Speaker 1: This is me eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by first, like creating proven versatile
Speaker 1: hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear for
Speaker 1: every hunt. First like go farther, stay longer, turn the
Speaker 1: machine on, Phil, I'll say a bold statement, machines. You
Speaker 1: wanna hear bold statement. Let's start show out. YEA, most
Speaker 1: people I know this to be true because of anecdotal evidence,
Speaker 1: So it must be true. It must be true because
Speaker 1: Andal Evan's most people, like a majority of people who
Speaker 1: are into falconry, came to it not through an interest
Speaker 1: in hunting. They came to it through an interest in
Speaker 1: dungeons and dragons. I listen, this is a true thing.
Speaker 1: I've got, like probably my left big toe kind of
Speaker 1: dipped into that world, Steve, And that's absolutely true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my brother Danny used to live up in Alaska. There
Speaker 1: was some falconers and they had gotten into huge snakes.
Speaker 1: They were way into D and D that's what they
Speaker 1: called dungeon dragons all in high school and and then
Speaker 1: got into falconry all out of like Sorcerer stuff. These
Speaker 1: are people that like to dress up like it's Shakespeare
Speaker 1: and go to the park and joust. It's called ling
Speaker 1: action role playing. What about what about your buddy, the
Speaker 1: world's greatest small game hunter? Didn't he engage in some
Speaker 1: He did, yes, but he's an exception to the rule.
Speaker 1: I said a majority, meaning if you had a hundred
Speaker 1: fifty one him came through D and D. I know
Speaker 1: some exceptions to Phil just say, you know, when I
Speaker 1: go hunting and don't successfully kill anything, I just tell
Speaker 1: people I have been a lart ping go creeping around,
Speaker 1: and they just feel bad for you and kind of nod.
Speaker 1: That's all. That's great, right exactly. John Hayes from Hayes
Speaker 1: Taxidermy Studio, what do you think about that. You've got
Speaker 1: these strong opinions. You don't want to alienate potential customers. See,
Speaker 1: he's gonna start dogging on D and D people. And
Speaker 1: then some guy was like, gonna send over his rabbit
Speaker 1: or whatever. It's all full of talent holes and he's like,
Speaker 1: I'm not sending it to him now because he dogged
Speaker 1: on D and D. You gotta stay on top, You
Speaker 1: gotta stay in good graces with everybody. Don't try to
Speaker 1: keep everybody happy as a tax ERNs. You can't afford
Speaker 1: to alienate people. Man, I, me and Seth know about
Speaker 1: a taxi nervous here in town that has really alienated
Speaker 1: some people. Just talk to him this morning and beat
Speaker 1: up other tax nervous and get people stuff, get people
Speaker 1: stuff back, and then he's the business for yourself. It's
Speaker 1: amazing how much stuff I've had brought to me from
Speaker 1: other shops over the years. It's surprised I didn't like
Speaker 1: know that was really like a thing I've had it?
Speaker 1: Why would Why would they bring it? Because it's like
Speaker 1: I just can't. Guy just pisces them off finally to
Speaker 1: the point where they just don't want to deal with anymore,
Speaker 1: dodging their calls. Takes payment, and Full doesn't complete it
Speaker 1: in a timely manner, and then they go get it
Speaker 1: and bring it. Yeah, and it's just sitting in a
Speaker 1: freezer for two years or something, or tanned or in
Speaker 1: a freezer or Yeah, we're ruined back in the stuff.
Speaker 1: Oh dude, I'm fully accepted the fact that it's ruined. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not just him, man, other friends of mine. I feel
Speaker 1: horrible about it. Paid and Full too, a couple of
Speaker 1: friends of mine we had we had a tax nervous
Speaker 1: that we worked with for years and was and you know,
Speaker 1: very very good, very reliable, and then uh, and we
Speaker 1: referred all of our clients to this this guy too.
Speaker 1: And you know, so I have like an unbelievable amount
Speaker 1: of store credit to a store that doesn't exist anymore,
Speaker 1: because one day, where do I take this credit out?
Speaker 1: One day? Right? It was just like a guy just
Speaker 1: up and left the whole business, the whole deal just
Speaker 1: walked away. Yeah yeah, but like no no offense, dude.
Speaker 1: But people in your business, like, I don't know where
Speaker 1: they find him? Oh my god. Yeah yeah. I'm always
Speaker 1: like yeah, I'm a taxiderm as and I'm always waiting
Speaker 1: for some sort of response or the stories start coming out.
Speaker 1: I knew this guy, and I'm like, gosh, yeah, we
Speaker 1: need to establish John as like an upstanding member of
Speaker 1: the taxidermy community. He's got a whole he's got a
Speaker 1: whole box, he's got a whole box of my stuff.
Speaker 1: He's got my boys mule here. He's got my bear,
Speaker 1: which looks beautiful. Well, my bear skull already got my
Speaker 1: bare road back. The bear skull looks beautiful. That'll be
Speaker 1: another question for you later is um, ah, why sometimes?
Speaker 1: But I'm I'm not saying it's not on a laziness.
Speaker 1: But a great question that you think people have for
Speaker 1: tax nervous is um, what is the hold up? Sometimes?
Speaker 1: Well you can think about you can answer now if
Speaker 1: you want, Okay, I can tell you what the hold
Speaker 1: up has been the last year is the tanneries with COVID.
Speaker 1: I actually just received four goats back that brought into
Speaker 1: me in a fallow up twenty just got them back.
Speaker 1: So not even your fault, No, No, it's just we're
Speaker 1: just we have stuff that's been out for a year
Speaker 1: and a half and it's still there. It's being processed
Speaker 1: and everything's coming back fine. But yeah, I'm definitely starting
Speaker 1: to get the phone calls. We're like, are you sure
Speaker 1: it's okay. I'm like, I'm sure it's okay. It's just
Speaker 1: there's nobody there to man the tannery for their short staff,
Speaker 1: very short staff. We finally split it up between four
Speaker 1: tanneries this year just to try to not overwhelm one
Speaker 1: place and so we can get our turnaround times a
Speaker 1: little better. Do you ever have tanneries lose your stuff. No,
Speaker 1: thank god, knock knock on. There haven't had that happen yet.
Speaker 1: I've had that happened before. It's hard for them to
Speaker 1: lose stuff these days, you know, like you'll we'll have
Speaker 1: a seal put in it that's got our name and
Speaker 1: our code on it. Then it's punched with our invoice
Speaker 1: number um and he distinguishing marks. We always document so
Speaker 1: if they sent me the wrong thing back, it would
Speaker 1: be pretty obvious. Then I want to be one of
Speaker 1: the top crisis season the tax during the world. Right,
Speaker 1: is cape condition yes? And and making sure it's my
Speaker 1: cape yes, yep. And so the punches and the seals
Speaker 1: that that helps make sure that that's accurate. I remember
Speaker 1: a long time ago, we did one and mounted it
Speaker 1: up for a guy and he came in and he
Speaker 1: was like, oh, it looks great. Comes back the next
Speaker 1: day and he's like, this isn't my dear, and we're like,
Speaker 1: that's your dear, and he brought a picture out and yeah,
Speaker 1: the cape's got switched around. He's like different haircut. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's totally different. So at that shop I was working
Speaker 1: at that time, that's when we started implementing the seals,
Speaker 1: not just a punch already. This guy's reputable. I want time,
Speaker 1: despite his occupation, despite his calling. I sent a coyote
Speaker 1: that was like super red one time to the tannery.
Speaker 1: Looked like a red fox, was kyote and uh. A
Speaker 1: couple of months later, I get my kio back in
Speaker 1: the mail and open it up, and it's freaking gray
Speaker 1: as grey can be. You gotta wonder, like how much
Speaker 1: when you bring meat to a processor because you got
Speaker 1: no way of no one. Yeah, like there with with
Speaker 1: a cape or a bear or something, you'd be like, look, man,
Speaker 1: the bear I shot had a big white spots on
Speaker 1: his chest and this bear is red, right, but like
Speaker 1: how much meat? They're like, I don't know this. Help
Speaker 1: just give him an help. Yeah, it's from that person whatever,
Speaker 1: like that out rotted. He'll probably never come back for it.
Speaker 1: That guy. Give that guy that OK and that guy
Speaker 1: that open probably happens a whole time. And tell the
Speaker 1: guy who's calling right now that we're really backed up
Speaker 1: because COVID. Oh when people here, just I'll be a
Speaker 1: thou and dollars richer. Why is that? Steve? Well, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you why, because'm gonna win that Derby tomorrow Duck's
Speaker 1: on ice. Oh yeah, you could be richer if you
Speaker 1: catch the biggest fish of the whole. Damn, there's a
Speaker 1: side thing if you if you have if you're fishing, No, no,
Speaker 1: it's between it's between bourbon, walleye and perch. If you
Speaker 1: happen to catch the biggest fish out of the entire derby,
Speaker 1: you win. Well why would we not just spend tomorrow
Speaker 1: tip up and for bourbon and win all that money? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean that could be a your strategy could be
Speaker 1: this the time, like the the timing for it's not
Speaker 1: good for. It's not good for. You can't start until
Speaker 1: eight while I tried that last I tried that on
Speaker 1: my birthday. And let me tell you how that went.
Speaker 1: It was a long day. We were running what nineteen
Speaker 1: tip ups twenty something like that salmon belly, the salmon
Speaker 1: fins that I brought back from Alaska, like the little
Speaker 1: uh what do you call him? A little pectoral finn
Speaker 1: we had I don't know why, acres covered and tip
Speaker 1: and you lord at the end and just oil comes
Speaker 1: off it. Soccer strips that I bought off my kid,
Speaker 1: not a not a flag. Well, no one falls trip.
Speaker 1: Probably some trout at the time of year when it
Speaker 1: supposed to be on fire a year ago, a year earlier. Yep,
Speaker 1: we went from twenty four to zero man Canyan Ferry.
Speaker 1: In my opinion, I don't know what's different this year,
Speaker 1: but different. The water is super low. I should just
Speaker 1: blow the damn drain the whole thing. Now it's useless. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like I was gonna be the worst day in the world.
Speaker 1: I think they I think they should manage it for
Speaker 1: everything other than trout. Yeah. Man, like, it's so weird.
Speaker 1: They're like, if you catch a perch, it's gonna be
Speaker 1: bigger than a walley that you catch more than likely.
Speaker 1: So strange. My daughter yesterday said, I rememorized that. She said,
Speaker 1: would you stop talking about that? No one even knows
Speaker 1: what a derby is. Now I should go to it's
Speaker 1: how Daddy's gonna make it. You couldn't go. I thought
Speaker 1: it was Sunday, not Saturday. No, you can still go
Speaker 1: buy the thing. It's forty bucks to get in this
Speaker 1: for ducks unlimited fifty bucks at the door. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: might join, Well, I just I'm not. I don't mean
Speaker 1: to moral I'll shoot you morally. But I also included
Speaker 1: a five dollar donation everybody. Every I was trying. I'm
Speaker 1: just a modest little you know, nod. I was so
Speaker 1: shocked that I did wasn't buying it at the door
Speaker 1: that I was actually I was like, I'm gonna give
Speaker 1: him at the door like it was normal, which normally
Speaker 1: I would do this at the last minute. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I might join. Oh, I hit us real quick with UM.
Speaker 1: I know it's like early and you haven't read everything yet,
Speaker 1: but the eagle study that's you're making its round right now? Man,
Speaker 1: what's your take? Half of all eagles? So if if
Speaker 1: you haven't read the study, but you're only reading headlines,
Speaker 1: you would it would seem that there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: anti hunters out there that came out with the study
Speaker 1: that the hunters are killing all the eagles in the
Speaker 1: US half of them. Um. And as with studies, they
Speaker 1: can be applied in certain ways. And what this was
Speaker 1: was they did a study in the US of eagle health.
Speaker 1: And can I interrupt you for saying this is bald
Speaker 1: and golden, bald and golden yea, both of them, and um,
Speaker 1: you know I think they were like eagles captured um
Speaker 1: or or or analyzed in the study and and then
Speaker 1: that right is like and then if you applied that
Speaker 1: to the entire United States, that's this is what you
Speaker 1: could get. Um for I guess like the dose of
Speaker 1: reality is, uh, do not pay attention to things that
Speaker 1: that's Compare the effects of lead on people to the
Speaker 1: effects of lead on birds. It turns out we're very
Speaker 1: different aside from the flying and the the highly acidic stomach.
Speaker 1: So the feathers throw me off to you know, Um,
Speaker 1: I've seen some people eat in similar ways. But uh,
Speaker 1: you know, lead does have a fast and and oftentimes
Speaker 1: deadly effect on birds that eat carrion, and you know
Speaker 1: that that is the truth. So um, you know. The
Speaker 1: other thing to look at here, though, is ego populations
Speaker 1: in much of the country are are actually expanding and growing.
Speaker 1: And so it comes down to this conversation that you'll
Speaker 1: hear many many times, like the individual versus the population?
Speaker 1: Are we having population level effects? And where those things
Speaker 1: are overlapping would be like the case like the California
Speaker 1: condor right, where if you were to kill an individual,
Speaker 1: that individual's death could then have an overall effect on
Speaker 1: the population. So um, I'm gonna do more of an
Speaker 1: in depth go through this thing, um on the weekend review.
