they get done.

Yes. Yeah, your mental picture. Yeah, it looks like, oh, it was grease through there real quick. Uh-uh. Yeah, all the tops and slasher, all this piled everywhere. Oh my God, man.

Cal made that mistake one day. He's like, what, it's only 500 yards. Oh my goodness, yeah. I mean, it is, I think it's twice as hard because your mental picture of like helicopter logging is they just plucked a few trees out of the ground. Clean.

Yeah, it should be easier because there's fewer trees. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, what a mess. Yeah. While you were doing that, you always wanted to get back into taxidermy?

Yeah. I would still, you know, fart around a little bit on my own remedialedial tanning projects. What's that mean? Just like trying to do home tans, like tan muskrat or some, you know, beaver hide or coyote hide or something like that. But that's not even part of taxidermy anymore, right? Like you don't do any tanning. Nope, I don't do any tanning in the house unless it's like emergent and we have to get something small tan, like a deer cape or something.

Oh, so you can do it. We can do it, yeah. We just don't have time anymore. anymore oh i didn't realize you could so there's no like as if you have a taxidermy studio that's doing like a ton of business is there a way like i don't want to like dig too deep i don't want to like ask you like a question like how much land you have and how many cattle run on it but um how many things, like just give sort of like a ballpark of how many pieces flow through your hands annually? Well, we just got a confirmation yesterday that our 109th black bear will be coming in since April of last year. Just coming back to you.

Just getting brought through the studio. So yeah, we'll have 109 in under a year's time. So your studio will do 109 black bears. And that's just one species. Yep. And that's just bears. What percent get lost? Or sold for profit.

Yeah. Uh, that's what you're not selling our stuff, right? I'm like, no. There's no money in that. You know how there was like way more hunting and fishing activity due to COVID. Did you get a lot more, did you see like an uptick in business requests or anything?

Or are you just like kind of set with the amount? One of the big things that COVID killed for us was they shut down Spring Bear for non-residents. And we have tons of non-residents that come up there to Spring Bear hunt. Oh, up in your area. Yeah, we have tons. I mean, we got guys that have been coming up

from Utah. We got a large following in Utah that come up to Libby. What's wrong with their bears? A heart, special drawing versus over the counter. And so one guy, they've been coming up. They missed one year since Mount St. Helens erupted. They were there. Yeah, that's the only year they had missed since the year before it erupted to that 21 or 20.

And so that was a huge dip for us. Canada was closed down. So all the outfitters, like. Oh, so you weren't getting local guys for you bringing bears they killed in Canada. We've saturated the bear rug market for the local guys. You know, they only want so many of them, you know. So a lot of times most of the work is from out of town. So do you, are you, do you imagine yourself now

as like a bear specialist? Like what's your specialty? I know your bears look outstanding. I really like doing bears. That has always been, whether it was a rug or a life size or anything in between, I always really enjoyed working on bears, but I enjoy doing everything. Squishy pillows.

You do pillows? Not bear pillows. He pioneered the squishy pillow. Oh, that rug. Yeah, that's what Jan is bringing, a big bobcat. Mm-hmm. Yep. Explain that piece.

The pillow? Yeah. It's not the right word for it, though, I don't think. Yeah, right? There's got to be a better term for it. We had a guy come in and talk Dennis and I into doing a soft mounted coyote. And we were like, no way. Anatomically, you just, you don't have the form. You can't make everything exact.

So he finally coerced us in. Like he wanted the coyote sewn into a teddy bear? Like just so it's pliable, soft. Like a full body mount but soft yep yeah so so it'd be like a teddy bear kind of kind of okay so we uh go on ended up doing it for this guy and then he never showed up and we were like oh man oh he never came back to get it never came back to get us now he got this how much did you charge them? Oh, honestly, I don't even know back then. Dennis would have been in charge.

What's the industry standard? For a. Deposit. Well, it depends. It's case to case sometimes. Just like for us right now, we're usually do a third. That's because of these lessons we've learned. Yeah, but you got so many guys that vanish on you though.

Not so much anymore. Back in the day, we had more of that issue. People vanish,. Americans are getting better. More people are committed to getting it, especially if they do put a deposit on it. That helped. So a third, I want to get back to this

teddy bear thing, but the deposit thing. Now that I know that it's such a thing, that people will abandon you. I guess if you said it's full price, then you might send business to competitors. A third will get them coming back. Yeah, maybe. And then usually what we started implementing is you put a third down.

Once we receive your hideback from the tannery and we're getting ready to start your product, then it's time to either pay in full or put at least another third down. I got you. Because now you're going to start putting manual time into it. Yep. That's a good system. It helps.

And then at least the guy that calls you up and he's like, hey, I really want to get that done. I want to get that done. How fast can you do it? And you're like, okay, I'll do it right away. And he's like, I know it's Christmas time, man. I can't. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. So now we have to make sure they're paying along the way. I'm with you. Yeah. Okay. So back to the coyote teddy bear. I imagine it's a soft tan and then you stitch

it up like a balloon and then you pick an orifice and shoot it full of duck feathers. Get one of those things that blows in insulation. That's exactly what I'm thinking. Stick it in the leg. We never thought of that one. That might have been the way to go. Out the door.

So we ended up with this, and I mean, it could end up in the fucked up old taxidermy calendar, I'm sure. Oh, send it over. I don't have any pictures of it. I don't keep that shit. No record of it. You're trying to stay out of the calendar. I keep forgetting he's trying to stay out of the calendar. We had a car show coming to

Libby. It was Hot August Nights is what it was called. So there were some people coming through town. Hold on, hold on. I'm very interested. I'm trying to understand. How did we get from the... So this is how the pillow got out. Oh, the guy vanished. The guy vanished. Okay, but then you have the thing sitting there. So we got it sitting in the shop.

Okay, now I'm into the car show. The car show people stopped by and this guy's like, wow, I love that thing. They're like, really? He's like, can I borrow it and take it down to the car show? He's like, I don't want to put it in my car. We're like, yeah, go ahead. You know, whatever. So he took

it down there and then we had about a half a dozen people come back from the car show and they're like, we want ones for our hot rods. I saw the most amazing coyote. It was a coyote sleeping in the front seat of a 56 Chevy. You had it mounted in a way that was kind of laying down, curled up.

Like a dog would be on a dog bed. Yep. I found the video. You don't have any pictures of this. I found the video that Clay Newcomb posted about it. But this was Coyote 1. This is Coyote 1000. Dude, that looks amazing.

It's amazing. Big difference. It's amazing. It is amazing. Suddenly you had a text during the side hustle. This is unbelievable. This is not the one. No, God, no.

No, no. That's what he's saying. That is amazing. He's done like a thousand of them by now. But wait, let him finish his story. Hope those Rinella kids aren't listening. They're going to ruin their Christmas. Look at this.

That's unbelievable. That looks really good. And he pioneered that. So we, and I know other people do it now, but that was just something we came up with at the time. There might've been other people doing the same thing somewhere else, but as far as we know, we just totally made that shit up. Go to at Stephen Rinella on Instagram and see what we're talking about.

Okay. Hot Rods. Hot Rods. So we end up selling about a half a dozen more of them. To Hot Rodders. To Hot Rodders for car shows. Well, one of the car show people owned a storefront from the parody shops, and they owned a storefront engine most of the major airports around the country.

What's that mean, parody shops? It was just the name of a business. Okay. You know, when you, like, there are gift shops in the airport. You probably bought from it. But the word is, like, parody, like mocking. I think it, Paradis, I think is the name of the chain. And so they called up and asked if we'd ship one to Spokane, put it in Spokane International.

So we're like, sure. So we sent one there. And then that, it was sold just like instantly. So they ended up ordering a few of them. And we sent some to Texas and we sent them to New York and we sent them to Arizona. And for years, I mean, they just went like crazy. And then started getting a little bit of a negative feedback. Like, I can't believe you guys have these animals on display in the stores and stuff.

So they finally just pulled back about, probably about eight, nine years ago. That's what I was going to guess. It'd be like that company that was making the parkas with the coyote rough on it. And everybody had a shit fit. Texas was the last holdout. They finally, they finally were like, yeah, they're going to make us. They stuck to their guns. Yeah.

Corporate was like, no, you guys have to pull the pins. So, but Texas loved them. That was a hot spot. I'm surprised you haven't picked up. Like, I'm surprised someone hasn't assumed all that, hasn't gotten back into it. Ah, well.

This podcast will revive that. After Clay posted that video, that was a, I think we got 2 million views on that thing on TikTok in like a week. It was. Did you get any more requests? We had 800 emails. Yeah.

Yeah. It was, it was unbelievable. So actually I got a silver fox shipped in this week. I got two gray fox that will be leaving Monday morning from California. And I got a coyote coming in from, I think it was Ohio. So what we're, just in case you don't go,

no, just go look at Instagram. But it's, I mean, it looks like a damn coyote laying there. Curled up sleeping. Super realistic. And it's soft and pliable. I mean, I could. You could rest your head on it. They did not look like it originally.

Can you guys patent stuff like that? I don't think so. I don't know how I would patent that. They did not look like it originally. Can you guys patent stuff like that? I don't think so. I don't know how I would patent that. You probably could with like the materials that you use on the inside. It's more like trade secret. You could patent a filler vacuum though. An attachment.

The head. Have species specific attachments. Right. The heads for our pillows, whether we're doing the fox or the coyote or the wolf pillows, are my own sculptings. So doing that, nobody else has the same look on theirs. Yeah. You got trade secrets.

Not necessarily that ours are better looking than somebody else's, but ours are our look. How are those things going to hold up when your seven-year-old kid starts carrying it around like a stuffed animal? They're quite durable. Yeah. That's a, we get a really good tan on. It'sold kid starts carrying it around like a stuffed animal. They're quite durable. Yeah. That's a, we get a really good tan on. It's a garment tan, just like a fur coat. You wouldn't want to get it wet. You know, a dog would tear it to shreds in a

matter of moments. So it's fairly fragile, but. Dude, my dog would be scared of that for five years. Before she realized. She's like, you know what? That thing never does shit. Ever.

Oh, man. A beaver would be real cool. Have you done a soft little beaver? Well, we did a lot of different things. Now it's pretty much just canine family. Is it hard to do other stuff? You know, like a beaver curled up? Yeah, I don't picture them curling up like that.

With a big fuzzy tail over their nose? Yeah, and I did a badger and it looked, you know, kind of, I'm like, oh, John just made a uncomfortable stance. He looked uncomfortable. I picture like a badger in like

August laying along the road that got hit. But its eyes were all open and clean. But it looked a lot like that. Hey, do you mess around with fish? I used to do fish. Now I outsource my fish to another taxidermist that I know. I feel like it's like fish taxidermy, in my view, has ceased to be a thing.

