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Originally Posted by DvlshAngel985  You hit the nail on the head here. I don't understand it to be honest. Taxidermy is just odd to me. Why? What purpose does it serve? I guess I have to see it in person. I mean no disrespect, I just don't get it. You're explanation about eating meat, that I understand because I'm an omnivore too! The only "stuffed" animal I've seen was a giant anteater (my school's symbol) hidden in one of the corridors of the school. I had never been to that side of the school before, and ran into it. It was the oddest thing I had ever seen! But it looked fake. 
I have been to a Body Worlds exhibit and I thought that was amazing! I loved all the exhibits because I always want to know how things worked. Everything was displayed. The muscles, the nervous system, the digestive system, cardiovascular, all the muscle placements and on and on. It was very educational! So is taxidermy the same thing? |
Well not exactly. i mean granted i've seen my fair share of the insides of animals. in fact i got to pull lymph nodes from deer heads to be tested for chronic wasting disease. taxidermy i think is given a bad rep due to the HORRIBLE taxidermists out there that use their own tanning products to tan the hides that go on the forms. they then will pull away from the form and expose holes and fall apart and look very nasty and scary. my dad has his deer hides professionally tanned so they are everlasting and don't start to pull off and look all messed up. he is a perfectionist so they eyes are perfectly placed and every drop of paint and stich of a needle is just right.
here's how it works. we get the dead deer head, dad carefully skins the hide from the body and head. he cuts off the antlers and boils them to pure bone white in chemicals. he cuts all the meat from the hide and freezes them. then they thaw out and he salts it and lets it dry then sends it to a tanning company in MT. (his friend that hunts afriacan safari animals AMAZING) and we get them back beautifully tanned Hair on still kinda like a leather purse you might see. he then wets and stretches them out over a foam form made and measured to look like the deer. the hide is glued and then sewn onto the form on the back. he places glass eyes in, paints the original nose back to black, brushes and blowdries the hair and lets it all dry with cardboard to hold hair perfectly in place. it's a very precise and neat process. he does ONE deer head a day all year long. then he moves into fish in the summer months right before it's deer season again. fish are hand tanned by him and stretched over a foam form with glass eyes and each scale is hand painted with an airbrush to look exactly like the fish they are. it's amazing.
my fav. is bob cats, coyotes, bear, elk, quail, and other types of animals. deer heads get old. all racks no matter how huge look that same to you after awhile, yet each is so different and so unique. but i just love his work and it's so beautiful to see it finished and looking like it did in life. he puts them sometimes into beautiful scenery like a museum display you might have seen. on wooded tree like things with grass and rock on the bottom of the display.
sorry to take such a big long part of the thread. but i wanted to explain what it's really like. it's not scary or weird. it's really quite beautiful. it's a preservation of a beautiful creature and a memory of hunting and capsuring a large trophy animal.
the cool ones are african animals, my dad has done some things for famous people like Tom Teague, he's a ranch owner sometimes you'll see him on PBR bull riding shows with his bulls he raised. he also has two deer ranch and is the owner of the first 30 30 buck. 30 points, 30 inch spread. WOW. dad did a ton of his african animals and had to learn all these new colors and techniques to make them look realistic and just like they were when stalking the jungle.
i hope that makes some more sense to you. if you saw his work you'd love it. it's not nearly as creepy as the halls and walls of a museum or university with falling apart creepy animals heads looking at you. his are so much nicer than that.
thanks for letting me share...LOVE YOU ALL