Speaker 1: This is like broad strokes. With Cal's we can review,
Speaker 1: ladies and gentlemen, Cal's we can review. I feel like anymore,
Speaker 1: you can't drive like ten miles without seeing a bald eagle.
Speaker 1: They're everywhere. No, they're pr person screwed up. You just
Speaker 1: get all excited seeing one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um so yeah.
Speaker 1: Some of these headlines are very misleading, as per usual UM,
Speaker 1: and as per usual good you know, good science should
Speaker 1: be applauded UM, and lots of people can take that
Speaker 1: good science and apply it in ways where He's like,
Speaker 1: but if and that's why you gotta read this stuff.
Speaker 1: Thanks Cal. We'll be following this one. Listen, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: crystal ball it for a minute. This is gonna make everybody,
Speaker 1: oh man, this issue is here's my crystal ball. This
Speaker 1: ain't going away and stop. This discussion is not about
Speaker 1: to end. It is not about that's my crystal ball prediction.
Speaker 1: And you know I always say, like you have a
Speaker 1: choice as a hunter to uh purchase non toxic ammunition
Speaker 1: and and you know non toxic ammunition the variety that's
Speaker 1: on the shelf right now. Uh is way broader and
Speaker 1: way better than it's ever been. And if you choose
Speaker 1: to hunt with that stuff, you're not gonna have these
Speaker 1: secondary effects, right, You're you're gonna kill the thing that
Speaker 1: you're shooting and not the things that are eating the leftovers. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't want to equate it to like spanking little kids,
Speaker 1: but it's just fading out sort of its own way,
Speaker 1: you know. Um Like when I was a little good,
Speaker 1: every kid got spanked all the time. Now that's not
Speaker 1: that many kids get spanked anymore. And I feel like
Speaker 1: a lot of people are just and annoying made a
Speaker 1: law about it, right, But I just like more and
Speaker 1: more people I know, regardless of whether they're thinking about
Speaker 1: raptors or whatever, are for big game at least shooting
Speaker 1: model copper bullets. Did you see the article a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks ago on the phasing out of whaling due
Speaker 1: to the market, right, Like the market dictates, oh like
Speaker 1: people are buying less than whale ol yeah, or whale
Speaker 1: products right, and or the industries that still use whale
Speaker 1: oil for stuff. Uh, And you think about you know,
Speaker 1: the crazy, screaming, bloody murder on on the whale topics
Speaker 1: and you know, like there's alternatives hitting the market every
Speaker 1: day type of thing, and that's what is ending whale
Speaker 1: industries in in certain areas. A Karan, why did you
Speaker 1: Why did you decide it's not is it? Because it
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with our subject matter on this
Speaker 1: podcast that you removed the COVID Yankee candle review. That's
Speaker 1: a funny article, which is the funniest thing. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: everybody knows that Yankee candles are sort of like like
Speaker 1: if your grandma has a candle in her house, it's
Speaker 1: probably a Yankee candle. People like them because they have
Speaker 1: a very potent, potent candles, No, nothing subtle about them.
Speaker 1: And someone I have totally explored it, but someone tracked
Speaker 1: COVID outbreaks with reviews of bad reviews of yanky whatever smell.
Speaker 1: Whenever there's a big spike in a COVID outbreak, there's
Speaker 1: a big spike and Yankee candle reviews that it doesn't
Speaker 1: have any smells candles, So damn really the graphic tracks
Speaker 1: like you just lay both charts on like this could
Speaker 1: be a rough week, bro. Customer service cases are spike
Speaker 1: and people are not smelling their cans. Uh oh, so
Speaker 1: Brody got, I don't want to say it was not
Speaker 1: like a PR crisis, because it's like a not very
Speaker 1: widely viewed thing. But Brody has now developed the track
Speaker 1: record of being something about his tonality when discussing dogs. Dogs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Brody gets to talking about dogs, Corey gets to getting
Speaker 1: emails of people that are mad at him, and I'll
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a dog owner. I love dogs. You've
Speaker 1: always had Yeah, yeah, dogs, yep, yep, the first one,
Speaker 1: you think he's like a bad dog Personce people got
Speaker 1: madder than the Golden retriever. Eventually this will get the
Speaker 1: peta I feel like. So, Brody observed, did you catch
Speaker 1: what they called you? Did they call you a jack
Speaker 1: wagon or an ass hat or something like that. It
Speaker 1: was along those lines a category of insult um, Brody said.
Speaker 1: Brody observed, Yeah, we were talking about just passionately observed. Yes,
Speaker 1: going back, we were talking. A gentleman wrote us about
Speaker 1: he had an injured deer in his yard that his
Speaker 1: dog went out and injured it. Further yadi yadi an
Speaker 1: insult to injury. Yes, and we're chatting about it and
Speaker 1: I made a comment that I made the comment that
Speaker 1: this is on the skip the flip in. In certain states,
Speaker 1: if you see a dog chasing deer, harassing big game,
Speaker 1: attacking big game, it is legal to shoot the dog.
Speaker 1: That got extrapolated out to me condoning the killing of
Speaker 1: domestic It is reported this is on a thing called UH,
Speaker 1: a Facebook group called Army of Orange, which I liked
Speaker 1: the UH. It is reported that this jack wagon this
Speaker 1: being bro to you Henderson. It is reported that this
Speaker 1: jack wagon spouts off encouraging the shooting of domestic dogs. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let him and his sponsors and his publishers know how
Speaker 1: you feel. What's funny is the guy making the post
Speaker 1: hasn't listened obviously, because he just says it is reported. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's and he provides a link, and he's already calling
Speaker 1: for a boycott. Yeah. And basically what I was doing
Speaker 1: was making the case that you should train your dog
Speaker 1: not to chase a deer, right because bad things happen
Speaker 1: when dogs chase an attack deer. There and and a
Speaker 1: lot of places, uh, pet dogs kill a lot of deer.
Speaker 1: A grade school biology teacher here in Missoula, Montana who
Speaker 1: was like, I see a dog chasing a deer, I
Speaker 1: kill it that's right. That was like fifth grade growing
Speaker 1: up in Missoula, Montana, which for those of you unfamiliar
Speaker 1: with Montana would be seen as the liberal it's the
Speaker 1: Paris of West central Montana. Yeah, that would be the
Speaker 1: other thing. That's what I was thinking, especially from folks
Speaker 1: and those French cheese from Missoula came up. His concern
Speaker 1: is legitimate. Sure, his concern is, hey man, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of states were allowed to legally use dogs to
Speaker 1: hunt deer, which I support where that's legal. I think
Speaker 1: it should stay where it's legal and has been legal.
Speaker 1: I think it should stay legal. And he points out
Speaker 1: that a lot of hound hunters um are very reluctant
Speaker 1: to let their dogs work on public land during deer
Speaker 1: season for fear that vigilante UH people such as Brody
Speaker 1: going down. I don't actually hunt deer. I hunt dogs.
Speaker 1: But every every dog an incidental dear, regardless of if
Speaker 1: you've trained your dog to run deer, every dog owner
Speaker 1: has a long list of serious concerns for different times
Speaker 1: of year. I'm like, where you're gonna take your dog? Right,
Speaker 1: like the tangled up in a snare? And so his
Speaker 1: point was good, But then what's funny is he gets
Speaker 1: riled up and he's like, if that's true, I want
Speaker 1: you to post the law. Right Probably someone post law
Speaker 1: yeah from Brody State. Read how they word you want
Speaker 1: the general rule Like someone's like this from someone pointed
Speaker 1: out some points. I was like, he's just say he
Speaker 1: didn't say you should. He's just saying it is. They're like,
Speaker 1: well that's not and then someone's like, well no, it's statute,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. I was saying, if you don't want
Speaker 1: that to happen, teach your dog not to chase deer.
Speaker 1: And in Pennsylvania, the law says a dog declared a
Speaker 1: public nuisance pursuant to Section four relating to declaring dogs
Speaker 1: public nuisances may be killed by any commission officer at
Speaker 1: any time or by any person when the dog is
Speaker 1: found to be in the act of attacking a big
Speaker 1: game animal, and you're then supposed to report it. Yes,
Speaker 1: didn't get a call in uh. Any person who kills
Speaker 1: a license this is this is crazy. That's if you
Speaker 1: kill a license dog, if you you kill a non
Speaker 1: licensed dog, and nothing to happen. In Pennsylvania, if you
Speaker 1: kill a licensed dog, you shall notify the owner or
Speaker 1: a commission officer within forty eight hours after the dog
Speaker 1: was killed. Now, I really do want to point out
Speaker 1: that I'm in favor of this law and probably not.
Speaker 1: You're coming out on record he wasn't even he didn't
Speaker 1: even pass. He didn't pass for the reason that you're thinking,
Speaker 1: I'm in favor of this law because there are so
Speaker 1: many shitty dog owners outside and oftentimes I have been
Speaker 1: able to say, uh, you know, you should really teach
Speaker 1: your dog not to run deer or go under the
Speaker 1: three strand barbed buire fans and chase that guy's cattle
Speaker 1: around because they can legally kill your dog. And I
Speaker 1: also have to say, like I would be like the
Speaker 1: most crushed individual you have ever seen if somebody were
Speaker 1: to shoot my dog. That is why, which is what
Speaker 1: I still think people should be able to shoot your dog.
Speaker 1: It's up to you responsibilities. Bold statement. Kel. I want
Speaker 1: people to know that that was not brody because Cal
Speaker 1: said it. No one's gonna care but Brody. They're like
Speaker 1: that Brodian dogs here, girls, that spouting off dogs was
Speaker 1: real bad. The Golden Retrievers, the dumbest dog. I still
Speaker 1: stand by that we're launching a new series where he's
Speaker 1: got a train of golden retriever. Next year it'll just
Speaker 1: be a show. We should drop like every Friday night
Speaker 1: and be like Brody with ten new things about ten
Speaker 1: new opinions about dogs. You have the picture over. Don't
Speaker 1: like that? Remember like Letterman's like listening, it's outing dogs.
Speaker 1: Needs to be a Formalian segment, the weekend up day segments.
Speaker 1: Uh so does that? Uh? Moving down? Oh? If you
Speaker 1: do in Pennsylvania, you kill a dog who's attacking a
Speaker 1: big game animal, the owner, if the dog was licensed,
Speaker 1: the owner is allowed to get the information about the time, place,
Speaker 1: and circumstances relating to the death of the dog, and
Speaker 1: they're allowed to learn the location. Well, that's kind of
Speaker 1: included in place. Also angry listeners, No, no, not angry listeners.
Speaker 1: I explained why when you're from southern Illinois you are
Speaker 1: not southern and and some people got mad about that,
Speaker 1: he said. One guy writes in I promise you that
Speaker 1: is the most inaccurate thing you've ever said. That's a bold,
Speaker 1: bold statement. He invites me to come down and hunt deer,
Speaker 1: squirrel or turkey in Pope County, Illinois, and then comes
Speaker 1: see for myself. If the people there are Southern or not,
Speaker 1: I think you'd be amazed. He says. We are the
Speaker 1: furthest possible from the people who ice fish up in Chicago. Steve,
Speaker 1: I was on your side until I actually looked at
Speaker 1: a map, because I did not realize how south Illinois
Speaker 1: South Illinois, bro, you can't be from the same place.
Speaker 1: Lincoln was from Michael and from the south, and we
Speaker 1: had an actual Southerner. Michael Wadell greed, if you can
Speaker 1: ice fish, you're not from the south. In Georgia, he said,
Speaker 1: I've never laid eyes on a man ice fishing in Georgia.
Speaker 1: It's on, it's on the same You know, latitude is
Speaker 1: as Virginia's south of St. Louis. It's not far from Nashville.
Speaker 1: It's it's pretty south the right. You got a draw
Speaker 1: line somewhere. But if you notice, if you go back
Speaker 1: in your history book, the Mason Dixon line did not
Speaker 1: follow a a latitude borders right. It was like cock
Speaker 1: eyed kind of line. Do we still use that too?
Speaker 1: I feel like that's that's not a good way to
Speaker 1: gonna make ice. I'm gonna make a line. What we
Speaker 1: should just draw it up someone could draw it up
Speaker 1: if you ice fish in that state and then you
Speaker 1: draw a line at the bottom of the state and
Speaker 1: it'll zigzag and then you'll know the south from the north.
Speaker 1: So we'll work on that. Put it on a T shirt.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at a picture here that shows the Mason
Speaker 1: Dixon Line being south of the Illinois border, because you
Speaker 1: can ice fish in Illinois. But it's funny because that's
Speaker 1: how it's funny, because it includes Missouri, which the line
Speaker 1: shoots up. Oh, you're a half the distance of you
Speaker 1: probably think you probably think of Missouri compromise as a bullet,
Speaker 1: but the Missouri Compromise was actually about that very issue.