There's not a lot of skin mounts. There's no part of the fish. If you like, I can still get a skin mount done through my friend Bill. He still does skin mounts. You still can do it for real. Yep. Can I tell you a funny story about a buddy of mine?

Buddy of mine is a taxidermist. He had a guy bring him. He's over in Miles City. He's not in the business anymore, but he was. He had a guy snag a paddlefish out on the Yellowstone and wraps it in a wet sleeping bag. Okay? And brings it to him.

He didn't want to lose any weight, so he wraps it in a wet sleeping bag. Brings it to him wanting to get it mounted. He takes a bunch of pictures, a bunch of measurements, and takes it down and lets it go in the river. That paddle fish swam away. Honestly, on a fish like that, I would definitely do a reproduction too.

Difficult to work on something that size and keep it stable. Yeah. Yeah, no, I would definitely do a reproduction. So I feel like, that's why I say like it ceased to be a thing is I don't really get it there's still uh you catch a bass i can see that you're commemorating it by getting a replica but if a client called you let's say a client called you and said hey man um i want a 10 pound large mouth yeah you just be like okay

yep here we've done that a lot so it it's, it's like, there's no. Is there, what is it anymore? It is a, it is basically a painting. We did a scene, a guy for, it was out of Hamilton. He wanted to have, it was a brook trout, brown trout, rainbow cutthroat, and a bull trout. No mountain whitefish.

No mountain whitefish. But he wanted those trout all on artificial like a button the river bottom see i respect that is there a reason like that's different go ahead well is there like an actual reason where a skin mount would look better than one of those reproductions no no no they're the casting technology the all the injection molding for castings come a long way. So the scale detail and everything's just spot on. And when you're painting those things from a

picture, you're like paying attention to little details and. Yep. Do you paint them? I used to paint fish. Yeah. Who doesn't know? One of my coworkers, he's a colleague of mine,

Bill. I see. He, he's the guy that kind of pioneered the casted head for fish. So like when they're, when they're first phasing towards more of the reproduction, the head on a lot of fish taxidermy is like, you look at an old fish, it starts to get where the paint,

you see like the bleed in the paint or the oils are popping, the finish is coming off. You can't, you can't really clean parts of the gill plates out, get in there and you just can't clean all the organic material out of the head. So over time, those oils can leach back through and pop the paint off. Oh, when you say clean, you don't mean dust it off. You mean from the original.

To get it prepared for the mouth. Like the actual tissue. I got you. And so he started doing, he'd just take your fish and cast its own head. Really? Well, he had done so many of them, he started having tons of molds. So yeah, he was, he was pretty much the guy that started the whole casted head.

Hmm. And that, that was, that was a huge step in itself. Yeah. You know, this, see, this opens up weird. Like there's nothing, I want to say, it's not like an ethical thing. It's just like a sort of like, what is the thing

and what is not the thing? But talk about casting of horns and antlers oh there's no way to prevent uh just making up a fish whereas if you bring not like a crinstal fish right yes not a crinstal not not a mish which would be a moose fish combo or something like that but um i said be a moosh, but right. It's like, I'm just providing you with the species, a picture, and here are my measurements. Yep. Right.

Or a lot of times though, you get it like, I think it was about like 12 to 15 pounds. Okay. Has anyone come in and introduced the idea of there being a, I don't know, man, like a certification of some sort? Now that there's no part of a fish in a fish, that there is like a, yes, this fish was a thing. It legitimizes fishing tails, right? Yeah, they're like this big. So like fish taxidermy, now I look at it. Like when I look at a stuffed whitetail, right? Mm-hmm.

First thing in my mind is I got to know more. Like, I don't know. Right? Right. So you can just go buy a big dead white, buy big whitetails in little pastures and shoot them. You know, you see a big ass moose, you're like, that's cool. Because there's only one place that came from.

That came from, right. Which is out in the woods. Yep. You know? And when I see a fish, I'm like, I don't, I have no idea, dude. Yeah, there's, and it's like I said, it totally legitimizes all fishing tales. Is there a thing. It's whatever you want.

Yeah. Is there a thing in taxidermy, like making synthetic antlers? Like maybe making a mold of a 210 inch set of mule deer antlers and then making. Some guy be like, that's the one I want. Like the same thing as a fish, you know? Yeah. Um, usually it, like it only happens on, on like that, right? Yeah.

Like it's some estate record, a world record or just some. Reproductions. Yeah. Then, uh, then there's, well, for the deer tour, we only use real deer. Like that's, they're all. What's the deer tour? Uh, the mule deer tour that travels around the country. Okay. Eastman's used to put it on a lot. Yep. That's all real deer. Like that's, they're all. What's the deer tour? Uh, the mule deer tour that travels around the country.

Eastman's used to put it on a lot. Yep. That's all real deer. That is all real deer. And if they don't know where it came from and who harvested it, it doesn't make the tour. So they, it's like. Oh, really?

Yeah. It's more of a historical, you know, taken out of old collections or people find them, you know, granddad had it thrown in the barn and they take it off and they'll still have a tag on it and they'll know when it was harvested, who harvested it, where it came from.

And then we put brand new mounts underneath them and take them on tour around the country. Hmm. And you're involved in that? Yeah, I do all the deer for the tour. Dan Woodbridge is the owner of it. And then I'm the taxidermist that does all the mounts that travel around.

Hold on, you've done all the mounts? Mm-hmm. Yeah. What's the biggest mule deer you ever mounted? Around 300. Oh, I can't even imagine, man. Yeah. And at that point, everything's custom, right?

Because like there's not a lot of 300-inch mule deer walking around, so you're building your own forms and stuff. We can still get forms that are close with a minor alteration. Um, so, uh, in, in reality, yeah, that, that form does not match up to what that deer was originally. Uh, but you're not going to find a cape that was of that size to worry about getting on that form anyway.

So you just start with the absolute biggest primest mule deer capes you can get. We get a lot of them out of Canada. And then just go from there. What's wrong with the cave that was on it? Most of them are deteriorated. Oh, okay. Or they're just antlers. Like in the tour, I got you.

You're recreating, not recreating. You're putting new caves on old antlers. Yep. Gotcha. Yep. What's the, I was going to ask you, what's the biggest, most common mistake people make when they're bringing stuff to the taxidermist?

But just like, what are the mistakes people make when they're bringing stuff and they're like, I want to get this mounted? Like, uh, like to say like deer rise? Yeah. Whatever. I don't know. Um, that's common one.

Most people that hunt will get a deer and probably one amount of, at some point I would say common mistakes would be dragging it, like dragging it around and wear all the hair off of one side of it. Okay. Cutting its throat after you shoot it and then wanting us to mount it.

It's hard to get it right again. It's very difficult to hide a cut throat because you cut through all the hair. I mean, if you poked in and went under and cut out, it wouldn't be as bad. But when you just, they lay the knife across it and cut all the hair off, then you have to jump up to get past that.

So it creates a pinch point. Yeah. I want to, let me, let me, I want to dwell on that for a second. Just explain what you're talking about to people is that if you take a, like, let's say you want to cut into a deer. If you cut from the leather up, right?

Yep. The knife passes through all the hair. Yep. Parts out of the way. But sometimes take a knife and try to make an incision in a deer coming down through it. Hair everywhere. Little, yeah, you cut through all the hair and create like shaving stuff. Yeah.

It's interesting to me that the throat cut is still around. That was like something that was very prominent in my youth did. Oh, it was a lot of guys were just like, they'd, yeah, you'd bleed it. Yeah. Nevermind that you just like put a 30 caliber bullet through its lungs. Lungs, right. And there's like a cord of blood laying in

there loose. It's just, you then go bleed it too. Yeah. Well. Finishing it off. You know, that's another one. Bring it in, shoot it through the face after it's been, to dispatch it and then want us to

mount it. And it looks like that. Yeah. He's referring to a bear. And it looks like that. Yeah. He's referring to a bear that's missing half of his. Can I open this up? Hmm? Watch all there.

Sorry. Whose bear is that? It was a guy that used to work for me. He shot it and I was just, I don't know, morbidly curious on what the skull looked like. So I had it cleaned. Jeez. Jeez. Interesting.

That's cool, though. Mm-hmm, right? So what are we looking at? We're looking at a black bear that's missing the back of his head. A black bear skull that got shot, presumably? 338 Ultramag. Oh. Oh, yeah.

Was he trying to hit it there? Mm-hmm. What was he doing? Peeking up over a log. Oh, I see. Oh, yeah, that brain is splat. Yeah, he didn't go far. Short blood trail.

Yeah. What other kind of mistakes? Cutting through it. Cutting through it. Cutting his throat. Cutting the cape too short. Older style, like I'm sure a lot of the ones that you guys have seen sent in for the old taxidermy, it's a neck mount. Sure.

Not a shoulder mount. And so people end up cutting it really high up on the shoulder, like no brisket left on it. And so then you just don't have enough cape to actually get it out. So you want them to like, if they're going to cape it like way back on the ribs. Start basically at the sternum and go all the way around. Is it right that it's hard to get, when someone messes up the armpits, it's hard to get it back right again? If it's there, no.

If they cut up and then that piece is missing, then yes. But if they just make an incorrect cut, but the hide is there, a lot of times it'll end up on the side and then you pull it back in and sew the leg back together and split the leg down the side.

Hey, Steve, you know what we should do? We should come up with new bandanas that show how you should properly. Cape a deer. Skin and cape certain critters if you want to take them to taxidermy. I'll cape your deer. That is a good idea.

A friend of mine who I think you put in the artist category, they do a lot of Africa stuff. And for a lot of people who want like full, he's like, I spent a lot of my time reconstructing penis sheaths. Oh yeah. It's like a lot of the genitals like. Mm-hmm.

On full bodies. Yeah. Cause folks are used to just cutting them out. Mm. And especially on African stuff where it's very short hair. I mean, it'd look like Kindle. You'd be something that you would notice, you

know, it'd be very obvious. Yeah. So yeah, trying to reconstruct all that. You're like, I can't quite figure out what it is, but something's missing here. Something's amiss. Yeah. What, uh, why does, have you done much Africa

stuff? Yeah. Why does, uh, like why do elephants and hippos always look so phony? They look like they've're epoxied. A lot of them are phony. So it's like the whole fish problem. The fish thing, right?

Really? Yeah. What do you got there? This is a supply catalog. Let me see if I can find... I don't know if I can find African in here. Yeah, so you'd be looking at a taxidermy collection in some big game room, and you see that, and you're like,

looks like you got it from a plastic injection molding place. Yeah, the rhinos, the hippos, elephants, a lot of them are. Really? They're onto the same? I know what's in here somewhere. Like a tannery, I would imagine, would have a hard time doing that, though. Like, where's your vat to treat? Oh, no, there's a full body elephant.

There's a lot of tanneries that'll do it. Really? Mm-hmm. There, you can see. Full life-size reproduction elephant. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, there you are. You just buy the whole damn elephant.

And then you just screw those tusks in there. Yep, put their tusks in it. You got to have a special house for that thing. Huckman doesn't say how much it costs. Oh, there it is. Have you ever done an elephant? Just elephant footstools. Guess what you pay if you want an elephant?

ELP 500 slash zero slash five before shipping that sucker is 10 grand yeah 10,000 that's a good guess 10,542 bucks and you two can have gotten an elephant and is that what's the material for that body mold? It's kind of like a fiberglass. Oh, look at this. You can just buy a whole damn elephant.

A whole fake elephant is $88,000. $87,930.50. And it's just an elephant. And they don't even comp you shipping. Just an elephant. And then you have to put it together. Yeah. For $90,000, you could have a not real elephant standing comp your shipping. Just an elephant. And then you have to put it together. Yeah. For $90,000, you could have a not real elephant standing in your house.

It'd be a fun thing to do with the kids. It's like a giant Lego set. I could gut my entire house and it still won't fit. That's incredible. That's why they look so bad. So that's becoming more normalized more normal, normalized now. A lot of reproduction stuff. Is that because.

Do you take that business? You know, I have yet to have to order one of those. But it definitely could come up. I'm thinking 50% upfront when it comes time to. Paid in full and then we order it. Yeah. So when you, let's walk through a deer some uh deer how a deer what happens to a deer okay so guy shoots deer um let's say he guts it up to the sternum drags in his truck brings it over and says i want to get

my deer a shoulder mount walk Walk me through what happens. What do you do? We'll have one of the guys go out there and skin the cape off for him at that point, just to make sure that makes our life easier at that point. And you prefer it that way because now you know what you're dealing with. Yes. You know, the cuts, usually one of the other mistakes I see a lot of time, and it's not really that big of an issue on most deer mounts,

but guys will start at the middle of the back and cut up to the base of the skull. That's what I thought you're supposed to do. And you cut from the base of the skull down. Oh. So you go with the hair so that parts out of the way.

And if you're going up, sometimes it'll still catch the hair and cut one side off. I had no idea. So you prefer starting at the forehead and go back. Yep. Start right at the base of the skull and go down to where your circumference, where you make

the cut all the way around the body. That's good to know. And then like, and like to beat them out. I mean, unless you're, so that's a good question to ask your artists at that time. Um, if they prefer a short Y incision or if they do the full dorsal cut down the back. So you guys really liked this artist nomenclature. Well, it's, it's more applicable nowadays. He is. I like it's more applicable nowadays.

Yeah, I like it. I like it, man. What do you recommend? Oh, sorry. Go ahead. What do you recommend for an antelope in the field? Because their hair falls out so easy.

It falls out really easy and they blood stain. So. Okay. That's one of the most common things we see with antelope is the blood staining around the face. If you get your antelope and you know you're going to mount it, take some paper towels or

toilet paper, cut a bit of your bandana up and get it plugged. Take your canteen and get the blood off as quick as you can. Oh, that's good. Because it goes inside the hair. When you say plugged, what do you mean? Like fill the nose up, fill the mouth out.

Oh, so he's not. So it stops leaching more blood out into the hair. Huh. That's a good tip. Yeah, you can carry some of that quick clot stuff with you, man. You can't wash it out. Once it, if it sits there long enough, it actually draws into the hair. Huh. That's a good tip. Yeah, you can carry some of that quick clot stuff with you, man. You can't wash it out. Once it, if it sits there long enough, it

actually draws into the hair follicle. So it's inside the hair showing through the hair. No kidding. Yeah. So there's no, no getting it out. And it'll do it like you see like on shoulder mounts, you see the darker spots by the

shoulder. That's another spot, you know, just plug it up. And you can't just like peroxide it out because you've got so many other colors next to it, right? And it would, you'd have to fry the hair. Like I said, peroxide would lighten the outside of the hair, but the blood's on the inside

showing through. Because it's like that tube. It's like a straw. Hollow tube. Like a hollow tube. And this is like kind of particular to antelope. And like sheep, doll sheep. That's the one that we see a lot.

You know, guys just don't know. They're coated in blood and it's too late. Yeah. Yeah. And then it has, it soaks in like that quarter inch, you have that halo. And if you just part the hair back, it's beautiful white, but it's got that frosted brown

on the outside. Is it okay to just like go down to a cold ass creek and throw it in there and try to just get it all out right away? Yep. Yeah. Then just get it hung up and get the water off of it and get it drying back out again.

But yeah. So if you had an antelope cape that had blood in it, you could just turn a hose on it and just. Mm-hmm. That's better than leaving it. That's better than leaving it. That's better than leaving it bloody. Yeah. You just got to make sure you get it back to dry.

You know, you wouldn't want to do that and throw it in a bag. Cause it's still going to be leaching out more blood from the tissue at that point. So you want to rinse the hair off and get it to hang into where the water runs off finally. And then plug its nose and mouth. Yeah. If you leave the skull in it. Yeah. What do you, what do you, what's a good way to plug it?

With what? Paper towels, toilet Yeah. What do you, what do you, what's a good way to plug it? With what? Paper towels, toilet paper. What about like Vaseline? You know, like when you have like UFC fights and then a guy gets his, his, uh, you know, something in his face split and they pack it with some. I wouldn't put that on an antelope just because it would probably soak that oil up into the hair

also. You mentioned, uh, leaving the skull and I'm assuming you on any big game animal, if someone doesn't know what they're doing, like just leave the head, like the head unskinned. Yeah. I mean, ideally, yeah, for our benefit, but I understand, you know, when you shoot an elk four

miles from the truck and you're going to mount it and not do a European and you're like, should I carry the 25 pound block of skull out with me or not? So it, it, you know, you're going to have to make that call yourself at some point on what you want to do. I carry an actual scalpel. I mean, I used to, and now I don't walk around. When you had to cape stuff out for guys.

But yeah. So I had like a separate little kit inside my other kit for doing faces and paws and stuff for bears and stuff. But, and that was, it was a good way to kind of get some of your, your own alone time too, because folks get real bored watching you do that. Antelope is my number one mounted animal. Like they're, it's a really pretty mount. They're pretty animals. Yes. They're small.

So you can fit them in a lot of different places. And if they fall off the wall, they're not going to kill anybody. Right. So I think there's a lot of pros in the antelope mount. Yeah. That's why, that's why I asked. Cause that's like the one thing that I want to get a shoulder mount on. You do?

Yeah. I have like, uh, probably over half a dozen floating around Missoula. Nice. I've given away over. That are yours. Yeah. Cause I was like

living out of my truck, you know. I thought you meant for clients. No. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

Did you keep, did you write your name on the back of them? Well, a buddy of mine just called me. He's like, hey,

come over and do some framing for me and get these fucking antelope. So I might do that, McVick. Donation. That should be an upcoming donation. Cows antelope. Alright, so the guy shows up.

You have one of your folks go out. One of your artists capes it. Then, there you are. You got a caped out deer. Yep. And bring it back in the shop and then we'll actually take the skull out of it at that point and turn the ears inside out, turn your lips,

your nostrils, your eyelids, remove all the excess flesh from it, the fat, and then bury it in salt. And you're doing that over a fleshing bean? On a deer, a lot of times, yeah. But if I skin it myself, a lot of times there's really not much to. You clean skin it. Yeah. Which times, yeah. But if I skin it myself, a lot of times there's really not much to. You clean skin it.

Yeah. Which if, if you get enough practice at it, it's, it's very legit, very viable way to do it. But you, when you're first starting, that's a pretty high risk way of cutting a lot of holes in your deer. Yeah. It's, it's okay to leave a little fat and meat

on there. If you're starting to like, I'm getting kind of close to cutting, just leave it on there. That's not a big deal. Someone will get it off later. Yeah. But you prefer to do them just leave it on there. That's not a big deal. Someone will get it off later. Yeah. But you prefer to do them clean. Mm-hmm.

Salting is a weird deal. There's a lot of misconceptions. Yeah. I remember. When do I salt it? Well, here's the thing I don't get is I used to sell fur. Like no salt.

Fur bear fur at the, this thing called Ravanna Fur Auction. And there every lot gets bid on, right? But deer, when you brought deer, you could also sell deer at the Ravanna Fur Auction. And the first deer that came up, they bid on it. And that was the price for every deer that came through the door. And these are just deer hides that people pulled off. And I mean, the bulk of them, people open it up and dump a thing of Morton table salt on it. But then I just thought it was like normal

practice. But I later learned that that doesn't do anybody any good. No, no. Like it's gotta be clean. It's gotta be clean. Like you could have a quarter inch piece of meat on a deer hide and salt will work

right through it, but an eighth of an inch of fat, and it creates that oil barrier and it never gets to this, the actual epidermal layer to pull that moisture out and set the hair. And the hair will slip anyway. Yep. Got you. So do you get a lot of stuff, like some guy skins a bear, it's got fat and meat all over it and then he poured salt all over it? Got the head in it, the feet in it still. They pour a bag of rock salt on it, roll it up and send it. Yeah.

Does it make your job harder? Oh, yes. Okay. Yes. You really don't want people salting stuff. You can try to keep an edge on a knife fleshing through salt, you know, you're like, you know, that was that. Stroke it back up, make a couple cuts, stroke it back up.

What do you use for a knife? A lot of times when we're fleshing bears, I use a shaving wheel, actual bench-mounted shaving wheel. I can't picture what you're talking about. Is that a skinning tool or like a work tool? It's actually just for removing flesh and shaving, like shaving a tan tide down.

Is it on an angle grinder? No, it's a different beast. You know what he's talking about, Seth? Yeah, it's like one of those you know those, like, I'm picturing like a Oh, like a big ass meat slicer wheel. Oh, yeah. Okay, no, that's not what I was picturing. I was picturing like

a wheel like one of those things you, like a grinder you mount on your workbench that has like the grinding wheels on it. Look at that shit, man. It's like a spinning wheel. A flushing table. Probably got to figure out how to use that thing before you get started.

Oh, yeah. There's a curve on that one. I can't really picture it. The new guys, if they shoot their own deer, I'm like, you can practice on that because you'll make a hole that big. Yeah, people can picture like a deli like a deli slicer it's the blade of a deli slicer mounted on top of a workbench yeah and you walk up that son of a bitch and try to cut your hand off and like keep the blade between the yeah you gotta yeah because there's there's a guard on it but it's still exposed so you just the only real guard is you just don't touch it. And you're just running it down there and like guiding it through the.

Wow. Have you ever done a beaver hide with one of those or something? Oh yeah. Is it slick? For me it is. A couple of my guys like it. A couple of them don't. How fast could you do a beaver with that thing?

Like a fresh where it's still kind of fatty? Yeah. A couple of minutes. I think we need a beaver pillow. We know. Oh, you know. Said he doesn't like pillows. It's not beaver. Oh, think we need a beaver pillow. We know... Sandy doesn't like pillows. Oh, a curled up beaver?