Speaker 1: I would love love nothing more than to go into
Speaker 1: a barbershop some and see the Missouri compromise as like
Speaker 1: you point to the picture, Oh you want Ah, here's
Speaker 1: the big news I've been following. And that was actually,
Speaker 1: you know, I actually wanted to do. I wanted to do,
Speaker 1: like do the public comment thing, but it was really
Speaker 1: hard to do the public comment thing. That it was
Speaker 1: time to do it, like in person public comment is
Speaker 1: they've opened up spear fishing for a number of game
Speaker 1: fish in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, which is great
Speaker 1: for me in Michigan. But they've drawn it in like
Speaker 1: a weird way. Um, the areas they've opened up, it's
Speaker 1: almost like they thought to themselves, what would be the
Speaker 1: area that someone would be would be least likely to
Speaker 1: enjoy success, and that will be the Walleye Northern Pike
Speaker 1: spear fishing area, meaning what it's like south of the
Speaker 1: Southern Pier in Grand Haven for Lake Michigan and Lake
Speaker 1: here you're talking about like the distribution of the species
Speaker 1: does They didn't open up any inland, see like everything
Speaker 1: in the Great Lakes are inland, but like a term
Speaker 1: would be sort of like inland being not the great
Speaker 1: They didn't open up any non Great lake waters Great
Speaker 1: Lakes proper, right, And then they drew a line where
Speaker 1: like they opened up Lake Michigan and Michigan water south
Speaker 1: of the Southern Pier where the Grand River flows into
Speaker 1: Lake Michigan. If someone said like, hey, you can now
Speaker 1: spearfish for Northern and Walleye in Michigan, that would be
Speaker 1: the last place I would that would ding in my
Speaker 1: head is where I'm headed to. Is that something to
Speaker 1: do with the muskie populations? No, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: I think it just has to do with the people.
Speaker 1: People the Roding Real crowd of which I'm a member.
Speaker 1: Most of them are real fired up about this. They're like, oh,
Speaker 1: they're gonna kill them all. So I know they're gonna
Speaker 1: kill like five of them. But um uh tribes didn't
Speaker 1: want it. Uh. A lot of the rod and Real
Speaker 1: crowd didn't want it. Spear fishermen have been put in
Speaker 1: so they did like this experimental spear fishing season in
Speaker 1: places that seemed not great. Now hopefully there's some guy
Speaker 1: in Michigan thinking like, no, you got it all wrong,
Speaker 1: and he'll right in and tell me how I'm all wrong.
Speaker 1: But then we'll go check it out and bite you
Speaker 1: to come out there. And there's one guy who's been
Speaker 1: sending me emails about this, and he's been following it
Speaker 1: and he did testify on it, and he's still views
Speaker 1: it as a win. Oh you also you gotta like
Speaker 1: fill out like a report about what you did and
Speaker 1: didn't do. He used it as a win because it's
Speaker 1: it's expanding areas for spear fishing. It's because the first time,
Speaker 1: it's the first time in michiganan spear what would be
Speaker 1: called the game fish. So they've and what what my
Speaker 1: guess is, what will happen if if the good if
Speaker 1: the goodwill on the part of the fisheries managers extends
Speaker 1: like well, let's see. My feeling is that the way
Speaker 1: they've done it, they are not going to find that
Speaker 1: all of a sudden there's an overwhelming harvest by spear fishing.
Speaker 1: If you were if your goal was to kill a
Speaker 1: shipload of walleye, like, to get a shipload of walleye
Speaker 1: spear fishing is probably not no you know, or lake
Speaker 1: trout for that matter. I'll tell you to change the
Speaker 1: physique of a lot of walleye. Fishermen need a heavy dive.
Speaker 1: Lead prices are gonna go way up trying to sink
Speaker 1: all that. But it is weird because because you know,
Speaker 1: in salt water you can spear all kinds of game fish. Yeah, freshwater,
Speaker 1: it's just never been a thing. Freshwater spear fishing, I
Speaker 1: think is the new frontier man and it's like good.
Speaker 1: But I just feel like it's great that they did it.
Speaker 1: Um being from there, I was excited and then I
Speaker 1: saw what they're opening and I was like, I was
Speaker 1: ready to make a special trip right then I saw
Speaker 1: what their opening. I mean I might go there to
Speaker 1: see my mom anyways, and that this border is very
Speaker 1: near my mom hour drive my mom's place. Um, but
Speaker 1: when I saw what they opened, I was like, oh wait,
Speaker 1: I don't know. So maybe someone will right in and
Speaker 1: they'll be like, no, you got it all wrong, dude.
Speaker 1: But you think it's more of a like is there purse,
Speaker 1: it's just a poor spot for the fish to be
Speaker 1: or it was there like a water clarity issue, uh,
Speaker 1: seasonal clarity issue. But in the spring you have good
Speaker 1: In the spring you have great clarity. It's just a
Speaker 1: matter of like where they're gonna be concentrated and when
Speaker 1: they're gonna be there, and that you're it's just like
Speaker 1: a basin, you know. I mean it's like an open
Speaker 1: sandy basin. And a lot of those big bays did
Speaker 1: have more sort of identifiable structure in places you'd go
Speaker 1: like be like this would be a great place to
Speaker 1: look for walleye. A lot of that stuff lies north there.
Speaker 1: There might be stuffing I'm not thinking of is it
Speaker 1: deep south there? You know what's funny is it's it's
Speaker 1: like it's super predictively deep, like if you go six
Speaker 1: miles out, it's two deep, you know. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: just like it's so gradual the way it was carved out.
Speaker 1: It might be yeah, shallow again, I don't, I don't
Speaker 1: know what, but it greatly behooves you to stack the
Speaker 1: deck in your favor as much as pop. So if
Speaker 1: you're going to a spot where, yeah, there's a few
Speaker 1: fish around, um, that's gonna be a tough day of
Speaker 1: spear fishing. The upside is, at least this year, when
Speaker 1: you show up down on the bottom, the last thing
Speaker 1: on his mind is gonna be that you're gonna shoot him,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. There's no marine mammals. It's
Speaker 1: just like a big wally, just nothing ever happens to him.
Speaker 1: There's no reason to run from anything. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, there's no catching release with spear fishing,
Speaker 1: and I mean, my goodness, like the rotten real angler.
Speaker 1: You gotta accept the fact that once you let that
Speaker 1: fish go, there's a lot happening below the surface that
Speaker 1: you just have no idea about. Whereas it somebody with
Speaker 1: a spear, you kind of live it personally. You're very
Speaker 1: familiar with the fate of that fish man. I don't
Speaker 1: even know this. I wanted to talk about this one.
Speaker 1: Don't even know. It's like I can't tell. Do you
Speaker 1: wanna talk about the organ thing? It's sad or I'll
Speaker 1: get out. It's like I don't even know if it's
Speaker 1: like if it's if it fits. So a guy in Oregon,
Speaker 1: are you deadline? Oregon man accidentally shoots brother while fending
Speaker 1: off bear, then kills himself. So fending fending being as
Speaker 1: a verb, right, um no, yeah, is it a bird?
Speaker 1: I know, but when it's got an I m g
Speaker 1: is a still over? Yeah, of course it is. So
Speaker 1: it seems like I don't really know. But looking at
Speaker 1: it seems more like they saw a bear out in
Speaker 1: the yard on their property. One of them runs and
Speaker 1: gets the gun, and then in the loading manages to
Speaker 1: kill his brother. So I don't know, like how whether
Speaker 1: they're fending off a bear or just fix them to
Speaker 1: go get a bear, or just getting excited with a
Speaker 1: gun because there's a bear out in the yard. The
Speaker 1: tragic thing is then the guy was so distraught shot
Speaker 1: himself moving on any more to stay there. One of
Speaker 1: those will never really know. Yeah, oh oh no, Cal
Speaker 1: would love to know if if O d F G
Speaker 1: Oregon Department of Fishing game has been called previously regard
Speaker 1: your property destroying or threatening bear question like was it
Speaker 1: a black was it like a black bear threat? Just
Speaker 1: a weird story. I'm sure more details like were they
Speaker 1: super on edge because it's like, oh, the crazy marauding
Speaker 1: bear is coming back? Or you know, it's just there's
Speaker 1: some context there that would make this um a little
Speaker 1: more relatable. I guess. I mean, it's just just sad.
Speaker 1: But I got to uh removing into tax during me. Now, John,
Speaker 1: were you getting bored? I want to talk about our calendar,
Speaker 1: and you know, I want to ask your peinbot a counter,
Speaker 1: but first I want to heat with a listener question. Okay,
Speaker 1: A listener wrote in with a pressing question, what do
Speaker 1: you me eater folks expect from their mounts when they
Speaker 1: die or pass them on? My grandfather had over one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty mounts in his basement. I was wish
Speaker 1: I could do that small museum. It's been a nightmare
Speaker 1: for our family. He goes on to say his basement,
Speaker 1: all of his stories made up or not. We're the
Speaker 1: highlights of holidays and the grandchildren's dreams. Now that he
Speaker 1: has passed, it seems to be a nightmare to be
Speaker 1: rid of them. In context, before he passed, he told
Speaker 1: me personally, I really enjoy looking at all these animals
Speaker 1: I've collected in my basement. But when I die, good luck,
Speaker 1: it's not my problem anymore. Does he want to see
Speaker 1: what the problem is? Holy cow, he's got a lot
Speaker 1: of crazy stuff. Yeah, well, the problem is that they
Speaker 1: gotta get rid of this stuff because I imagine, you know,
Speaker 1: they want to sell the house or Yeah, but how's
Speaker 1: that a nightmare? It's a gold mine? But is it? Though?
Speaker 1: That's the question? Not not necessarily? Yeah, see what they have?
Speaker 1: What are they sitting on here? There's a nice walleme
Speaker 1: out there. You can send that to me. John is
Speaker 1: gonna give you a very accurate estimate of its value
Speaker 1: right now. I mean, it's stuff does and look all
Speaker 1: rot and falling apart? Is that a great horned owl?
Speaker 1: And that picture? Yeah, I might be part of the
Speaker 1: explain that part of the problem, you know, Uh, get
Speaker 1: go get closer your mic there. The biggest thing I
Speaker 1: see when I look at these pictures like this, um
Speaker 1: a lot of personal trophies, but for highly resellable. You're
Speaker 1: basically looking at something that has Boot and Crockett value.
Speaker 1: If if if granddadded shot you know five there, those
Speaker 1: would be really easy to move. Uh. Just your average
Speaker 1: little stuff that just meant something to him, it's very
Speaker 1: difficult to move. And then as they get older. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of I get this. A lot people call
Speaker 1: me constantly asking Hey, how can I get rid of
Speaker 1: this stuff? Where do I sell this stuff? At? Certain
Speaker 1: things require permitting that the permits don't exist. You have
Speaker 1: to go back through and refile for stuff. You know,
Speaker 1: it can be a nightmare. I would imagine, Um, did
Speaker 1: you notice the bobcat lounging on the TV in the
Speaker 1: lower left hand corner. No, I just got all messed
Speaker 1: up and I lost my place on things like moved
Speaker 1: or I don't know. I didn't do it. I didn't
Speaker 1: do anything. I mean it looks to me like, you know,
Speaker 1: you could just send this picture around to like every
Speaker 1: controls get magically over here. Any kitchen, you know, restaurant, bar,
Speaker 1: you know whatever, that's always an easy place to try
Speaker 1: to unload a lot of that stuff. He's got a
Speaker 1: beaver now and on a stick. I want to see
Speaker 1: I want to see a bigger version of the axis
Speaker 1: dear where it's got? Why can I get a big
Speaker 1: rest of the hide over the top? Is the like
Speaker 1: that thing belongs in some crappy bar in a SKII
Speaker 1: in front of the fireplace. It looks like that access
Speaker 1: to here says to me expensive cocktails could find better elsewhere.
Speaker 1: And as the looks changed so much that you know,
Speaker 1: I mean like stuff I did when I was in
Speaker 1: high school compared to now, I mean, I couldn't give
Speaker 1: that ship away. Do you know he has an airplane
Speaker 1: hanging from the ceiling to airplane that really throws the
Speaker 1: whole thing off. Unless he was a bush pilot. He's
Speaker 1: got a couple of them. Yeah, so he does have
Speaker 1: the family does have a problem. They'll have to definitely
Speaker 1: search around and try to find places to just give
Speaker 1: a lot of that away. Really. Yeah, we got a
Speaker 1: letter from a guy one time that took his grandpa's
Speaker 1: stuff and made a pire p y a E and
Speaker 1: torched it all because he's like, it just seemed like
Speaker 1: I didn't we didn't know what to do with it.
Speaker 1: It just seemed like a way to just send it along,
Speaker 1: Send it along. Man, do people come to you to
Speaker 1: try and offload. Yeah, and usually unless I'm buying antlers
Speaker 1: off something I don't, or like a sheep if it's
Speaker 1: pinned and I know it's legal, something like that. I
Speaker 1: think the big question here is not what happens to
Speaker 1: the taxidermy items, but what happens to the taxidermist when
Speaker 1: somebody likes this, Like this dies, that's a cash cow,
Speaker 1: all right, Yeah, like his business is drying up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not my client. But about the rogue taxidermist who
Speaker 1: will come in and put one head on another thing
Speaker 1: and attach something. We're gonna next Harry Potter type, Harry
Speaker 1: Potter type tax Yes, she was explaining that, making like
Speaker 1: Harry Potter animals. That's it's quite She's like, she's she
Speaker 1: doesn't know it. She's tiptoeing in that direction. Hey, well,
Speaker 1: it seems like John's gotta little vein of that in
Speaker 1: him too. You need to pay this guy a visit. Crane,
Speaker 1: you'd have endless opportunity. You can make a beaver fish.
Speaker 1: Get your hands on is it an our wall that
Speaker 1: has the horns? And oh yeah, Crean, you could go.
Speaker 1: You could go ape ship with all this stuff. You
Speaker 1: make a lion with like steel head for legs. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Uh, that's too bad. I want to see.
Speaker 1: I thought all that stuff was valuable, And in fact,
Speaker 1: I'm faced with a similar situation my father had. My
Speaker 1: father had the first uh fawn, first year he ever got,
Speaker 1: which was a white tail fawn that looks like it
Speaker 1: was mounted seven years ago. Um uh, he's got another
Speaker 1: white tail buck. He's got like a shoulder amount of
Speaker 1: a black bear, right, And I'm like trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what I'm gonna do with it. Like when I
Speaker 1: wanted my grandfather's white tail, his best white tail. Um,
Speaker 1: I just took the antlers off and redid it. The cape,
Speaker 1: new cape, new form, new style, you know. So just
Speaker 1: keep it in the family. You know, the grandkids all
Speaker 1: know the story from their parents and the uncles that
Speaker 1: were there stuff. So just refurbish it, you know, take it,
Speaker 1: take it back down, and put a brand new look
Speaker 1: back on it. That is the thing that's hard to
Speaker 1: get across on tax dury. Have you know, known a
Speaker 1: lot of old Cogers over the years, and they can
Speaker 1: look at them out and know the entire story and
Speaker 1: recount the whole like, oh yeah, this is this time
Speaker 1: of day, we were right here. Yeah, even if they're
Speaker 1: pretty fuzzy on just about everything. All right, So let's
Speaker 1: let's do one last for instance, Uh, is that a sailfish?
Speaker 1: What is that thing? Yeah, some sort of a Yeah,
Speaker 1: that billfish. That's a sailfish. Guy walks into your studio. No,
Speaker 1: that's a bad example. Well no, let's do this one.
Speaker 1: Let's check out his black bear. They're the one standing
Speaker 1: up black bear, standing up, beautiful white throat patch, gorgeous
Speaker 1: black beard. Guy walks into Hayes tax during studio on
Speaker 1: Libby Montana says, hey, uh, what's your best offer? You
Speaker 1: would literally say zero dollar. It's not my work, most importantly,
Speaker 1: and I don't sell anybody's work but my own, especially
Speaker 1: like the bears. I've been working a long time. We
Speaker 1: kind of have our own look good, bad or otherwise.
Speaker 1: It's becoming more recognizable to my studio. And I just
Speaker 1: don't don't have anything to do with other people's stuff
Speaker 1: because your bears look like a live bears. We're trying
Speaker 1: to get what we could have. We could open up,
Speaker 1: we can open ourselves up to some taxidermy donations, and
Speaker 1: then we can put those in the Menater House of Oddities. Well,
Speaker 1: that's something I was going to say. Next is especially
Speaker 1: if it's fucked up old Taxidermy, because then we could
Speaker 1: have like a companion calendar that Seth curates the photos
Speaker 1: for with an actual live in the fake flesh version
Speaker 1: of the I'm going to say, find out where uh,
Speaker 1: let's find out where he is, because maybe we just
Speaker 1: have to send someone there over there and fly over there,
Speaker 1: get a rental U haul and bring it all back,
Speaker 1: or if they really want to get rid of it,
Speaker 1: package it up. But I don't want crane root around
Speaker 1: in there cutting stuff of blue and all that ship
Speaker 1: back together. Yeah, we should get it. Maybe. I'm telling
Speaker 1: you guys, I got a spot in Idaho that we're
Speaker 1: gonna drive down too, because everybody needs to see the
Speaker 1: whole company. We'll get all of our messed up old
Speaker 1: taxider any photos that we need, and everybody will be
Speaker 1: done with it in absolute awe of everything else in
Speaker 1: this spot from one location. Is it a bar? It's unreal,
Speaker 1: It is unreal. We're doing last year we did a
Speaker 1: calendar I guess it was last year. We did a
Speaker 1: calendar for this year called fund Up Old Deer stands. Yes,
Speaker 1: I saw that. Great all sources from our community, our listeners. Um,
Speaker 1: that's been overwhelmed by the by next year's calendar submissions,
Speaker 1: which is fucked up old taxidermy. How many have you
Speaker 1: got now? Seth oh look two thousand and nine. Its
Speaker 1: slowed down because we haven't talked about it lately. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So now is this like novelty tax, durmy or tax
Speaker 1: or just poorly executed traditional tax? For me, I prefer
Speaker 1: it to be Yeah, no Harry Potter garbage at all,
Speaker 1: though in Crin's honor on the last page of the calendar,
Speaker 1: we might have a bunch of thumbnails, Like we might
Speaker 1: have a collection of Harry Potter stuff in the back,
Speaker 1: but it's not gonna be tied. We won't be tied
Speaker 1: to a month. It's it's preferably it's just yeah, nothing
Speaker 1: like that. What is that? I don't know. It just
Speaker 1: says taxidermy from hell. Yeah, nothing like we're looking for
Speaker 1: Grandpa's the perfect piece of old fund up tax, then
Speaker 1: we would be that. Um, it's stuff from hunters, stuff
Speaker 1: from trappers that just hasn't like aged well might have
Speaker 1: not been done the best in the first place was
Speaker 1: once loved now it's neglected. Yeah, like with the newspaper
Speaker 1: coming out of their eye and stuff like that. Like yeah,
Speaker 1: just like great old bad text nrmon, great old bad
Speaker 1: text Nrman, but not Harry Potter stuff. Sorry. I just
Speaker 1: so John, if you're sumbing through that calendar next year
Speaker 1: and you find your own stuff, now, you're gonna know
Speaker 1: you're like, that's like, just silence the conversation. Pep, we'll
Speaker 1: get a cease and desist. Wait, hold on, I really
Speaker 1: anyone who just really isn't a shitty mood right now,
Speaker 1: or just isn't a great mood but like wants to laugh,
Speaker 1: just google Old Bad Taxidermy and some real crazy ship
Speaker 1: will pop up and you will not be able to
Speaker 1: stop cracking up. No, I think it's gonna be good.
Speaker 1: I think, well, we like really scour it. We're gonna
Speaker 1: find some great months now. Funked up Old Taxidermy was seasonal,
Speaker 1: so it feels wintertime. There's an old deer stay in
Speaker 1: during the wintertime. Fils spring, there was up old deer
Speaker 1: staying in the spring. This is gonna not be a
Speaker 1: seasonal Maybe we can find a seasonal element. Nah, No,
Speaker 1: probably not. We need a good representation of different species. Though,
Speaker 1: why did you become a tax nerm me John tax
Speaker 1: der missed. My family always had tax drm me growing
Speaker 1: up and got it done, had it done. Um. And
Speaker 1: then one day I finally was old enough to go
Speaker 1: pick up a deer head with my dad and I
Speaker 1: was about eight years old and I went over to
Speaker 1: one of the local shops my dad pick it up,
Speaker 1: and I was just blown away. It was just amazing
Speaker 1: that just was absolutely enamored by the whole thing. And
Speaker 1: just the smell, yeah, everything, you know, just like like
Speaker 1: a little bit of rot, a little bit some bondo
Speaker 1: fumes in there. Yeah. Walking out the door, I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be a tax numerus some My dad was like,
Speaker 1: oh cool, you know whatever. So on and so forth
Speaker 1: it went. And first job I got was a tax
Speaker 1: for me in the shop, and really yeah, as soon
Speaker 1: as I got a driver's license I was fifteen, I
Speaker 1: just kept pestering the guy until he finally gave me
Speaker 1: a job. What was the job he gave you, shot bitch,
Speaker 1: basically sweeping the floor, cleaning the blood up. And finally
Speaker 1: I worked up the skin and and prepping hides and
Speaker 1: prepping forms and stuff. What when you were skinning, you
Speaker 1: were just skinning like cape and deer. He started on
Speaker 1: the bad stuff. First. We did a lot of lions
Speaker 1: back then, like they were really avid lion hunting back
Speaker 1: up in the b At that time. It wasn't a
Speaker 1: special drawing, so anybody that wanted to shoot one get
Speaker 1: attacked just over the counter. So it wasn't uncommon to
Speaker 1: skin thirty forty mountain lions in season. Yeah, so lots
Speaker 1: of lion skin in, um, lots of bears for springtime
Speaker 1: up there, um, and then a lots of deer guys
Speaker 1: bringing the whole line. It's Yeah, most of the time
Speaker 1: when I get a line brought it in, it is
Speaker 1: the whole line. Wow. I'm always just hoping that they
Speaker 1: didn't ride around with it on the dog box for
Speaker 1: two days to show everybody what it was, and then
Speaker 1: it shows up and it's bloated. How do you how
Speaker 1: do you skin a lot of road dirt? Right? How
Speaker 1: do you skin a lion if you're if you're gonna
Speaker 1: do a full body on it un down the back
Speaker 1: any so, yes, you can, depending on the pose you want,
Speaker 1: but ultimately on a life size anything you're skinning patterns
Speaker 1: not as critical as say a rug, because you're just
Speaker 1: sowing the two pieces back together. So like that cemetery
Speaker 1: you're looking for on a rug, where you want to
Speaker 1: be your splits, your legs aren't wonky, and you have
Speaker 1: equal amounts of belly on each side. Um that's critical
Speaker 1: for a rug size mounts. If if the artists prefers
Speaker 1: the dorsal cut, um, like if a cat was standing
Speaker 1: like that bear you know, or the show side is
Speaker 1: the belly. Um A dorsal cuts okay, um, But I
Speaker 1: don't really do dorsal cuts on anything anymore. You still
Speaker 1: have to cut everybody. I think at some point thinks
Speaker 1: you just make an incision down the back and then
Speaker 1: slatted on the form. But the form is completely rigid,
Speaker 1: so if it's like this, you still have to cut
Speaker 1: every leg and cut completely down the back of it
Speaker 1: and sew it all up. So I just I just
Speaker 1: prefer a belly incision. And most of the time the
Speaker 1: pose isn't just the belly. Would you prefer like if
Speaker 1: you blue Sky World it, uh? Would you prefer people
Speaker 1: show up with whole animals? If we're doing a life
Speaker 1: size I don't charge any extra to skin it out
Speaker 1: at the shop because it saves you a little. Uh
Speaker 1: when when me and Clay brought you my bear which
Speaker 1: turned out beautifully, were you happy or not happy with
Speaker 1: our skin and job? Oh? That was great, that was great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was just so you had a guy you worked
Speaker 1: for it got in a little trouble. Yeah, the first
Speaker 1: guy that I worked for. Did he get in like
Speaker 1: taxidermist type trouble, I know, but he had before he
Speaker 1: got in taxidermist type trouble. He got into like selling
Speaker 1: fully automatic weapons to the A T, F and FBI
Speaker 1: that he ended up had a client of his and
Speaker 1: did a middleman make a couple of thousand bucks quick,
Speaker 1: and the agent showed up undercover and bottom. And then
Speaker 1: when we were kids, it was a widely held belief
Speaker 1: that any semi automatic, including our Marlin semials and he
Speaker 1: saw semi automatic, was a few file strokes away from
Speaker 1: being full from being fully automatic. There was like some
Speaker 1: secret thing that if you just knew what needed to
Speaker 1: be filed, that was all that separated you from having
Speaker 1: a fully automatic two Marlin tube bad. Yeah, he filed
Speaker 1: the pin on it and like, no, this is fully automatic.
Speaker 1: It's just like but just no one every would show
Speaker 1: us what exactly one needed to file? Uh do you
Speaker 1: agree that? I don't. You know, We're not gonna talk
Speaker 1: all too much on this, but like in your opinion,
Speaker 1: why do people have sort of oh tax nervous I
Speaker 1: mean I do, even having any involvement or affiliation with
Speaker 1: other taxiderms, I'm really standoffish until I know him, because
Speaker 1: I'm just like a lot of a lot of people
Speaker 1: just do stupid shit. I mean, like them taking your
Speaker 1: money and not doing your work, or just slapping poor
Speaker 1: workout or you know, I lost it, you know, I
Speaker 1: mean just I don't know how that many in our
Speaker 1: industry are like that. It's just mind boggling. I think
Speaker 1: it's it's got to be transition because I think at
Speaker 1: a time it was like so many people kind of
Speaker 1: working out of their basement stuff. Right now you sort
Speaker 1: of seems like I don't really know, but it seems
Speaker 1: now you have like big taxidermy studio, Like you guys
Speaker 1: use like studio Like it's like a business when you go,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, it's like a full on
Speaker 1: business with like paperwork and stuff. And I've heard you
Speaker 1: used the word artist a few times too. At one
Speaker 1: point does a taxider must become an artist? Honestly, that
Speaker 1: probably is individually based. I would say, Um, early on,
Speaker 1: I definitely wasn't an artist. I was just mechanically trying
Speaker 1: to put stuff together. Um. But like the more you learn,
Speaker 1: the more you learn, right, and it starts opening up
Speaker 1: like a little door or of creativity where you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll try that this time. And so I think
Speaker 1: it's a progression. At least it was a progression for me.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know a couple of guys are just
Speaker 1: like they were just natural. I was not you. Weren't
Speaker 1: you here to work for it? Ground still grinding. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I started to really appreciate John when we're talking. I
Speaker 1: can't ember how it came up. Oh Yanni. Yeah, He's like, man,
Speaker 1: if I ever get a bear mounted, I'm gonna get
Speaker 1: it mounted where it's not growling, because he's like every
Speaker 1: bear I look at, he's never growling, right, But then
Speaker 1: every bear amount they're growling, and so were I was
Speaker 1: pointing out John, like why are they always growling? And
Speaker 1: it's just easier to make them growling. It is there's
Speaker 1: a lot more product materials available to make that look
Speaker 1: and I said, can we do one where he just
Speaker 1: looks like a normal bear walking through the woods, which
Speaker 1: is his mouth is closed. Yes, And you're saying when
Speaker 1: you go into your supply catalog, that's not in there.