Maybe it's not curled up. Maybe it's like... I don't know. This bird flasher? That's what I was picturing. Yep. It was like the wire. The wire wheel. I think we're doing a live show coming up in Billings. It'll be special for Cal. It'll be like a homecoming for old Cal. We're going to do a live show coming up for Billings. It'll be special for Cal. It'll be like a homecoming for old Cal.

We're going to do a live show coming up for Billings. That's what my vision of it is. We need a lot of comp tickets over there. Cal's like, I need 80 tickets. It's a whole thing. Don't ask. When the curtain opens, I want the curtain open to be like a play.

And there's going to be Seth at his flesh and beam. And there's going to be Seth at his fleshing beam. And there's going to be like our normal scene. And off in the corner is one of those theater spotlights. And the whole time Seth's going to be fleshing on a fleshing beam. With a spotlight on him. It's going to be so beautiful. It's going to be great. What about the flesher?

All mini flesher. It's basically a die grinder. Yeah. And it's got that little blade on there. This is a hell of a catalog. I got to play with one of them once. Yeah, it was terrifying. The Flesher all mini Flesher?

Oh, yeah. I was like, I'll take that one. I could ruin so much shit with that so fast. You need one for your garage, Steve. They got a blaster and master blaster dryers. Master blaster. It reminds me very much of when you're like, why would I ever pay somebody to mount the bindings to my skis?

And then the first thing you do is you drill through the ski, and you're like, uh-huh. It'll be fine. So what knives do you use skinning? Do you use replaceable razors, or are you sitting there with a strap like in the old days? I pretty much just sit with a strap like the old days. I keep a steel right next to me. The Victorinox.

So you like those commercial, you know? Yeah. They're inexpensive and you're sharpening constantly. Like in the spring bearer, I mean, you'll use pretty much one knife from brand new to garbage in a week. Just sharpening, sharpening, sharpening. And you can put a hell of an edge on those things but it just doesn't stay for long. It doesn't stay for long.

But if you're doing a strop anyways, you know what you're doing. Yeah. I can skin out a whole bear with one without having to go actually back to a stone on it. If you just keep working it on a steel or a strop or whatever. Yeah, stay away from, you know, scraping it on the bones and stuff like keep working it on a steel or a straw or whatever. Stay away from, you know, scraping it on the

bones and stuff like that. You can just stay to the flesh. Yeah. It's pretty doable. Uh, I want to get back to our following our theoretical deer through the process, but I want to ask you another, a bear question. When a guy brings you a whole bear, um, what,

like you get the hide, but then he's got to come right back over and bring his meat down and process it or pick it up or whatever. Right. Yes. Or does he, does he, you just have him stay in there while you do it? A lot of times you'll just have him wait. If they're going to take. Cause you don't want that thing laying around. No.

With guts in it and everything. We have a list of people that they'll contact us from around the Libby area that want bear meat. Oh really? Like if you have anybody that doesn't want their bear meat, give us a call. So then if I know somebody, yeah. No kidding. That's interesting.

I bet I donated probably at least 25 to 30 of them last spring. That's awesome. Yeah. How they come, they just come get the whole thing on the carcass. Yep. And if they're going to come, you know, it is very nice for them to provide that service for us to actually show up when they say they're going to show up. So if I get somebody that I know is going to actually do what they said they're going to, I'll just quarter it out, pull the back straps out of it and stuff, get it all bagged up.

So then I'll dispose of it. That's nice, man. Wow. That's cool. Yeah. All right. So our deer, you said throw it in a bucket of salt. Not sprinkle a jar of Morton's table salt on there.

No, I use a fairly coarse ground salt. It's not rock salt, but it's a mix, mixing salt for hay. Um, yeah. So we just lay it out on the floor. Calvary knows what you're talking about. I have no idea what you're talking about. Mixing salt for hay.

Mm-hmm. For livestock. It's just a coarse kiln dried. Oh, like a supplement. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I see. And, uh, you just get it laid out on the floor

flat, make sure there's no folds in it. So it's like, it's amazing how many guys when you're first teaching them to salt that actually make a mistake. It's like, you just have to get salt on all of it. That's it. There's like no technique, just salt on all of it. And they'll be like, they'll forget to fold the

face back. And so the face will be stuck down. It's like my kids arguing about what a clean plate looks like. I'm like, no, no, no. You'll know you're done because there'll be nothing on your plate. Yeah, right. It'll be very obvious.

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You can't overdo it. Nope, you can't overdo it. Nope. You can't overdo it. So I need to leave, I usually leave it in the salt 24 hours. Then I'll take it out. If we're using a salting table, it'll drain. It's at an incline. Oh, that's interesting.

It'll run if we don't have like big items we're doing on the floor. Because there's a lot of goo coming off there. A lot of moisture. Yeah. You'll see it like when we're doing the bears and you get like four or five, six bears stacked up in salt, you'll see the trail of water running off the pile towards the floor

drains. I got to interrupt you for a minute. Mm-hmm. This conversation just reminded me of something. Okay. A time, very time sensitive issue. Did you apply for the Idaho spring breakfast special draw?

No. Oh, that's a good one. Jimmy's giant trout is in the smoker. Oh. Talk about salt. Hey, can you run out and grab those fish fillets out of that smoker real quick? I left them in there, and it's been probably too long. Grab a hot pad and just open that cabinet.

It looks like a cabinet. It's next to the grill. Just open the door, and it's all on one wire rack. So you just pull the wire rack out and then just set it on top of the grill or something because it'll be it'll be

smell like smoke fish for a few minutes. But just lay it outside to cool. Sorry about that. The salting table somehow made me think of a smoke fish. That was good. Uh, where were we? Salting table.

Oh, so when it's done salting, um, it's wet. Yes. Soaking wet. So when we take it and we have racks that we assemble and disassemble throughout the seasons and you just put a new rung on the rack and then you drape them over the rack and then let them start drying out. Like at night, we'll turn the heat up and put fans out.

Next morning, you should be able to fold it. And then eventually you'll have it folded up into a nice little package. Oh, is that right? Like rock hard dry. Oh, because at that point, is it like pretty much archival? Mm-hmm. Yep. I remember a guy showing me, a taxidermist I used to know had a zebra that he had killed.

Mm-hmm. I feel like he told me that he had killed it seven years earlier but i mean this thing was like rock hard yeah yeah just salt crusted and rock hard yep and he was not worried about it he's like you gotta soak the piss out of that thing to get it back to life and as long as it's in a spot where nothing like mice insects don't get to it um it lasts indefinitely, really. Keep it dry and don't let anything eat it. It lasts indefinitely. So if deer season's running hot and heavy, that's what you guys are doing. Oh, yeah.

You're skinning, fleshing, salting, drying. Spring, bear season is historically the busiest season for my studio. Cause you guys are in like bear central. Yeah. So you guys get more bears than deer? Oh yeah. Yeah, definitely. Huh.

Um, this year we were, after everything started taking back off, we were really short handed. Um, had one guy had family stuff come up, so he was gone. And then we got outfitter where like one day I got 13 bears in. There's nobody there besides myself. Like I did, I did 51 days straight. Holding kids. Um, I just have one daughter and she's, uh, she'll be 16 on July 4th. Get her a skinning knife for Christmas.

She's thinking more like law school. That's probably kids these days, man. This is the family business here. There's bears of skin. Can be the only lawyer with the Popeye forearms of somebody who skins

for your living. As long as we stay honest and get the hides back, we don't need law protection. Right. You just need to learn how to skin. You just need to skin. It's a lot easier to just stay clear of the law. Hey, John, what about a – I'm still dreaming about these squishy pillows. What about a black bear pillow?

That would be kind of like you could – it would be like in someone's living room. You could just lean against it instead of a couch. It would look like Corinne's dog sleeping. Yes, exactly. We did do a small black bear. And the way we did it, it wasn't. Oh, it didn't work. Yeah, I wouldn't say it was a success.

Okay. For certain things, if you still want to do the soft mount, I would do like a annealed wire frame inside of it. Like when squirrel mounts, when you'd make the, you know, wood wool and you'd put your wires through there, then you can bend his legs and get him in position. A what mount? Like old squirrel tags. Oh, okay. Like original stuffing when you were actually stuffing it with.

Back when you said that, I want to get the deer stuffed. People would still say that when I was a kid. You can get it stuffed. Stuffed. With a piece of foam. Yeah. But then you could still do the soft mount and

it'd still be supple, but you would be able to pose it. Oh, I see. Cause so it's not just like slumped over on the floor. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So you got all these little dried out packets

that are deer hides. At some point you pack them in a truck or crates and trucks and. They go to the tannery. Yep. Start shipping them like this, just distributing them around so that we could actually get them back.

When, when I talked to my one tannery this spring and he this spring, I was like, hey, are you ready for a load? He's like, well, how many are we talking? I think I had 68 or 69 of them put up at that time. And he's like, oh, God, no, don't do that to me. Oh, really? Yeah, he's like, I'm still getting stuff from last year. He's like, if you want it back, he's like, you can't send me that much at one time. So I was like, all right.

So we started ship. Finding other places. Someone told me once that every, he might've been exaggerating slightly, but the gist was like every mountain goat in the country comes from the same tannery. You don't buy that? No, absolutely not. That they're like mountain goat specialists. No, there's's mountain goats, the two ways that are most commonly done is you're just like a traditional tan, whether it's wet or dry or

bleached. And there's only, there's only one place I know that does like a real, real bleaching on them. And I don't, we don't do bleaching, so. You don't like them bleached? No. You want it to have its natural color variations. Yep.

And bleaching is really hard on them. Man, my one. It mean, it's fried almost. It's like on the ragged edge of destruction by the time you get done with it. It's just cooked. That peroxide just, it cooks the leather. Oh, that's too bad, man. Like the, all the pigment color, like the black around the eyes and the nose and stuff, that's all gone when it comes back.

The leather is just white. See, I feel like the one I have getting done right now is getting bleached. Oh, no. Mm-hmm. But it was crazy because now is getting bleached. Oh, no. But it was crazy because he had a lot of coloration, man. He had a lot of gray. Like he had a lot of gray hairs blended into him. Was he near a burn at all?

Yeah, in a burn. Probably from the burnt wood. Look at this guy. Look at the head on this guy. I got a couple from the Bob Marshall. That had gray. I was like, well, it's got gray hair in it, but it washed out. No shit. Yeah. Yours looked like it was, like it was the color of the hair.

Yeah, no, for sure. It looked like it had just like gray charcoal hairs. The black. Scatter. In Alaska, we, we get, we do a lot of work for guys in Alaska. A lot of guys stationed in the Coast Guard know us. So they ship us goats and grizzly bears and doll sheep and all the time.

And the goats up there, they have a lot of, when I first started seeing them, I was like, they have black and so is that black sand from up there. But it all washes out. You're kidding me. Like on a goat, anything with fur, like shoulder mount wise, all the goats always get it is full shampoo and condition.