Speaker 1: There's only just a handful of clothes mouth and there.
Speaker 1: I would never use one for any of my work.
Speaker 1: I know that. So we just make our own look amazing.
Speaker 1: And that's how we like when you were saying about
Speaker 1: the guy walking with the bear, That's why I wouldn't
Speaker 1: take his bear, because I'm really particular in what I'm
Speaker 1: using to get that look, trying to try to be repeatable,
Speaker 1: so it's not like a snowflake like, oh my bear
Speaker 1: look great, and you're like, how my bear sucked. Trying
Speaker 1: to keep that repeatable performance out there. Uh, you know
Speaker 1: they want to ask you. You got into helicopter logging
Speaker 1: for a while. Yeah. That was kind of the path
Speaker 1: where the fork was like go to prison or go
Speaker 1: somewhere else. So I went helicopter logging when he left
Speaker 1: make our fortune and that was up. That was that
Speaker 1: was up when that was still some some timber business
Speaker 1: happening up. Could yeah you're on a Libby Montana, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's dried up right. Oh yeah, completely, it is
Speaker 1: the loggers. You're in like a former logging community. Yeah, yep,
Speaker 1: very well. That was the whole basis of the community.
Speaker 1: Originally was basically logging and then a little bit of mining,
Speaker 1: but logging was the staple. And you guys are doing
Speaker 1: like you're doing, like select cut helicopter stuff. And for
Speaker 1: the helicopter mostly we traveled, so we'd log in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Montana,
Speaker 1: anywhere where the train warranted using an aircraft. What was
Speaker 1: your role in that? That was a hooker, so a choker,
Speaker 1: ceter hooker. I was like John didn't make much money.
Speaker 1: That's why to get back into taxi here. I knew
Speaker 1: those logs and towns were off. So what's the hooker do.
Speaker 1: You're the external load person, So when the helicopter fly over,
Speaker 1: they lower a lion down to you and you would
Speaker 1: select a weight of logs, so you'd look at him
Speaker 1: and guess about how much that would weigh, and then
Speaker 1: put those together on chokers and attach it to the
Speaker 1: load beam on the hook and then the helicopter flat off.
Speaker 1: That was near our fish shack. They were doing a
Speaker 1: helicopter logging for a couple of summers, and I pictured
Speaker 1: it being that. I mean these are this is like
Speaker 1: old growth cedar, western red cedar, hemlock. I mean, these
Speaker 1: trees are no joke. They were probably running big aircraft
Speaker 1: up there, weren't they twin like big twin. But I
Speaker 1: thought they'd like lift the tree out right. I couldn't
Speaker 1: believe in it'd come up out of those trees with
Speaker 1: a bundle. Yeah, of trees you can't put your arm
Speaker 1: brown right, and then lay them onto a barge when
Speaker 1: they when they picked them up, those things never touched
Speaker 1: land again. Man, it was amazing lay them on a barge.
Speaker 1: The infrastructure they would build for logging, like one area
Speaker 1: around your shack roads and like not a town, but
Speaker 1: like a big gass camp for all the people to
Speaker 1: stay at. That's when they're that's when they're doing like
Speaker 1: the logging, like where they actually do a beach landing.
Speaker 1: But the helicopter stuff is very like discreet relatively. But
Speaker 1: I tell you what, man, it's hard to go through
Speaker 1: the woods. When they get done. Yes, yeah, it looks like,
Speaker 1: oh I just greased through there real quick. All the
Speaker 1: tops and slash are all just piled everywhere. Oh god
Speaker 1: man there, Oh my goodness. Yeah, I mean it is.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's twice as hard because your mental
Speaker 1: picture of like helicopter log game is they just plucked
Speaker 1: a few trees out of the ground and it should
Speaker 1: be easier because yeah, yeah, uh, while you're doing that,
Speaker 1: you always want to get back into Yeah. I would
Speaker 1: still you know, fart around a little bit on my own,
Speaker 1: um remedial tanning projects. And what's that mean, just like
Speaker 1: trying to do hometans like tan muskrat or something beaver
Speaker 1: hide or coyote hide or something like that. But that's
Speaker 1: not even part of text room anymore, right, Like you
Speaker 1: don't do any tanning. I don't do any tanning in
Speaker 1: the house unless it's like emergent and we have to
Speaker 1: get something small tan like a deer cape or something.
Speaker 1: Oh so you can do it, We can do it, yeah,
Speaker 1: I just we just don't have time anymore. I didn't
Speaker 1: realize you could. So there's no like as if you
Speaker 1: have a taxidermy studio that's doing like a ton of business.
Speaker 1: Is there a weight Like I don't want to like
Speaker 1: dig too deep. I don't want to ask you like
Speaker 1: a question like how much land you have and how
Speaker 1: many cattle run on it? But how many thinks like
Speaker 1: like just give sort of like a ballpark of how
Speaker 1: many pieces flow through your hands annually. Well, we just
Speaker 1: got a confirmation yesterday that our hundred ninth black barrel
Speaker 1: becoming in since April of last year. Just coming back
Speaker 1: to you, just getting brought through the studio. So yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll have a hundred nine under a year's time. Just
Speaker 1: your studio will do a hundred nine black bears. And
Speaker 1: that's just one species. Yep, that's just bears. Percent get
Speaker 1: lost or sold for profit. Yeah, that's what you're not
Speaker 1: selling our stuff, right, I'm like, I didn't know. Did
Speaker 1: you see there's no money in that? You know how
Speaker 1: there was like way more hunting and fishing activity due
Speaker 1: to COVID. Did you get a lot more? Did your
Speaker 1: just see like an uptick in business requests or anything?
Speaker 1: Are you just like for uh, one of the big
Speaker 1: things that COVID killed for us was as they shut
Speaker 1: down Spring Bear for non residence. And we have tons
Speaker 1: of non residents that come up there up in your area.
Speaker 1: We have tons. I mean, we've got guys that have
Speaker 1: been coming up from Utah's we got we got a
Speaker 1: large following in Utah that come up to Libby and
Speaker 1: bears Heart special drawing versus over the counter. And uh
Speaker 1: so one guy they've been coming up. They missed one
Speaker 1: year since Mountain Saint Helen's erupted. They were there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the only year they had missed since the year
Speaker 1: before erupted to that and or twenty and so that
Speaker 1: was there. That was a huge dip for US. Canada
Speaker 1: was closed down, so all the outfit, well, like you
Speaker 1: weren't getting local guys for you bringing bears. They killed
Speaker 1: in Canada. We've we've saturated the bear rug market for
Speaker 1: the local guys. You know, they only want so many
Speaker 1: of them, you know, so a lot of times most
Speaker 1: of the works from out of town. So do you
Speaker 1: are you? Do you imagine yourself now? Is like a
Speaker 1: bear specialist? Like, what's your specialty? I know your bears
Speaker 1: are called. I really like doing bears. Um that has
Speaker 1: always been whether it was a rugg or a life
Speaker 1: size or anything in between. I always really enjoyed working
Speaker 1: on bears, but I enjoyed doing every thing squashy pillows
Speaker 1: you do pillows? Oh that rug. Yeah, that's what Yanni's
Speaker 1: bringing a big bobcat. Explain that, explain that piece the pillow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's not the right word for it though, Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: there's gotta be a better term for it. We Uh
Speaker 1: we had a guy come in and talk Dennis and
Speaker 1: I into doing a soft mounted coyote and we were like,
Speaker 1: no way. Anatomically, you just don't have the form. You
Speaker 1: can't make everything exact. So he finally wanted into a
Speaker 1: Teddy Bear like, just so it's pliable, soft head, like
Speaker 1: a full body mount, but soft. Yeah, so so I'll
Speaker 1: be like a Teddy Bear kind of kind of Okay,
Speaker 1: So we ended up doing it for this guy and
Speaker 1: then he never showed up and we were like, oh man,
Speaker 1: well he never came back to it, never came back
Speaker 1: to get us. Now he got how much? How much
Speaker 1: you charge him? Honestly, I don't even know. Back then
Speaker 1: Dennis would have been in charge of what's industry standard
Speaker 1: for deposit Uh, well, it depends this case to case sometimes,
Speaker 1: just like for us right now, we're usually do a third.
Speaker 1: That's because vanish on you, though not so much anymore.
Speaker 1: Back in the day, we had more people like Americans
Speaker 1: are getting better. More people are committed to getting it,
Speaker 1: especially if they do put a deposit on it. That helped,
Speaker 1: so a third. I want to get back to this
Speaker 1: teddy bear thing about it, but like, but the deposit thing.
Speaker 1: Now that I know that it's such a thing that
Speaker 1: people will abandon you, um, I guess if you said
Speaker 1: it's full price, then you might send business to competitors.
Speaker 1: A third will get them common back maybe and then usually, uh,
Speaker 1: what we started implementing is you put a third down.
Speaker 1: Once we receive your high back from the tannery, and
Speaker 1: we're getting ready to start your your product, than you
Speaker 1: time to either paying full or put at least another
Speaker 1: third down. Now you're gonna start putting manual time into it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good system. It helps. And then at least
Speaker 1: the guy that calls you up and he's like, hey,
Speaker 1: I really want to get that done. I want to
Speaker 1: get that done, and how fast can you do it?
Speaker 1: And you're like, okay, I'll do it right away, and
Speaker 1: he's like, you know it's Christmas time, man. Yeah, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not like okay, so now we have to make
Speaker 1: sure they're paying along in the way with you. Okay,
Speaker 1: So back to the coyote teddy bear. I imagine it's
Speaker 1: a soft tan and then you stitch it up like
Speaker 1: a balloon and then uh, you pick an orifice and
Speaker 1: shooting doctor get one of those things that blows in insulations.
Speaker 1: Exactly what I'm thinking. We never thought of that one
Speaker 1: that like to out the door. So we ended up
Speaker 1: with this, and I mean it could end up in
Speaker 1: the fun up old taxi to me calendar. I'm sure
Speaker 1: I don't have any pictures of it. I don't keep
Speaker 1: that sht try to he's trying to stay out of
Speaker 1: the town. There. We had a car show coming to Libby.
Speaker 1: It was a hot August nice is what it was called,
Speaker 1: and so there were some people coming through town. I'm
Speaker 1: very interested, but I'm trying to understand how did you
Speaker 1: get from the So this is how the pillow. Oh,
Speaker 1: the guy vanished. The guy vanished, But then you have
Speaker 1: the things sitting there. So we got sitting in the
Speaker 1: shop and now now I'm not into the car show.
Speaker 1: The car show people stopped by and this guy is like, wow,
Speaker 1: I love that thing, and we're like really, He's like,
Speaker 1: can I borrow it and take it down to the
Speaker 1: car shows. I don't want to put it in my car.
Speaker 1: We're like, yeah, go ahead, you know whatever. So he
Speaker 1: took it down there and then we had about a
Speaker 1: half a dozen people come back from the car show
Speaker 1: and they're like, we want once for our hot I
Speaker 1: saw the most amazing kind and it was sleeping on
Speaker 1: the front seat of a Chevy, you know, in a
Speaker 1: way that was kind of laying down, curled up like
Speaker 1: a dog would be on a dog bed. Yep, I
Speaker 1: found any pictures of this. I found the video that
Speaker 1: A knew posting about it. But this, this was kayo one.
Speaker 1: This is suddenly amazing. It's a big difference. Suddenly you
Speaker 1: had a tax. This is unbelievable. This is not the one.
Speaker 1: No God, no, no, no, that's what that is amazing
Speaker 1: right now. But wait, let him hope. Those Ronella kids
Speaker 1: aren't listening. They're going to ruin their Christmas. That's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: And he pioneered back so we and I know other
Speaker 1: people do it now, um, but that was just something
Speaker 1: we came up at the time. There might have been
Speaker 1: other people doing the same thing somewhere else, but as
Speaker 1: far as we know, we just totally made that ship up.
Speaker 1: Go to at Steven Ronnella on Instagram and see what
Speaker 1: we're talking about. Okay, hot rods, hot rights. So we
Speaker 1: end up selling about a half a dozen more of
Speaker 1: us to hot riders, to hot rodders for car shows. Well,
Speaker 1: one of the one of the car show people owned
Speaker 1: storefront from the parody shops, and they owned storefront engine
Speaker 1: most of the major airports around the country. What does
Speaker 1: that mean parody shops. It was just the name of
Speaker 1: a business. You know, when you like their gift shops
Speaker 1: and the airport, you probably but the word is like parody,
Speaker 1: like like mocking parodies. And so they called up and
Speaker 1: asked we'd ship one to Spokane, but it didn't spoke
Speaker 1: Ane International, so I'm not sure someone there, and then
Speaker 1: that it was sold just like instantly. So they ended
Speaker 1: up ordering a few of them, and they sent me,
Speaker 1: sent them to Texas, and we sent them to New York,
Speaker 1: and we sent him to Arizona and for years and
Speaker 1: they went. They just went like crazy, and then started
Speaker 1: getting a little bit of a negative feedback, like I
Speaker 1: can't believe you guys have these animals on displaying the
Speaker 1: stores and stuff. So they finally just pulled back about
Speaker 1: about eight nine years ago. That's what I was going
Speaker 1: to guess. It'd be like that company that was making
Speaker 1: the park Is with the Coyote rofan, they never had
Speaker 1: a ship fit. Texas was the last holdout. They finally
Speaker 1: they finally were like, yeah, they're gonna make us. Corporate
Speaker 1: was like, no, you guys have to pull the pan.
Speaker 1: So but Texas loved him. I'm surprised you haven't picked up.
Speaker 1: Like I'm surprised someone hasn't assumed all that hasn't gotten
Speaker 1: back into it. Well after Clay posted that video that
Speaker 1: was I think we got two million views on that
Speaker 1: thing on TikTok in like a week. It was getting
Speaker 1: more requests. We had eight hundred emails. Yeah, yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It was unbelievable. So actually, uh, I got a silver
Speaker 1: Fox shipped in this week. I got two great Fox
Speaker 1: that we'll be leaving Monday morning from California, and I
Speaker 1: got a Kyote coming in from I think it was Ohio.
Speaker 1: So what we're just in case you don't go, no,
Speaker 1: just go look at the Instagram. But it's a I
Speaker 1: mean it looks like a damn Kyle landing there, curled
Speaker 1: up sleeping. They did not look like it originally? Can
Speaker 1: you guys pass like that? I don't think so. I
Speaker 1: don't know how I would patent that. You probably could
Speaker 1: with like the materials that you use on the inside
Speaker 1: secret fill vacuum though the attachment. The heads have specific
Speaker 1: at that right, the heads for our pillows, whether we're
Speaker 1: doing the fox or the coyote of the wolf pillows
Speaker 1: are my own sculptings. So doing that that nobody else
Speaker 1: has the same look on theirs got trade secrets, if
Speaker 1: not necessarily better looking than somebody else's, but our our
Speaker 1: our look. How are those things going to hold up
Speaker 1: when your seven year old kids starts carrying around like
Speaker 1: they're quite durable? Um, that's a we get a really
Speaker 1: good tan on. It's a garment tan. It's like a
Speaker 1: fur coat. You wouldn't want to get it wet. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, dog and shreds no matter of moments. So
Speaker 1: it's fairly fragile. But my dog will be scared of
Speaker 1: that for five years before she realized, she's like, you
Speaker 1: know what, that thing never does ship ever? I have
Speaker 1: beaver would be cool? Have you done a soft little beaver? Well? There,
Speaker 1: we did a lot of different things. Now it's pretty
Speaker 1: much just canine family. It's hard to do other stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, the like a beaver curled up. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't picture of curling up like that with a big
Speaker 1: fuzzy table over their nose. Yeah. And I did a
Speaker 1: badger and it looked you know Canada. I'm like, I
Speaker 1: did a John just for your listeners at home. John
Speaker 1: just made uncomfortable stance. He looks uncomfortable. I pictured like
Speaker 1: a badger. Uh in like August laying along the road.
Speaker 1: They got hit. It's like, but its eyes were all
Speaker 1: open and clean, but it looked a lot like that. Hey,
Speaker 1: what do you mess her? All? Fish? I used to
Speaker 1: do fish? Now I I outsourced my fish to another
Speaker 1: tax fromers that I know. Um, I feel like it's
Speaker 1: like like fish tax to me, in my view, has
Speaker 1: ceased to be a thing. There's a lot of skin mounts.
Speaker 1: There's no part of the fish. If you like, I
Speaker 1: can still get a skin mountain down through my my
Speaker 1: friend Bill. Um, he stilled as skin mounts. You still
Speaker 1: can do it for real? Yep. Can I tell you
Speaker 1: funny story about a buddy mine buddy mind his tax dermis.
Speaker 1: He had a guy bring him. He's in he's over
Speaker 1: in Miles City. He's not in the business anymore, but
Speaker 1: he was. Uh. He had a guy snaggle paddlefish out
Speaker 1: on the Yellowstone and wraps in a wet sleep bag okay,
Speaker 1: and brings it to him. He didn't want to lose
Speaker 1: any weight, so it's wraps and a wet sleep bag,
Speaker 1: brings it to him, wanting to get it mounted. He
Speaker 1: takes a bunch of pictures, a bunch of measurements, and
Speaker 1: takes it down and lets it go in the river.
Speaker 1: That paddlefish swam away. Honestly, on a fish like that,
Speaker 1: I would definitely do a reproduction to difficult work on
Speaker 1: something that size and keep it stable, and yeah, I
Speaker 1: know I would definitely. I feel like that's why I
Speaker 1: say like it ceased to be a thing. Is I
Speaker 1: don't really get it. There's still you catch a bass.
Speaker 1: I can see like you're commemorating it by getting a replica.
Speaker 1: But if a client called you, Let's say a client
Speaker 1: called you and said, hey, man, um, I want a
Speaker 1: tampon large mouth mhmm, yeah, you'd just be like, okay, here,
Speaker 1: We've done that a lot. So it's it's like there's
Speaker 1: no is there what is it is? It is basically
Speaker 1: a painting. Um. We did a seeing a guy for
Speaker 1: it was out of Hamilton's he wanted to have it
Speaker 1: was a brick trout, brown trout, rainbow cutthroat, and a
Speaker 1: bull trout. No mountain whitefish, no mountain whitefish that he
Speaker 1: wanted those trout all on artificial like a button the
Speaker 1: river bottom. Is there a reason like that's different? Well,
Speaker 1: is there like an actual reason where a skin mount
Speaker 1: would look better than one of those reproductions? No? No, no,
Speaker 1: they're the casting technology. The the injection molding for casting
Speaker 1: has come a long way, so the scale, detail and
Speaker 1: everything's just spot on. And when you're painting those things
Speaker 1: from a picture, you're like paying attention to little details
Speaker 1: and do you paint them? I used to paint fish. Yeah,
Speaker 1: who doesn't know one of my he's a colleague on Bill.
Speaker 1: He he was the guy that kind of pioneered the
Speaker 1: cast at head for fish. So like when you're when
Speaker 1: they're first phasing towards more of the reproduction, the head
Speaker 1: on a lot of fish taxs dur Me is like
Speaker 1: you look at old fish, it starts to get where
Speaker 1: the paint you see, like the bleed in the paint
Speaker 1: where the oils are popping the finishes coming off. You
Speaker 1: can't you can't really clean parts of the guilt plates
Speaker 1: out getting there. You just can't clean all the organic
Speaker 1: material out of the head. So over time those oils
Speaker 1: can leach back through and pop the paint off. Oh,
Speaker 1: when you say clean, you don't mean dust it off
Speaker 1: from the original to get it prepared like the actual tissue.
Speaker 1: And so he started doing he'd just take your fish
Speaker 1: and cast its own head. Well, he had done so
Speaker 1: many of them he started having tons of mold. So yeah,
Speaker 1: he was He was pretty much the guy that started
Speaker 1: the whole cast at head m and that that was
Speaker 1: that was a huge step in itself. Yeah, you know this,
Speaker 1: See this opens up weird, Like there's nothing I want
Speaker 1: to say. It's not like an ethical thing. It's just
Speaker 1: like a sort of like what is the thing and
Speaker 1: what is not the thing? But talk about casting of
Speaker 1: horns and nailers. There's no way to prevent uh, just
Speaker 1: making up a fish. Whereas if you bring right, yes,
Speaker 1: not not a a mish, which would like that, but
Speaker 1: that'd be a mouse. But right, it's like I'm just
Speaker 1: providing you with the species a picture and here are
Speaker 1: my measurements, right, or a lot of times so you
Speaker 1: get it. Like I think it was about like twelve
Speaker 1: to fifteen pounds. Okay. Has anyone come in and introduced
Speaker 1: the idea of there being a um, I don't know,
Speaker 1: man like a like a certification of some sort. Now
Speaker 1: that there's no part of a fish in a fish
Speaker 1: that there is like a yes, this fish was a
Speaker 1: thing like legitimizes fishing tails, right, so like fish tax
Speaker 1: I just now I look at it, like when I
Speaker 1: look at the stuffed white tail, right, first thing in
Speaker 1: my mind is I gotta know more, Like I don't know, right,
Speaker 1: So you just go by big dead white by big
Speaker 1: white tails and little pastures and shoot them. You know,
Speaker 1: you see a big gass moves You're like, that's cool
Speaker 1: because only one place that which is out in the woods,
Speaker 1: you know. And when I see a fish, I'm like,
Speaker 1: I have no idea, dude, Yeah there's And it's like
Speaker 1: I said, it totally legitimizes all fishing tails. Whatever you want.
Speaker 1: Is there a thing in taxidermy like making synthetic antlers?
Speaker 1: Like just um like maybe making a mold of and
Speaker 1: said a mule deer antlers. Yeah, make that's the one
Speaker 1: I want the same. Yeah. Um. Usually like it only
Speaker 1: happens on like that, right, like it's some state record
Speaker 1: or world record or just some repre deficit. And then
Speaker 1: then there's well for the deer tour, we only use
Speaker 1: real deer, like that's they're all what the tour, the
Speaker 1: meal deer tour that travels aroun the country. Eastman's used
Speaker 1: to put it on a lot. That's all real dear.
Speaker 1: That is all real dear. And if they don't know
Speaker 1: where it came from and who harvested it, doesn't make
Speaker 1: the tour. So they it's like, yeah, it's more of
Speaker 1: a historical you know, taking out of old collections or
Speaker 1: people find them. You know, Granddad had it thrown in
Speaker 1: the barn and they take it off and I still
Speaker 1: have a tag on it and a little when it
Speaker 1: was harvested, who harvested where it came from? And then
Speaker 1: we put brand new mounts underneath them and take them
Speaker 1: on tour around the country. M hm. And you're involved
Speaker 1: in that. I do all the deer for that tour.
Speaker 1: Dan Woodbridge is the owner of it, and then I'm
Speaker 1: the tax fromis that does all the mountains that travel around.
Speaker 1: You've done all the mounts. Yeah, what's the biggest mule
Speaker 1: do you ever mounted around? I can't even imagine, man.
Speaker 1: And at that point everything's custom right because like there's
Speaker 1: not a lot of mule you're walking around, so you're
Speaker 1: building your own forms and stuff. We can still get
Speaker 1: forms that are close with a minor alteration. Um so
Speaker 1: in reality, yeah, that that form does not match up
Speaker 1: to what that deer was originally. But you're not going
Speaker 1: to find a cape that was of that size to
Speaker 1: worry about getting on that forum anyway. So you just
Speaker 1: start with the absolute biggest primused mulder cape you can.
Speaker 1: We get a lot of amount of Canada and then
Speaker 1: just go from there. What's wrong with the cave that
Speaker 1: was on it? Most of them are deteriorated or just antlers.
Speaker 1: Like in the tour I got you, you're you're recreating,
Speaker 1: not recreating. You're putting new caves on old antlers. Yet
Speaker 1: what's the And I was I was gonna ask you,
Speaker 1: what's the biggest most common mistake people make when they're
Speaker 1: bringing stuff to the taxi? Germist? But just like, what
Speaker 1: are the mistakes people make when they're bringing stuff, and
Speaker 1: they're like, I want to get this mounted. Like uh
Speaker 1: like to say like deer rise, yeah, any whatever. I
Speaker 1: don't know, that's common one. Most people that hundle get
Speaker 1: a deer and probably one amount of at some point.
Speaker 1: I would say common mistakes would be dragging it, like
Speaker 1: dragging it around and wear all the hair off on
Speaker 1: one side of it, um cutting its throat after you
Speaker 1: shoot it and then want us to amount it, and
Speaker 1: it's hard to get it right. Again. It's very difficult
Speaker 1: to hide to cut throat because you kept through all
Speaker 1: the hair. I mean, if you poked in and went
Speaker 1: under and cut out, it wouldn't be as bad. But
Speaker 1: when he just they lay the knife across it and
Speaker 1: cut all the hair off and you have to jump
Speaker 1: up to get past that. So it creates a pinch point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to let me, let me. I want to
Speaker 1: dwell on that for a second. Just explain me talk
Speaker 1: about the people. Is that if you take a like
Speaker 1: let's say you want to cut into a deer. Um,
Speaker 1: if you cut from the leather up right, yep, the
Speaker 1: knife passes through all the hair parts out of the way.
Speaker 1: But sometimes take a knife and try to make an
Speaker 1: incision in a deer coming down through it, hair everywhere
Speaker 1: a little Yeah, you cut through all the hair and
Speaker 1: create like shaving stuffing. Yeah, it's interesting to me that
Speaker 1: the throat cut is still around. That was like something
Speaker 1: that was prominent youth did. Oh it was a lot
Speaker 1: of guys were just like they yeah that you bleed it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: never mind, you just like put a thirty calber bull
Speaker 1: through its lungungs, right, there's like a cord of blood
Speaker 1: laying in their loose. It's just you then go bleed
Speaker 1: it to Yeah, well finishing it off, that's another one.
Speaker 1: Bring it in, shoot it through the face after it's
Speaker 1: been to dispatch it, and then want us to mount it.