And then that master blaster, that's just a huge commercial blow dryer. It's actually for doing like car shows or bike shows so you can blow dry your car and not leave, you know, marks on it from toweling it. And so between the shampooing and conditioning and then the blast, you can get all the organic materials that you don't want in there out.

Yep. You know, we recently had on, we're going to keep, just so you know, we're going to keep following this deer project. We'll speed it up in a minute, but we recently had a fur handler on, like a trapper fur handler on the show. And I realized now what we didn't talk to him

about, which I know that he does, is he has a washing machine in his fur shed that's just dedicated to that and everything he skins. Skins a raccoon. Wash it. Before he fleshes it, it goes into that washing machine. No soap.

Yep. It's agitated. Yeah. Yep. And I was talking to a bobcat trapper the other day that does all of his with brightening shampoo. Yeah. Yep. And I was talking to a bobcat trapper the other day that does all of his with brightening shampoo. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Shampoos them. Just for presentation. Get the white bellies whiter. Yeah. Like the goats, we use a brightening shampoo. You do. Mm-hmm. But not dyeing it.

Nope. Okay. No, like actual peroxide whitening. It's just like, you know, for guys with gray hair, you can use it too. If you got that yellow gray hair, it helps brighten it up. Got it.

You eventually get all these, you eventually get these. Cal's taking notes. Yeah. Brighten up the mustache. Cal's like, I'm going to grow my hair. I'm going to grow my hair back and brighten it. You get them all back.

They're tanned. And then it just looks like you got a t back, they're tanned. And then it just looks like you got a tanned fur, right? Yep. Yeah. Most of our deer capes and stuff come back just dry tanned. And meanwhile, all those antlers are where?

Hanging under a hook? Yeah. We have a series of racks upstairs so we can keep them like, you know, white tails and mule deer, then keep the elk and the moose separate or got caribou. Then we have spots where like when the African safaris show up, we can keep all the African

safaris separate. Why are you worried about keeping it separate? You're not going to like when the African safaris show up, we can keep all the African safaris separate. Why are you worried about keeping it separate? You're not going to like. Easier to find. Oh, I see. If you keep it. Yeah. Just to try to keep it species specific.

So like a guy comes in, he's like. Your name on it. That's a deer I turned into Oryx. My kind of taxidermist. He's trying to, trying to be able to find stuff easy. Yeah. Because, you know. I imagine able to find stuff easy. Yeah. Because, you know.

I imagine your clientele likes that. Right. Because it's like, well, I'm going to swing in and show off my rack. Yeah. And you're like, oh, I don't know where it's at. You know, so yeah, it's a lot nicer when you're like, you just go upstairs and you go backwards

there and. It's in the whitetail section. Yeah. Whitetail section, your tags on it, your names on it, your invoice numbers on it. And then you guys got to soak them, right? Mm-hmm. Yep. So we usually, you guys got to soak them, right? Yep.

So we usually, what I do is I'll, if we're going to do like a dozen deer heads, I'll soak up those 12 capes, contact everybody, find out what pose they want. If they want like looking left or right or semi sneaks or full sneaks or what, what they want. That might depend on where they want to put it. Yep. Yeah.

Yep. And then they always, when they ask you, it's if you were the deer on the wall, which way would you turn your head? Not my left. Cause I'm like, well, I don't know. Let your left, his left, who's left. So yeah, it's always.

What's a full sneak? Uh, where the head is below the back. Like when you see a buck trailing a doe. I like that one. I always did the semi sneak looking left or right. You know. Uh, Brody just sent us a one that was like a it was a goofy a little bit not goofy but that's not the right word for it beautifully done but like a weird

call odd uh odd placement yeah it was a deer jump on a fence but it was basically like the deer committing suicide off the guys off balcony, off the balcony railing. Yeah. But unbelievably well, like unbelievably well executed. Like when a whitetail in the middle of one of those giant bounds that they do. But he was going to land down in the living room. We're actually, when I, when I get back next week, we're ordering a jumping whitetail for a 180 class whitetail. And then there'll be about 100, it was about 170 pound mountain lion jumping through the air to catch the whitetail.

That's a diorama. How does that work? Like when someone's going to do like a custom kind of thing like that and like it's kind of based on the architecture of their house like yep needs to be in a certain position in a certain place like do they got to do all the measuring or like how does that well this particular one there in texas and uh they got they found found out about us got a hold of me and then they've had a architect and a contractor at their place for like three or four years they said working on it constantly. And so he went up and gave me photographs of the stud layout in the wall.

It was like, I was like, wow, that's nice. We can pretty much do anything we want. You can get input blocking in. So. What? Yeah. Built into the house. Yep.

And he gave me the, all the dimensions for the, it's a, like a triangle shaped piece in between two rooms. And so then we have like 20 feet to lay that thing out with all the habitat and junipers. Yeah. Cause you'll see like mountain lions curled up in a corner. I do like that, man. I do like that.

Yeah. I'd like to do that someday. If I had a high spot, like a mountain lion laying up there. You guys know what that. Like perched up on a log or something. Looking. You guys know what the balcony rail represents on that whitetail, right?

What's that? It's jumping. A fence. The neighbor's fence. The neighbor's fence. That's an important jump right there. There he goes. Had he made that one.

Yeah, he'd be like, you'll notice that he's hitting the back end. Almost got onto the neighbor's place. Here's a question that we used to get all the time was velvet, velvet bucks. What's your recommendation there? Like how it's going to turn out really is affected by what phase the velvet growth is in. If it's super early where the horns, like, you know, you can shake them and the horns are still rubbery, that's a really difficult one to

stabilize. In the middle where it's still alive, but you're getting good setup, that's one of your prime ones to be able to like embalm the actual velvet. And then at a certain point, it's just falling off, you know. Now when it gets where you can just grab it in your hands bloody, that's late.

That's. Or is that not late? That's early. Well, early well that's early i'm thinking about caribou like you grab in your hand this is like soaked with blood that's an early stage and where the antler is still soft well i guess it makes sense because it's still full blood because it's growing yeah that's a dumb question forgive me a lot a lot of no a lot of times though uh you can just have it stripped and artificial put back on. Right. And, and that was always the question is like, should we scrape all this off? Like in the field, scrape it off, right?

Yeah. Don't, yeah. And if you're going to re-velvet it, just leave it as is. And then when it gets in, they'll either just power wash it off or peel it and then take it in and just have it actually re-velveted. And can you, can you preserve the actual

velvet when it's in that. In the right stage. State of decay? Though, you know, like we're starting to come off. Yeah. Kind of, but you always run the risk of like, you know, not quite getting it.

Yeah. And then, so the, it still has proteins left in it, which would promote bug life. I wanted to make my wife bra lined with that antler velvet off, off a caribou. My wife's like, you don't know the first thing about what people want in a bra. Because my wife's like, how about a muskrat lined bra? She's like, no, no, you don't want a muskrat lined bra.

It's not what's going on there when you wear a bra. What about a cactus buck that you kill in October, November? That's still full velvet. How are you guys doing those? If it's something really unique like a cactus buck, send it in and have it freeze dried. Just the whole thing. My fiance shot one a couple years ago and got it done. I didn't know how they did it, but it's still – I don't think they stripped it or anything. Yeah, you can have them freeze-dried and they'll be perfectly stable.

How the hell do you have a sturgeon spearing hoodie? Someone sent these into Hayden and Hayden gave me this one. Oh, I thought it said tradition. Everybody that comes in the door has got a spearfishing hoodie. Talk to Hayden about it. Sturgeon's Spear and Hoodie. Yeah, Hayden's never held a spear in his life. For those listening, I've never seen it.

Steven Rinella, never get a complimentary t-shirt featuring Sturgeon's Fishing. Steve doesn't like when you have cool shit that he doesn't have. Especially when I never even saw it. I checked the free table. This didn't go on the free table. No, it must have went direct. D to C. Listen, I've never speared a sturgeon

or have gone sturgeon spearing so I'm a bit of a poser, but I just like the sweatshirt. I hadn't thought about the poser angle. I just like because it's got chainsaw and everything on it. Yeah. A little sweatshirt. I hadn't thought about the poser angle. I just like because it's got chainsaw and everything on it. Yeah. A little shanty.

Yeah, it's cool. Okay, back to our hypothetical gear. You soak it in what water? Yep, I just do room temperature water. And then you go on into your handy dandy catalog there. So you would, you've already established what pose they want.

And then you just soak it up and then you stretch it. And part of the learning curve when you're- Stretch it over the form. No, you stretch it on the bench and then you order the form that fits those measurements. So this is a form that I use very frequently. So by measurements, are like, how are you- Nose to eye. Okay.

And then you have three points on the neck. Like a circumference. Yeah. You order 69-7221L. That's not like secret sauce, is it? Man, that's not that expensive. Okay. Those are quite reasonable compared to buying an elephant.

Yes. How much is it? 80, 90 bucks. Oh. Mm-hmm. dolphin. Yes. How much is it? 80, 90 bucks. Oh. But I imagine like if you could lay out the, the conversation you would like to have with everybody who walks in the door, right? Cause I imagine there's a lot of like, hey, I

want this mounted. And you're like, well, you're in the right spot, but. Yeah. Try to talk them off the ledge sometimes where you're like okay so this is what we can do this is the way we need to go about doing it like that you mean yeah and be like and these are like the price ranges that you're gonna come into if you just want something that that is your deer looking back to you but you're not you're not going for the jumping white tail

with the mount line yeah yeah that Yeah. That price range. Yeah. There's not a lot of like sliding scale on anything we do. It's pretty, pretty set. Okay. The only time there's any like additional charges, like you have a traditional shoulder mount, but if they want habitat on it, then you have to pay for the habitat to go with it. But you're still basically just, you're buying accessories at that point. You still have a base price of what your deer head costs. Ballpark me a, like a nice job on a standard whitetail shoulder mount. 900.

Oh. Yeah. So you don't, you don't do a lot of haggling, I gather. No. Not anymore. Okay. How do you handle this? Every single taxidermy studio

Anytime you go in there There's somebody bullshitting With somebody who obviously needs to be doing work How do you handle the bullshit When they want to drop it off Yeah it's very difficult To handle that Because you can't be like

Dude it's time for you to go Because they're more than likely a client You can tell them alright Your thing's going to rot like, you know, dude, it's time for you to go. Cause you know, they're more than likely a client. You could tell them, all right, uh, your thing's going to rot. Start, uh, you know, just the secret is just to keep working. And eventually a lot of times they're like, well, you know, I probably should let you go.

That's the approach you take. A lot, yeah. Don't break stride. Just keep going. Do you get people trying to work you? Like if they bring in, you know, a little dinker buck that their kid shot and they're like, well, it's smaller, you know, can you. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Like the antlers are smaller, so I should get a better deal. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Like, no. You don't need to be working around them big old antlers. Cause you got the standard 900, right? Yeah.