Speaker 1: And it looks like that, you know, he's just going
Speaker 1: into a bar and it's missing half of his Can
Speaker 1: I open us up? Sorry? Whose bears that? It was
Speaker 1: a guy that used to work for me. Yeah, shot
Speaker 1: it and I was just, I don't know, morbidly curious
Speaker 1: on what the skull looked like, so I had it cleaned. Jeez,
Speaker 1: inter resting. That's cool though, right, So what are we
Speaker 1: looking at? We got a black beard. It's missing the
Speaker 1: back of his head. A black beard skull. They got
Speaker 1: shot ultramega. Was he trying to hit it there peeking
Speaker 1: up over a log? Oh I see, Oh yeah, that
Speaker 1: brain is he didn't go far short short blood trail.
Speaker 1: One of the kind of mistakes cutting through it, cutting throat,
Speaker 1: cutting a cape too short, old older style like in
Speaker 1: the like. I'm sure a lot of the ones that
Speaker 1: you guys get seen sent in for the old text.
Speaker 1: For me, it's a neck mount, not a shoulder mount,
Speaker 1: and so people end up cutting it really high up
Speaker 1: on the shoulder, like no brisket left on it, and
Speaker 1: so then you just don't have enough cape to ask
Speaker 1: you want them to, like if they're going to keepe
Speaker 1: it like way back on the start, start basically at
Speaker 1: the sternum and go all the way around. Is it
Speaker 1: right that it's hard to get when someone messes up
Speaker 1: the arm pits. It's hard to get it back right again.
Speaker 1: If it's there, No, if they cut up and then
Speaker 1: that piece is missing, then yes. But if they just
Speaker 1: make an incorrect cut but the hide is there, a
Speaker 1: lot of times will end up on the side and
Speaker 1: then you pull it back in and sew the leg
Speaker 1: back together and split the leg down the side. Hey, Steve,
Speaker 1: you know what we should do. We should come up
Speaker 1: with new bandanas that show how you should properly skin
Speaker 1: and cape certain critters if you want to take them
Speaker 1: to who I think you're putting the artist category. They
Speaker 1: do a lot of Africa stuff and for a lot
Speaker 1: of people who want like full He's like, I spend
Speaker 1: a lot of my time reconstructing penis sheaths, genitals like
Speaker 1: on full bodies, because folks, are you used to just
Speaker 1: cutting them out? M hmm, And especially on African stuff
Speaker 1: where it's very short hair. I mean it looks like
Speaker 1: kindall you'd be something that you would notice, you know,
Speaker 1: it would be very obvious. So yeah, trying to reconstruct
Speaker 1: all that, you're like something I can't quite figure out
Speaker 1: what it is, but something's missing. What Why does have
Speaker 1: you done much of Africa stuff? Why does uh? Like
Speaker 1: why do elephants and hippos always look so phony? They
Speaker 1: look like theybe like a poxyed? A lot of them
Speaker 1: are phony. So it's like whole fishing rightly? What do
Speaker 1: you got there? This will be this is a supply catalog.
Speaker 1: Let me see if I can find African in here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like if you looking at a text every collection
Speaker 1: in some big game room and you see that and
Speaker 1: you're like, yea, look, look looks like like you got
Speaker 1: it from a plastic injection molding place. Yeah, the rhinos,
Speaker 1: the hippos, elephants, a lot of them are. Really they're
Speaker 1: on the same. I don't know what's in here somewhere
Speaker 1: like a tannery. I wouldn't imagine would have a hard
Speaker 1: time doing that though, Like where's your vat to treat?
Speaker 1: There's elephant. There's a there's a lot of tanneries that
Speaker 1: will do it. You can see full life size reproduction elephant.
Speaker 1: Oh Jesus, yeah, there you are. You just buy the
Speaker 1: whole damn elephant and then you just screw those tusks
Speaker 1: in there and put their tusks in it. You gotta
Speaker 1: have a special house for that thing. Parkman doesn't say
Speaker 1: how much it costs. Oh there it is. Have you
Speaker 1: ever done an elephant? Just elephant foot footstools? Guess what
Speaker 1: you pay if you want an elephant e l P
Speaker 1: five zero zero slash five before shipping that sucker is
Speaker 1: ten grand. Yeah, that's a good guess. Ten thousand two
Speaker 1: bucks and YouTube can have gotten an elephant. And is
Speaker 1: that what's the material for that body mold. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like a fiberglass. Oh look at this. You just
Speaker 1: buy a whole damn elephant. Mm hmm. The whole fake
Speaker 1: elephant is eight thollars eighty seven thousand dollars and fifty cents.
Speaker 1: And it's just an elephant. And they don't even compu shipping,
Speaker 1: just an elephant, and then you have to put it together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for nine bucks, you could have a not real elephant
Speaker 1: standing in your house. Be a fun thing to do
Speaker 1: with the kids. Like, it's like a giant lego. I
Speaker 1: could cut my entire house and it still won't fit.
Speaker 1: That's incredible. That's why it looks so bad. Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: so that's becoming more more normal normalized now. A lot
Speaker 1: of reproduction stuff you do take that business. You know,
Speaker 1: I have yet to have to order one of those, um,
Speaker 1: but it definitely could come up. I'm thinking pent up front,
Speaker 1: paid in full and we order it. Yeah. So when
Speaker 1: you let's walk through a deer so dear, how dear?
Speaker 1: What happens to a dear? So guy shoots deer? Um,
Speaker 1: Let's say he guts it up to the sternum, drags
Speaker 1: in his truck, brings it over and says, I want
Speaker 1: to get my dear a shoulder mountain. Walk me through.
Speaker 1: What happens? What do you do? We'll have one of
Speaker 1: the guys go out there and skin the cape off
Speaker 1: for him at that point. I'm just to make sure
Speaker 1: that makes our life easier at that point. And you
Speaker 1: prefer it that way, because now you know what you're
Speaker 1: dealing with. Yes, you know, it's the cuts usually, uh,
Speaker 1: one of the other mistakes I see a lot of time,
Speaker 1: and it's it's not really that big of an issue
Speaker 1: on most deer mounts, but guys will start at the
Speaker 1: middle of the back and cut up to the base
Speaker 1: of the skull. That's what I thought you're supposed to do,
Speaker 1: and he kept from the base of the skull down.
Speaker 1: So you go with the hair so that parts out
Speaker 1: of the way, and if you're going up sometimes it'll
Speaker 1: still catch the hair and cut one side off. I had.
Speaker 1: What is So you prefer starting at the forehead and
Speaker 1: go back, start right at the base of the skull
Speaker 1: and go down to where you're circumfortence where you make
Speaker 1: the cut all the way around the body and then
Speaker 1: like and like to beating them out. I mean unless
Speaker 1: you're so that's a good question to ask your artists
Speaker 1: at that time if they prefer a short wine decision
Speaker 1: or if they do the full dorsal cut down the back.
Speaker 1: So you guys really like this artist Norman Clature. Well,
Speaker 1: it's it's more applicable nowadays. What do you what do
Speaker 1: you recommend? What do you recommend for antelope in the field?
Speaker 1: So their hair falls out so easy, it falls out
Speaker 1: really easy, and they blood stain. So that's one of
Speaker 1: the most common things we see with antalope is the
Speaker 1: blood staining around the face. Um, if you get your
Speaker 1: antelope and you know you're going to mount it, take
Speaker 1: some paper towels or toilet paper. You cut a bit
Speaker 1: of your band an up and get it plugged. Take
Speaker 1: your canteen and get the blood off as quick as
Speaker 1: you can because it goes inside the hair. When you
Speaker 1: say plugg what do you mean like fill the nose up,
Speaker 1: fill them out out so he's not out into the hair. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can carry some of that quick clots up with you. Man,
Speaker 1: you can't wash it out once. If it sits there
Speaker 1: long enough, it actually draws into the hair follicle, so
Speaker 1: it's inside the hair showing through the hair. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: there's no no getting it out, and it'll do it
Speaker 1: like you see like on the shoulder mount you see
Speaker 1: the darker spots by the shoulder, that's another spot. You know.
Speaker 1: Just you can't just like peroxide it out because you
Speaker 1: can get so many other colors next to it, and
Speaker 1: it would you'd have to fry the hair's like you said,
Speaker 1: proxy would lighten the outside of the hair. But the
Speaker 1: bloods on the inside showing through because it's like that,
Speaker 1: like this is like kind of particular to antelope and
Speaker 1: like sheep, doll, sheep, that's the one that we see
Speaker 1: a lot. You know, guys just don't know they're coded
Speaker 1: in blood. It's too late. Yeah, yeah, and then it
Speaker 1: has soaks in like that quarter inch you had that
Speaker 1: halo and if you just part the hair bag is
Speaker 1: beautiful white, but it's got that frosted brown on the outside.
Speaker 1: Is it okay? Just like go down to a cold
Speaker 1: as creak and throw it in the air and try
Speaker 1: to just get it all out right away and then
Speaker 1: just get it hung up and get the water off
Speaker 1: of it, get it drying back out again. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so if you got to anlopeate that blood and it
Speaker 1: you can just turn a hose it. Just that's better
Speaker 1: than leaving it. That's better than leaving it bloody. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you just gotta make sure you get it back to dry.
Speaker 1: You know, you wouldn't want to do that then throw
Speaker 1: it in a bag because it's still gonna be leaching
Speaker 1: out more blood from a tissue at that point. So
Speaker 1: you want to rinse the hair off and get it
Speaker 1: hanging to where the water runs off. Finally, yeah, if
Speaker 1: if you leave the skull in it, Yeah, what do
Speaker 1: you what do you what's a good way to plug
Speaker 1: it with? What? Paper? Towels? Toilet paper? About like vasiline?
Speaker 1: You know, like when you have like UFC fights and
Speaker 1: then it gets his his uh you know, something in
Speaker 1: his face split and they pack it with some I
Speaker 1: wouldn't put that on an antelope just because it would
Speaker 1: probably soak that oil up into the hair. Also, you
Speaker 1: mentioned leaving the skull, and I'm assuming you on any
Speaker 1: big game animal if someone doesn't know what they're doing,
Speaker 1: like just leave the head like the head unskinned. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that ideally, Yeah, um, for our benefit, but
Speaker 1: I understand, you know, when you shoot an elk four
Speaker 1: miles from the truck and you're gonna mount it and
Speaker 1: not do a European You're like, should I carry the
Speaker 1: twenty five pound block? Is all out with me or not?
Speaker 1: So it you know that you don't have to make
Speaker 1: that call yourself at some point on what you want
Speaker 1: to do. I carry it actual scalpel. I mean I
Speaker 1: used to, and now I don't walk around anything. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I had like a separate little kit inside my other
Speaker 1: kit for doing faces and ye pause and stuff for
Speaker 1: bears and stuff. But that was it was a good
Speaker 1: way to kind of get some of your your own
Speaker 1: alone time too, because yeah, antelope is my number one
Speaker 1: uh mounted animal. Like there, it's a really pretty mountain.
Speaker 1: They're pretty animals. They're small, so you can fit them
Speaker 1: in a lot of different places and if they fall
Speaker 1: off the wall, they're not gonna kill anybody, right, I
Speaker 1: think there's a lot of pros and the Antelope mountain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why. That's why I asked, because that's like the
Speaker 1: one thing that I want to get. Shoulder mounts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have like us probably over half a dozen floating
Speaker 1: around Massoula. I've given away over there. Yeah, because I
Speaker 1: was like living out of my truck. You have to clients. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: did you did you write your name on the back
Speaker 1: of him? Well, a buddy mine just called me. He's like, hey,
Speaker 1: come over and do some framing for me and get
Speaker 1: these fucking Antiope, so I might do that mcmig donation.
Speaker 1: That should be an upcoming Yeah, all right, So the
Speaker 1: guy shows up, you have one of your folks go out,
Speaker 1: one of your artists keeps it. Then there you are.
Speaker 1: You gotta keeped out, dear and bring it back in
Speaker 1: the shop and then we'll actually take the skull out
Speaker 1: of it at that point and turn the ears inside out,
Speaker 1: turn your lips, your nostrils, your eyelids, remove all the
Speaker 1: excess flesh from it fat and then bury it in salt.
Speaker 1: And you're doing that over a fleshing beam um on
Speaker 1: a deer a lot of times. Yeah, but if I
Speaker 1: skin myself a lot of time, there's really not much
Speaker 1: to clean skin, which if you get enough practice at it,
Speaker 1: it's it's very legit, very viable way to do it.
Speaker 1: But when you're first started as a pretty high risk
Speaker 1: way of cutting a lot of holes in your deer,
Speaker 1: it's here, it's Okay to leave a little fat meat
Speaker 1: on there. If you're starting to, like I'm getting kind
Speaker 1: of close to cutting, just leave it on there. It's
Speaker 1: not a big deal. Someone will get it off later.
Speaker 1: You prefer to do them clean. Salting is a weird deal.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of misconception. Yeah, I remember it. Well.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing I don't get is I used to
Speaker 1: sell for for bear for at the um this thing
Speaker 1: called Ravanna for auction, and there every lot gets bit on, right,
Speaker 1: but deer when you brought deer, you could also sell
Speaker 1: deer at the Ravana for our auction. And the first
Speaker 1: deer that came up, they bid on it, and that
Speaker 1: was the price for every deer that came through the door.