And this is only half the buck that that one was. Yeah. No, there's. It seems like there's a job opportunity for like the old retired fish cop or somebody who just wants to have those conversations all day. Put them up in front. Right, and you put them up in front.

Oh, like a Walmart greeter. Exactly. They're like, oh, look at that buck. Where'd you get that? That'd be a good idea. You could hire a guy to bullshit up front. Like a caged offer. They could look at us,

but they couldn't actually get to us. Yeah, flexing the last window. And then you hire an old feller to sit out there and be like, you like to talk to everybody you run into. But they can knock out the paperwork. Yeah. You know how you talk to everybody at the grocery store? Just come down and do it at my studio. Speaking of fish and game cops, how often are they popping in and out of your place?

Oh, man. I was going to go down that same path. Go ahead. Like, uh. Sorry. No, no, no. Right now with, uh, when COVID happened,

trying to get all the bears tagged and then like wolves tagged, you know, any of the fur bears where you actually have to have that seal put in there. They had closed down like the public coming into like normal tagging areas. Yeah, yeah. Because there was, there was so.

There was no in-person inspections. They waived it the first year. And then last year they did it where we did a transfer possession form. So like you would shoot a bear and bring it to my shop and then we would fill out the paperwork, like where you harvested it, when you harvested it and your coordinates, you know, lat and long.

Um, then we'd sign a couple of pieces of paper and then you'd leave. And I would have present that now it's my possession. So then fishing game, they were coming every two to three days to my shop. Oh, so you could call them and be like. Yeah.

I got a whole bulk, I had a bulk deal for you. Yeah. So I, I try to accumulate a stack of them. It took a while, you know, cause then they have to go through all my paperwork and then register the state seal to it. And then I have to register through all my paperwork and then register the state seal to it. And then I have to register that into my paperwork.

And they're pulling a tooth at your place. I ended up, we, uh, they finally gave us the tooth puller, the, the elevator tool. Yep. Because you can't pull a tooth when it's frozen. And I can't have. So you could yank your own teeth. Stacks of rotting heads laying around.

So we just would pull the tooth and put it in the envelope and write their ALS number and the sex of it and put it in their paperwork. And then they'd come and just grab everything and go. Have you had situations where something didn't smell right? See, that's the question. I was dying. Oh, like somebody trying to bang into something?

Yeah, yeah. Some guy. I forgot my tag, right? Yeah, a guy walks in and he's like, hey, I want to get this eagle mounted. Oh, yeah. I'm not talking. I was going more like some big in and he's like, hey, I want to get this eagle mounted. Oh, yeah. I'm not talking. I was going more like some big buck and you're like, man, something just doesn't.

Oh, okay. I've turned people in that I know. Oh, absolutely. I mean, if I was in cahoots at all, the state is who provides my business license. And that's gone. So you can't be like, buddy, you better just go on your own way. You gotta be like, now you've made it my problem.

Yeah. If it comes to the shop and I know that you're like intentionally doing that. It's your problem. Yeah. Seth and I were in a. Oh, it's gotta be, I don't want to say awkward, but that's gotta be awkward-ish.

Like, you know, honestly, most of the time they don't do that. People don't do that shit. It's not as common as one might, one might guess. Yeah. I've only ever seen it a couple of times where I'm like, you just absolutely know that they poached that thing. You're like, mm-hmm. So then you just turn them in.

Well, I got a, for instance, right, Seth and I were in this cafe truck stop bait store in Kansas. Mm-hmm. Place was awesome. Opening day of deer season. We got done duck hunting. It's probably like 1030 in the morning. And you can also get licenses and tags there, right? You're talking about that surgeon spearing

poser next to you? Yeah, exactly. And we're sitting there having breakfast, talking about our next move. And I just can't help but notice the oddest thing, if you've ever been in the hunting and angling community, was every person in line getting a deer tag at 1030 in the morning, 1030, 11 a.m. was female. And I was just like, that, there's something about that.

You know? And then you hear the questions like, now what do you need? And you're like, well, I just, like the, whatever you need to hunt deer. Something for an extra buck

that's laying on our property. Oh man, our mom, I shouldn't say this because she's laying on our property. Our mom, I shouldn't say this cause she's still alive and I'm still alive. But yeah, our mom had a few deer tags. It was just like, we didn't even know.

It was just so, when I was little, it was like, you would, it was so not hidden. It's like, you would go to show and tell at school and be like, and then my mom tagged it.

It's just like, it wasn't even, if you'd have given me a, like a polygraph or something about breaking the rule, like my heart rate wouldn't have gone up. Cause I wouldn't have known. I didn't know you weren't supposed to do it. Did like,

did you in fact, I'd be like, no, cause I would have known. I wouldn't have known to be nervous. Right. You know, like I know it needed a tag.

Yeah. My mom, my mom, my known to be nervous. Right. You know, I know it needed a tag. Yeah. My ma. My ma. That's my ma's do tag. Anyway, in a very circular fashion, I could see how situations like that could come back to you. Where it's like, here's the tag that goes with the rack. And then eventually somebody comes in and says, hey, did somebody turn in a rack? And what was their name?

So like, I, I've always in rack? And what was their name? So like, I, I've always been fortunate. We maintain a good rapport with our wardens. Um, and we've had quite a few wardens circulate through our area cause we're right in the corner there. So we have like three, up to three wardens that come through and, uh, all we've been very fortunate, very, very nice, very professional

wardens. And if they call, call me up and ask me, you know, hey, did so-and-so bring something in? And if I have it, I'm like, yeah, it's in the shop. Oh. Yeah. Could we come get it? Yeah, it's in the shop.

Have you ever had any sort of strange things where everything looked up to speed, but then some other guy's in there and he's like, where'd this buck come from? No, I haven't had the, hey, wait a second, that came off my property. like that kind of stuff like never any kind of crazy stuff like that a lot i mean it'd be hard to like have much visual time with the deer where we live they're always in the timber so i see a couple trail cam pictures floating around i know uh did you hear that

crazy story um someone actually got prosecuted off this, and we talked about it, but it occurred between Tennessee and Kentucky, and I can't remember which direction it went. But there was like a Big Buck Roadshow, right? And there was a buck there that was the state record of wherever the hell, the state record. It was honored by the state of Kentucky as being some such thing. And a guy happens to be at the big buck show.

And he's like, that buck was not killed in Kentucky. I have trail cam pictures of that buck a couple hundred miles into Tennessee. And I'd get it every day, and then it vanished, and that buck was not killed in this state. And the guy was prosecuted over it. For receiving all the, like, award money? He even had that. He even had the, like, award money? He even had that. He even had the, what's it called when you move across state lines? Oh, Lacey Act?

Yeah. Really? And this guy, I mean, it was such an unusual buck. And this guy's like, nope, this is on my place. There he is. There he is. There he is. There he is.

This is the last we ever saw him. He gets, some guy moved him, shot him and tagged him from another state and moved him over and then started parading him around. Wow. Yeah. Yes. It was, it was covered in the, it was covered

in the press a bit, you know, that's what I was kind of thinking about with that. If you've ever been involved in any stories like that. No, nothing, nothing quite that exciting. Yeah. A friend of mine was a LEO up in that neck of the woods a long, long time ago.

And, and he's like, he, because of what you said, right. It's like big, dark timber country. He would volunteer for every game check station because he's like, you just never knew what was going to come out of the woods. Yeah. It's like crazy white tails, you know, crazy mule deer. Um, and you, because you're not in country where you're like seeing this stuff, right? They're not getting profiled by a bunch of people.

Yeah. Yeah. I was in a taxidermy studio one time after EHD came through real bad in the September and holy shit, the bucks down there, man. Cause people were just bringing them in. It was like bucks you did not know existed. You know, people was bringing in deadheads to get them

cleaned up and stuff, you know, but just incredible bucks. Man. And he's like, I don't know, during hunting season, they don't come in, but then here they all are now. Oh yeah, right. Right.

Cause it's like August. Yeah. Like there they are. Like all the ones that no one's probably going to look at during hunting season. Yeah. Go nocturnal, stay, stay out of the view. Yeah. Uh, so back to our, stay, stay out of the view. Yeah.

So back to our, our, our deer, you stretch it and measure it. Mm-hmm. Then once. Then you order up your form. Put the hide in the freezer till the form arrives. And then once. Then the form comes in.

Then we take the hide out of the freezer and thaw it out and then we can start mounting it. And you like drape it over it and you, and I see, I sometimes catch you guys like mid stride and he's all pinned and pins holding the eyes and. Get all your adhesive on there. And depending on how they, how you prefer to do your ears, whether you do like a bond over your

cartilage replacement ear liner, um, get all that done, get all your eyes set on the form. If you're doing a change out nose or putting septums into the existing form, you get all that done ahead of time. Short Y incision, there's no stitching on the back. So you set your antlers and then you take them out and have a clay edge around it. Then you pull the cape on and then just have just that Y incision open up on the top to take the antlers out and put it

back on and you just have that small Y to sew back up. And you're sewing it by hand. Mm-hmm. Yep. Needle and thread. Once you start doing that, is it like once you start, you got to finish it or can you walk away

from it? Once, when I start doing any mount, you're pretty much there until you're done. But how do you do the But how do you do the last stitch? For like the tie off? Yeah, but like you don't see it. Do you take it back off and do the last stitch, then pull it back on again? No, usually like I do a full dorsal cut, so it's usually tight.

There's no taking it off once it's sewn back on. But you still have to, when it's all done. There's no taking it off once it's sewn back on. You'd have to cut the stitching. But you still have to, when it's all done, you still have some stitch you got to make. It's, so on like a shoulder mount, your stitch dead ends over the back and is stapled on to the form. So when it's on the wall, you can't ever see the

last stitch. Then you trim off the excess. Oh, that's where it ends. Mm-hmm. I got you. Yep. You'll have one that you'll bring over from the first antler base, like there. And then the have one that you'll bring over from the first antler base.

There. And then the next one, you can just catch that one and then go back down so you don't have a knot with a piece sticking up at the top. But you are sewing it on the form. Mm-hmm. Yep. I still don't understand how you could ever get, like, I want to see it because I don't get how the hair would lay back so nice. So like in the early days, you know, you got it on there and you sewed it on and brushed it all out and let it dry. And that was what we did. I mean, that was what we, that was the standard.

That was how you did it. And then I had a opportunity to have a guy that was actually, he took a blue ribbon first place in the world show in the master's division for whitetail taxidermy, which is a really hard division. I mean, everybody does whitetails for the most part around the country. And there's a lot of guys that are really good at it. Where is he from? Scott Brewer. He's in Washington right now.

And so Scott, he is working for another artist in town. In your town? Mm-hmm. There's, we have, at one time when we had Scott and Phil and Daniel Ming was in town, all three of those guys have taken best in world. Oh, wow. You guys all get big fights at the bar? You know, there, there has been a lot of, uh, like historical bickering and pissing matches.

There was 14 taxidermists in Libby at one time when I was a kid. Whoa. And then there, and like, there's some really high end talent that is still there. There's some, still some outstanding. It's like a talent laden town. Small town.

Small town. A lot of talent. A lot of taxidermy. Would a taxidermist spat come from like you stole my technique? Or most of the time with those guys, it was like, you stole my client. You know, I had done a deer for him

and now he's at your place. You, you've coerced him somehow, you know, or some shit like that. Showed him at his house with a pistol. Oh yeah, right there. Next buck comes to me. There was a lot of, a lot of bickering amongst a lot of the taxidermists in town

for years. But so Scott ends up in town and I'm trying to make connection with Scott because I wanted him to come out and look at my work. I, you know, plateaued. I really thought I had a pretty good grip on it. You know, I'd done by that point, I'd probably done, you know, a few thousand deer heads.

You should be fairly skilled at that point. So Scott's a certified judge for world on whitetail. And so you can't really get a much better critic than that. So I finally meet him and I was like, would you come out and look at a deer head if I do one?

And he's like, okay. So I was like, cool. So I do the absolute best whitetail. It was like, the cape was perfect. It was like pristine, good hair length, good color. It was a nice buck. You know, it was like, I was perfect. It was like pristine, good hair length, good color. It was a nice buck. You know, it was like, I was like, oh man, this

is great. And so Scott is, he's a huge guy too. Like when I first met Scott, it was, it wasn't at all what I was expecting. Scott's like 6'3", 250 pounds. He was a Navy SEAL instructor. So he's an intimidating, large guy. His hands are just huge guy.

Very delicate touch. It's really amazing to watch him work those giant mitts and little teeny brush, you know, and it's like, huh. So talk Scott into coming out to the shop and I've got it set up, you know, everything's cleaned out of the way and the deer's on the mounting stand straight up, right when you open the door,

it's like lights on it look good. Scott opens the door and he's like, is that the deer? And I was like, that's the deer? And I was like, that's the deer. And he's like, that sucks. And I was like, really? I was like, do you need to get any closer to it? And he's like, no, I can tell it sucks from here.

And I was like 20 feet away. And I'm like, wow. I was like, that is not at all what I was expecting. I said, I was thinking like he'd give me a gold star or something. He's like, you're I was like, that is not at all what I was expecting. I said, I was thinking like, he'd give me a gold star or something. He's like, you're a long ways away from gold stars. What did he not like about it? Which that was the thing, right? Like I had no idea what was wrong with it. I like, I had no idea. So when I finally talked to him, I'm like, would you tell me what's wrong with it? And he's

like, are you going to get like, oh, well, I like doing it like that. Or that's the way I think it should look. And I was like, no, I said, I would really like to know. And he's like, well, if you really want to know, I'll help you. So he came out and worked with me for a few months. And like direction of hair, the way the hair grows, like you look at a picture of a live deer, the way it grows around, instead of just slicked back. The cow licks, your eyelash alignment,

how big your bottom lip exposure is to the width of your nose pattern, like a lot, how long your ear bud is. If your ear's back, is it actually rolled in the right position? You know, the anatomy of it. So I had no idea about that stuff. And that's what gives the good ones like that look. Yes.

You don't have to know why it looks like, what made it look like that, but you can look at the two, anybody can and be like, wow, that's clean. That looks nice. It looks like what made it look like that but you can look at the two anybody can and be like wow that's clean it looks nice it looks like a deer yeah when i shot him he didn't have newspaper coming out right right so just just getting the opportunity to have those guys that like that next level up or five levels up wherever you happen to be come in and actually help you that's that's been the key for anything that I do well. Had some really good help over the years. How many deer you done at this point?

I have no idea. A lot. Thousands. How many bears passed through your hands? I wouldn't even have a guess. Really? That many? Yeah.

I mean, I, I bet we skin close to a hundred a year, you know, I mean, thousands of bears. So what, what would, uh, given all that experience, like what would be the thing that, uh, gets your, your creativity flowing? Like what, what do you get excited about at this point? The thing that probably makes me the most excited at this point is if it's in a really good condition specimen, not necessarily the size of it or anything, but if it was like just really good condition and somebody wants to do a unique piece with it, that's, that's great. But I, I still, I mean, I still love doing just a game head with nobody else there, nice and quiet.

Just sitting there by myself. Really? Oh yeah. I got my little spot. Everybody works over there. Then I work over here. You enjoy it? Oh, very much.

Yeah. That's still my favorite is to actually hands on get to do it. What was it like with wolves? We're all, you know, one minute there's no wolf hunting, you know, and all of a sudden there's wolf hunting and you're in the thick you know? Yeah. And all of a sudden there's wolf hunting and you're in the thick of it. And.

And all of a sudden like there's wolves coming in. Locally, I, uh, I had always been known for coyote hunting. Like that was my favorite thing to hunt most of the time was coyotes. So everybody had known we did a lot of coyotes. Um, people in Alaska, the Coast Guard guys, they'd ship us wolves and stuff.

So I'd, I'd had a lot of canine. Oh, I hadn't thought about it. You were getting wolves from other places. Yeah. And then, uh,, the Coast Guard guys, they'd ship us wolves and stuff. So I'd had a lot of canine. Oh, I hadn't thought about it. You were getting wolves from other places. Yeah. And then, uh, when the wolf hunting started, I could already see that we were gonna have a, it was gonna be another viable piece to bring into the business.

You know, it wasn't just gonna be like, well, we might do a wolf. So like how we do have our own sculptings for the uh, coyote heads. I made, I made my own head for a pillow or a life-size because I can use it for either way. And then I made a rug shell for an open mouth, like the relaxed open mouth, not the snarled. Yep, yep. And at that time.

Clay's got a coyote like that that you did, I think. Mm-hmm. Yeah. At one time, if it was an open mouth wolf, back when the season first came out, they were always like heavy snarls, like way heavy snarls. And I just, I never liked that look. So I just went for a passive open mouth. And then, uh, I just actually redid that mold just probably about October or so.

Um, they came out with a new mouth cup for it. So I redid the mold to accept the new mouth cup and, uh, just that nice clean pass. I think I posted that one, I think on my Instagram. Tell people what your Instagram is. Hayes Taxidermy. H-A-Y-E-S. Yep.

Hayes Taxidermy Studio. Yeah. That's a good page. I like looking at that stuff, man. It's just come so far. Yes. That's the amazing part. I mean, I think the discipline has come a long ways.

And then like, you're like, uh, like an exemplary practitioner of a thing that's already like just so far beyond what it used to be. The, the part where people are not just wanting to just, just have my head stuck on a wall, you know, it's my antlers and yes, it's got, I think it's cape on there and that's good enough because I'm never going to look at anything below the antlers anyways. People want to see better work. They want their animal to look lifelike. They want it to be clean.

They don't want it to smell. You know, that's the people. As they're walking out the door and I don't want it to smell. I've had, I've had so many mounds come in. People bring them in and they're like, hey, this is kind of old. It's funky. And you start opening them up to take them apart.

And there had been a healthy population of things living inside the mounds in their house for years. Is that right? Until they completely consumed everything out of it. Oh, that's when you get like, I've had skulls that I found. And you wonder why there's like a little cone of sawdust underneath them all the time. You realize it's something like one of those beetles or whatever is in there working away at it.

Or the little bit of hair, people are like, I'm noticing some hair on the coffee table below the deer head. Do you know what that'd be from? Like something's eating it. But it's not eating the hair. It's like I'd get it out of there. Yeah.

Ford, at first light uh, he drew his, uh, Idaho mountain goat, like, uh, most, you know, first time non-resident applicants do in Idaho. Like all the other First Light employees draw. Um, it took him a long time to get his goat back and he's like, yeah, is it supposed to smell like this? No. It had, like, he's like, you kept taking it back. There was a smell. And I was like, man, all right, yeah, no.

No, not supposed to smell like that. It's supposed to go inside your house. That's too bad, man. Yeah. Goats and antelope, those are two of the ones that I've seen come in where people are like, it stinks.

And most of the time they didn't sweat the horn off. Oh. You should check on that though. Don't you check on that? If. Oh, when they're dropping it off, it smells.

Yes. They like, they bring a mount in and they're like, this thing smells. One of them, they were like, we put it out in the shed

for six months and it still stinks. But hold on, but not, you didn't stuff it. like, this thing smells. One of them, they were like, we put it out in the shed for six months and it still stinks. But hold on, but not, you didn't stuff it. No, no, no. We take the horns off everything. Because you make sure to do that. Yeah. So I noticed. I wonder if you should check and see if that, if

they did a shitty job. That's, yeah. If they did a shitty job, because they might have bondoed it back on there, but like it's a bunch of goo up in there. You need to explain what you're talking about. so horned most of your horned ant oh go ahead you explain yeah horn sheath and horn core yeah case in point case in point my massive antelope huh i wonder about my antelope skull well i was gonna bring up your antelope skull. Well, I was going to bring up your antelope skull because your folks, they sealed, I noticed

they sealed around the bases of the horn sheath, which I'd never seen before. Most horned animals have a bone core and a horn sheath. Not antlered, but horn. Horn. And there's a lot of funcation. There is a lot of funcation. That lives between those two things. Oh, man.

And if you don't get that off, you can do a couple different methods, but for most practical purposes, we call it sweating. You get it all skinned out, and then you just wrap it in plastic bags, like three, four bags, and leave it in room temperature area for three to five days. We always call that rotting them off. Yeah. You guys call it sweating them off. Sounds better. Sounds better, right? And then you can just twist and pop them off.

Yeah, and on the inside of that thing. And stand back. It's just like goo in there, right? The gooiest of goo is the sheep. That one's always, that's impressive. Yeah, they got some crazy stuff in there. Take those bighorns and pop those off, but yeah. And then you're saying like that's what's kind of rotting inside that would give them out. Because they will stuff in there. Take those bighorns and pop those off. But yeah. And then you're saying like, that's what's kind

of rotting inside that would give them out. Because they will dry in place. Yep. If you left it out and like, you know, if you brought it in, the guy just takes the skull cap off and left the horns on. And underneath the horns. In a year's time hanging up in a building, it

will dry on there and you would have to soak it in water to get it to come off. Oh, I'm just going to, it's never going to smell right. No, no. My brother, Danny, he's got, when he's doing doll sheep, he takes a cooler and takes a contractor bag, puts a sheep head in there,

pours a cup of water in there, waits a long time, pulls it out, lays out a piece of plywood on the ground and hucks it at the plywood. Yep. And pop, you know, all of a sudden you wiggle the horn off. Yeah, pop right off. Yeah, he's got his whole little system.

He's probably got a special piece of plywood for that purpose. Like a good whap. It is unbelievably foul though. Like the beer mugs they're making now out of horn so you can drink out of it. I would never drink out of one. Is that right?

I've spent too much time. Like when I see them, I'm always like, huh. You just smell it looking at it. Yeah, like a little Vicks VapoRub and a mask, you know, to help cut down on it. And I'm like, I'm not drinking out of that thing. How do, if people wanted to bring something to your studio, but they don't live around you,

how do people, how do they like make that decision? How do they, not how do they make this, that's not the right word. How do they facilitate it? Like you don't just like stick a deer in the mail. We get a lot of stuff shipped in through FedEx, FedEx and UPS. We get stuff shipped in pretty much every week.

So they can skin their deer down to the base of the head, sever the head. Yep. Use most commonly like, even like this tote here, that's just stuff that we get stacks of totes brought in there. And you'll talk them through the process. Yep.

And we usually recommend doing FedEx second day air, not overnight, because usually it should be frozen and it has to thaw out. You know. And they got to have their paperwork square and you help with the paperwork. Yep. And they'll go down and get everything set up

and we had a deer show up on last night, actually. From? Wisconsin. So he just wanted you to do it. Mm-hmm. And that's not a problem. Nope. Nope. No, we get most of our work is from out of town. And then you wanted you to do it. Mm-hmm. And that's not a problem. Nope.

Nope. Most of our work is from out of town. And then you crate it and ship it back to him. Yeah. Yep. We ship all over the country. So you got a guy that's making crates. Mm-hmm.

And then we also, this year, there was another company with the rise on the materials for crating and all the lumber prices. They started doing crateless. So this company doesn't do anything besides ship taxidermy. They just travel around. And so you don't have the cost of the crate factored in. And they have the same systems of plates that we mount all of our stuff to the stands when we're actually working on them.

And so they'll just take it and put a plate on it and mount them in the trailer and then just travel around and drop it off. There's a guy in Alaska. It's another good old codger job. There's probably multiple guys in Alaska that do that. They like their business is at the end of the year.

Transporting. Hauling all that shit down to the lower 48 and then they got drop off points. Yeah. Yep. We just had a big moose and a dull sheep dropped off at our tannery and then I'll go pick up the antlers at some point, but we got a long time until it's tanned. And then, like, I have to go over to John Edwards from Schnee's.

Yep. They harvested a big Yukon moose, and so I'm going to pick up the antlers from them today, and their cape got drop shipped right to one of our tanneries in michigan and we just got confirmation yesterday that it'll be here next week so we'll make that loop and pick that up and they're gonna do a half life size in the store whoa really yeah yeah just the ass end my old man had my old man had my brother stole the ass. When you went in the bathroom, inside the bathroom was the pig's ass and outside the bathroom was the pig's head.

But he did that thing the guys used to do in the old days where like when they probably still do. When you glue the tusks in, you barely stick the tusk in and then glue it so it looks like it's got like huge, yeah like five inch tusks coming out of it, you know? Like it's half warthog.

Now then you'll see old, where they would like really exaggerate bear fangs too. They'd let a lot of... Hang out. Let a lot of it hang out to make it look more ferocious. That's not your scene. No. No, I honestly, I'm more into just the details

of trying to make it look alive again. Yeah. Well, I'm telling you, man, the bear you did, the closed-mouth bear rug you did for me, I don't want you to see it. I'm still waiting for Chester. I'm supposed to be hanging that son of a bitch up. But these guys, Seth and Chester actually have little desks.

Chester's not here, but they have little desks next to each other, and they call their little area the bear den. It's like in the muppets there's two old men that have that little booth you know it's called the medium sketch the medium sketch yeah it wasn't rare and it certainly wasn't well done but they're in kind of a recessed area but my bear is hanging over the rail in the bear den right now. I'm going to get it hung up. Is Clay's going up there too? I don't know what we're going to do with it.

See, now it's going to take a while, but we, yeah, nevermind. That thing is huge. There's a lot of stuff that's got to get moved to a new place at some point soon. Meaning all of our shit. All of your shit. So it's just hard to get excited about hanging anything up right now. Right. Competitive delivery service where you factor in the cost

of me listening to how you got the animal I delivered. Not only will I show up to deliver, I will give you an hour of going, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Then what happened? You don't say. How far did he go? Mm-hmm.

Good hit on it all the questions i mean we could play some hell yeah you could sell that up in your neck you got all the retired border patrol guys and stuff i mean they live for that stuff oh yeah yeah hanging out at the coffee shop but but they could, you know, a little more new faces to tell their own stories too. What caliber? What's the ballistic coefficient on that?

All right. Hayes Taxidermy Studio. Libby, Montana. Do you got more room for more business? Yes. You ever turn business in? Yeah, I got a hide

in the freezer I told you about. You got room to take that? Absolutely. Oh, he can bring it With him right now Yep Did you get Yanni's Bobcat yet Not yet

Not yet We just got Actually when I was Pulling up here this morning We just got confirmation On the reproductions going They're in the works For the sheep now

Oh That's gonna be cool Yeah that should be Pretty neat Yanni's bighorn I'm gonna warn you now That was like Joe Taxidermy right now

That was the first bear ever skinned, and it was all by myself in the middle of the night, so hopefully I did enough. Is he missing an appendage? That's old Stumpy, yeah. Are you going to do a recreation on the appendage? No. Corinne's like, put a fish on there.

You mean like when... Put an eagle's head coming out of his foot. Is it black? You got a human arm, you can... Is it a black color phase? Yeah, it's black. Yep.

We could put another one on there. Yeah, kind of like, like it the way it was, man. It's a cool bear, yeah. It's a cool story. Keep it the way it was. Like Clay's bear. Yeah, whatever,

like, did you reconstruct that bear's face or did it stay the same? That bear looked like it had been hit by a lawnmower. Yeah, like Phantom of the Opera you reconstruct that bear's face or did it stay the same? That bear looked like it had been hit by a lawnmower. Yeah, like Phantom of the Opera kind of stuff. The face, you can only do so much before you distort the shape of the face. We were able to take out as many of the shave outs as we could. My boys just watched that episode like a week ago.

They were like, what's wrong with that bear's head? And then we, the ears were so far gone we had to cut the ears off another stock bear we had then and lay those on to oh no you guys talking about different bears oh we are you're talking about the bear clay's bear had gotten in a fight he'd been in a fight had his muzzle all bit up yeah he's talking about clay had a like my the biggest black bear the biggest black bear rug because not just the length but i mean it's huge yeah just like yeah did you do the one of clay's anyways it was all messed up he had it was all The biggest black bear rug, not just the length, but I mean, it's huge. Yeah. Just like a big round. Yeah, did you do the one in Clay's?

Anyways, it was all messed up. It was all destroyed and messed up. And he rejuvenated it. Got it. It wasn't like taken care of. He didn't know what he was going to do with it. He had it hanging around his house as just like a rug. It's like a tanned hide.

My bad. I thought we were talking about. Oh, the bear that got bit up by a bear. I don't know what he did with that bear. Yeah. That thing turned out thought we were talking about. Oh, the bear that got bit up by a bear. Yeah. I don't know what he did with that bear. Yeah. That thing turned out great. It was, it was lucky. We, luckily we had the right bears in stock to use to take pieces off to replace parts and stuff.

So it was, we definitely got lucky on that. And my bear is beautiful, man. My closed mouth bear rug. I'm a real sucker for rugs, man. I like those bear rugs. I like rugs. I've always enjoyed. You did a great job of it, man. It looks amazing bear rug. I'm a real sucker for rugs, man. I like those bear rugs. I like rugs. I've always enjoyed. You did a great job of it, man.

It looks amazing. Enjoyed doing them. A lot of places kind of look down on rug work. They're like, eh, you know, maybe have my wife do that or something. I didn't know that. Yeah. It's not really, not really a prestigious thing.

I got like, I gave some away, but yeah, I mean, I got like a mountain lion rug, a Himalayan tar rug that I gave to my buddy. A lot of bear rugs. Love them. I like those mountain goat rugs. Don't you have a new guy rug? The old tiny ones with like the red fringe on the top, you know?

Yeah, yeah. I always liked those a lot. I think a well done rug is really beautiful. Bad rugs for bad, you know, I'm saying bad anything, you know. Bad rugs for bad people. All right. Hayes Taxidermy Studio Get yourself a squishy pillow

Guaranteed not to lose your stuff No it does beautiful stuff Go look at the crazy ass coyote Squishy thing Make sure to hit follow when you're there on Instagram. Go to Hayes Taxidermy Studio and see for yourself. Beautiful work. I live in Montana.

And send a box over there. We'll be there. Yeah. Rough skin it so it's got a lot of fat and meat on it. Throw a jar of salt on there. Do they need to send you an email beforehand that like, hey, I'm sending a box? Or do you just get boxes from?

I strongly encourage contact before. Okay, contact before. Yeah. We actually had a mount of animal shipped to us with no name, no contact, no nothing. And I was like, well, you know, we'll run it through the tanning process. And it was probably the most patient customer we ever had. It was about four years later, this guy calls up and he's like, hey, man, where's my whatever it was probably the most patient customer we ever had. It was about four years later, this guy calls up and he's like, hey man, where's my whatever it was? And I'm like, who are you?

And he gives me his name and I was like, okay. So I go to the alphabetical file trying to find him. I was like, when did you send it? And he's like, it's been a long time. I'm like, all right. So I'm rambling through there. I'm like, you're not even on file. Then I was like, wait a second. Was it, did you ship it? He's like, yeah, that's me. I was like, well, you So I'm rambling through there. I'm like, you're not even on file. And I was like, wait a second.

Was it, did you ship it? He's like, yeah, that's me. I was like, well, you got to put your name in it before you send it to me. There was nothing there. He's like, oh, you still got it? And I was like, we still got it. We were able to get it done and get it to him. Oh, that's great.

That's a happy ending to the story. All right, everybody. John Hayes, thanks a lot for joining. Thank you very much. Send all your texts to me or to John. He'll get you squared away. Does beautiful work. And I should point out, the Freedom Mounts look amazing.

I call them European. I don't like... Remember how they had to rebrand French fries during the Iraq invasion? Yes. I don't like calling them European mounts. Freedom Mounts. Freedom Mounts is what I like to call them. I like that. Yeah.

Do you charge less or more for Freedom Mounts? If it's called a Freedom Mount, I would I like to call them. I like that. Yeah. Do you charge less or more for freedom? If it's called a freedom mount, I would charge a little less. A little less. Just the skull. But the bear is beautiful. I like how it's pinned. This way, when your kids pick it up to show their friend and the jaw doesn't fall off, the teeth are breaking in half.

Yeah. Right. You prevent all that from happening. I feel like there's two things wrong with the European mount. It's a little more expensive and it's going to smell like cigarettes. Freedom Mount over here. All right. Thanks a lot, everybody. Thank you.