Speaker 1: And these are just deer hides of people pulled off,
Speaker 1: and I mean the bulk of them. People open it
Speaker 1: up and dump a I don't think of moreton table
Speaker 1: salt on. But then I just thought it was like
Speaker 1: normal practice. So I later learned that doesn't do anybody
Speaker 1: any good. No, no, Like, it's gotta be clean. It's
Speaker 1: got to be clean. Like you could have a quarter
Speaker 1: inch piece of meat on a deer hide and salt
Speaker 1: of work, right, through it, but an eighth of an
Speaker 1: inch of fat and it creates that oil barrier and
Speaker 1: it never gets to this the actual epidermal layer to
Speaker 1: pull that moisture out and set the hair, and the
Speaker 1: hair will slip anyway. Got you? So do you get
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff like some guy skins bear. It's
Speaker 1: got fat meat all over and he poured salt all
Speaker 1: over the head and at the feet and it's still
Speaker 1: They pour a bag of rock salt on it, roll
Speaker 1: it up and send it. Yeah, does it make your
Speaker 1: job harder? Yes? Yes, you really don't want people salt
Speaker 1: and stuff. You can trying to keep an edge on
Speaker 1: a knife fleshing through salt. You know you're like that
Speaker 1: was that? Stroke a bag up? Make a couple of
Speaker 1: cats stroke it back up? What do you use for
Speaker 1: a knife? A lot of times when refleshing bears, I
Speaker 1: use a shaving wheel? Um, actual bench mounted shaving wheel. UM.
Speaker 1: I can't picture you're talking about. Is that a Is
Speaker 1: that a skinning tool or like a work to it?
Speaker 1: It's actually just for removing flesh and shaving like a
Speaker 1: shaving a tan tide down? Is it on an angle grinder? No,
Speaker 1: it's it's a different beast, you know what you're talking about? That. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like one of those you know. It's like I'm
Speaker 1: I'm picturing like a like a big gas meat slicer wheel.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, No, that's not what I was picturing.
Speaker 1: I was picturing like a like a wheel, like one
Speaker 1: of those things you like a grinder you mount on
Speaker 1: your on your work bench that has like the grinding
Speaker 1: wheels on mane flushing table. Probably gotta figure out how
Speaker 1: to use that thing before you get started. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that there's there's a curve on that one. I can't
Speaker 1: really picture. Always the new guys they like if they
Speaker 1: shoot their own deer, you know, I'm like, you can
Speaker 1: practice on that because you will make a hole like
Speaker 1: that big. Just yeah. People can picture like a deli
Speaker 1: like a deli slicer. It's the blade of a deli
Speaker 1: slicer mountain on top of a workbench and you walk
Speaker 1: up that some bit and tried to cut your hand
Speaker 1: off and like keep the blade between the Yeah you
Speaker 1: got yeah, because there's there's a guard on it, but
Speaker 1: it's still exposed, so you just the only real guards
Speaker 1: and you're just running it down there and like guiding
Speaker 1: it through the Wow. Have you ever done a beaver
Speaker 1: hide with one of those or something? Oh? Yeah? For
Speaker 1: me it is a couple of my guys like it.
Speaker 1: A couple of them don't. How fast could you do
Speaker 1: a beaver with that thing? Like a freshwa still kind
Speaker 1: of fatty a couple of minutes. I think we need
Speaker 1: I think we need a beaver pillow. We know, oh
Speaker 1: you know said he doesn't like pillows. It's not but
Speaker 1: maybe it's not curled up. Maybe it's like I don't know,
Speaker 1: this bird flasher, that's what I was picturing. Yep, it
Speaker 1: was like the wire wire wire wheel. I think we're
Speaker 1: doing a I think we're doing a live show coming
Speaker 1: up in buildings. This is there'll be special for Cal
Speaker 1: like a homecoming for Ocal. We're gonna do a live
Speaker 1: show come up for Billings. What my vision of it is,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of comp ticuts over there. It's a
Speaker 1: whole thing. Uh. When the curtain opens, I want the
Speaker 1: curtain open will be like a play and there's gonna
Speaker 1: be Seth at his fleshing beam, and there's gonna be
Speaker 1: like our normal scene. And off in the corner is
Speaker 1: one of those theater spotlights. And the whole time. So
Speaker 1: it's gonna be fleshing on a flesh and beam with
Speaker 1: a spotlight on. It's gonna be so beautiful. Canna be great?
Speaker 1: What about the flesh A mini flesher, it's it's basically
Speaker 1: a die grinder and has got that little blade on there.
Speaker 1: This is I gotta play with one of them once.
Speaker 1: I was terrifying. Yeah, I'll tell you that one. I
Speaker 1: could ruin so much ship with that so fast. They
Speaker 1: got a blaster and master blaster dryers. Reminds of this
Speaker 1: reminds me very much of like when you're like, why
Speaker 1: why would I ever pay somebody to mount the bindings
Speaker 1: to my skis? And then the first thing you do
Speaker 1: is you drill through the ski and you're like it'll
Speaker 1: be fine. Uh so what knights you use skinning? Like?
Speaker 1: Do you use replaceable razors? Are you sitting there with
Speaker 1: a strap like in the old days? I pretty much
Speaker 1: just sit with a strap like the old days and
Speaker 1: keep a steel right next to me. Um the Victor Knox.
Speaker 1: So you like those commercial you know they're inexpensive, and uh,
Speaker 1: you're sharpening constantly like on a in the spring bear.
Speaker 1: I mean you'll use pretty much one knife from brand
Speaker 1: new to garbage in a week, just sharpening, sharping, and
Speaker 1: you put a hell of an edge on those things.
Speaker 1: But it just doesn't stay for long. But if you're
Speaker 1: doing a strap anyways, you know what you're doing. We
Speaker 1: can get I can I can skin out a whole
Speaker 1: bear with one without having to go actually back to
Speaker 1: a stone on it. If you just keep working it
Speaker 1: on them, deal or straw whatever. Stay away from you know,
Speaker 1: scraping it on the bones and stuff like that. Just
Speaker 1: stay to the flesh. Acts pretty doable. I want to
Speaker 1: get back to our following our theoretical deer through the process.
Speaker 1: But I want to ask you a bearer question. When
Speaker 1: a guy brings you a whole bear, um what like
Speaker 1: you get the hide, but then he's got to come
Speaker 1: right back over and bring his meat down and process
Speaker 1: it or pick it up or whatever? Right yes? Or
Speaker 1: does he does he? You just have him staying there
Speaker 1: while you do it. A lot of times you all
Speaker 1: just have them wait if they're going to take because
Speaker 1: you want and everything. We have a list of people
Speaker 1: they'll contact us from around the Liby area that want
Speaker 1: bear meat. I do like, if you have anybody that
Speaker 1: doesn't want their bear meat, give us a call. So
Speaker 1: then if I know somebody, yeah, I bet I donated
Speaker 1: probably to thirty of them last spring. That's awesome. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how they come, they just come, get the whole thing
Speaker 1: on the carcass yep. And if they're going to come,
Speaker 1: you know, it is very nice for them to provide
Speaker 1: that service for us to act like show up when
Speaker 1: they say they're going to show up. So if I
Speaker 1: get somebody that I know is gonna actually do what
Speaker 1: they said they're going to, I'll just quarter it out,
Speaker 1: pull the backstraps out of it and stuff, get it
Speaker 1: all bagged up. So and then all they all right.
Speaker 1: So our dear you said throwing a bucket of salt,
Speaker 1: not sprinkle the jar of Morton's table salt on there. No,
Speaker 1: I use a fairly coarse ground salt. It's not rock salt,
Speaker 1: but it's a mixed mixing salt for hey, um yeah,
Speaker 1: as we just lay it out on the mixing salt
Speaker 1: for hay, for livestock. It's just a course kill. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I see. And you just get it laid out on
Speaker 1: the floor flat, make sure there's no folds in it,
Speaker 1: so it's like it's amazing how many guys when you're
Speaker 1: first teaching them to salt that actually make a mistake.
Speaker 1: It's like, you just have to get salt on all
Speaker 1: of it. That's it. There's like no technique, just salt
Speaker 1: on all of it. And they'll be like they'll forget
Speaker 1: to fold the face back and so the face will
Speaker 1: be stuck down. My kids arguing about what a clean
Speaker 1: plate looks like. I'm no, no, you'll know you're done
Speaker 1: because there'll be nothing like that, right, it'll be very obvious,
Speaker 1: the opposite of the way. You're getting closer. I see
Speaker 1: assault on everything, on everything. You can't overdo it. Nope,
Speaker 1: you can't overdo it. So I leave I usually leave
Speaker 1: it in the salt twenty four hours. Then i'll take
Speaker 1: it out for using a salty table. It'll drain, is
Speaker 1: that of incline, so it's interesting. It'll run if we
Speaker 1: if we don't like big items were doing on the floor,
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of good coming off there, a
Speaker 1: lot of moisture. Yeah, you'll you'll see it, like when
Speaker 1: we're doing the bears and you get like four or
Speaker 1: five six bears stacked up in salt, you'll see the
Speaker 1: trail of water running off the pile towards the floor drains.
Speaker 1: I got interrupted from it. This conversation just reminami is
Speaker 1: something the time, very time since theive issue. Did you
Speaker 1: apply for the Idaho spring Bragger spressure special draw? No,
Speaker 1: that's a good one. Jimmy's giant trout was in the smoker. Hey,
Speaker 1: can you run out and uh grab that those fish
Speaker 1: flames out of that smoker real quick. I left him
Speaker 1: in there and it's been probably too long. Grab a
Speaker 1: hot grab a hot pad, and just open that cabinet.
Speaker 1: It looks like a cabinet. It's next to the grill.
Speaker 1: Just open the door and it's all on one wire rack.
Speaker 1: So you just pull the wire rack out and then
Speaker 1: just set it on top of the grill or something
Speaker 1: because it'll be it'll be it'll be uh smell like
Speaker 1: smoke fish for a few minutes. But just lay it
Speaker 1: outside to cool. Sorry about that. Yeah, the salting table.
Speaker 1: How made me think it will smoke fish? Good? Uh?
Speaker 1: Where were we salting table? Oh? So when it's done
Speaker 1: salting um, it's wet, yes, so can it. So when
Speaker 1: we've taken we have racks that we assemble and assemble
Speaker 1: throughout the seasons, and you just put a new rung
Speaker 1: on the rack and then he drape him over the
Speaker 1: rack and then let him start drying out like at night,
Speaker 1: will turn the heat up and put fans out. Next
Speaker 1: morning you should be able to fold it and then
Speaker 1: eventually you have it folded up into a nice little
Speaker 1: package like rock hard dry because you know, at that
Speaker 1: point is it like pretty much archival. Remember guys showing
Speaker 1: me a text Romans I used to know had a
Speaker 1: zebra that he had killed. I feel like he told
Speaker 1: me that he had killed it seven years earlier. But
Speaker 1: I mean this thing was like rock hard. Yeah, just
Speaker 1: salt crusted in rock hard. And he was not worried
Speaker 1: about it. He's like, you got soaked the piss out
Speaker 1: of that thing to get it back to life. And
Speaker 1: as long as it's in a spot where nothing like
Speaker 1: mice insects don't get to it, um, it'd lasting. Definitely,
Speaker 1: really keep it dry, man, don't let anything eat it
Speaker 1: mid last, definitely. So if deer season is running hot
Speaker 1: and heavy, that's what you guys are doing. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: your skin in salting drying. And this spring bear season
Speaker 1: is historically the busiest season for my studio because you
Speaker 1: guys are in like bear central. Yeah. Do you guys
Speaker 1: get more bears than dear? Oh yeah, yeah definitely. Um.
Speaker 1: This year we were after everything started taking back off,
Speaker 1: we were really shorthanded. UM had one gad family stuff
Speaker 1: come up, so he was gone, and then we got
Speaker 1: outfitter where like one day I got thirteen bears in
Speaker 1: there's nobody there but size myself like I did. I
Speaker 1: did fifty one days straight. Might just have one daughter
Speaker 1: and she's she'll be sixteen one her skin a knife Christmas.
Speaker 1: She's thinking more like law school. That's probably It's like this,
Speaker 1: this is the family business year. Could be have be
Speaker 1: the only lawyer with the popeye four arms or somebody
Speaker 1: who's yeah, tell her like if as long as we
Speaker 1: stay honest and get the hides back, we don't need
Speaker 1: law protection right just to skin skin, to just stay
Speaker 1: clear the law. Hey John, what about it? I'm still
Speaker 1: dreaming about these squishy pills. What about a black bear pillow?
Speaker 1: That would be kind of like you could It would
Speaker 1: be like in someone's living room you could just lean
Speaker 1: again sleeping. We did do a small black bear UM,
Speaker 1: and the way we did it, it wasn't. Yeah, I wouldn't.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say it was a success um for certain things.
Speaker 1: If you still want to do the soft mount, I
Speaker 1: would do like annealed wire frame inside of it, like
Speaker 1: when squirrel mounts when you'd make the you know, wood wool,
Speaker 1: and you put your wires through there. Then you can
Speaker 1: bend his legs and get him in position like old
Speaker 1: old squirrel talk like original stuffing. When you were actually
Speaker 1: stuffing it said I only get the deer stuff. People
Speaker 1: would still say when I was a kid, you get
Speaker 1: stuff with a piece of foam. Yeah, But then you
Speaker 1: can still do this soft mount and it's still be suppled,
Speaker 1: but you would be able to pose it because so
Speaker 1: it's not just like slumped over on the floor. So
Speaker 1: you got all these little dried out packets that are
Speaker 1: deer hides. At some point you pack them in a
Speaker 1: trucker crates and trucks and they go to the tannery
Speaker 1: start shipping him like this, just distributing him around so
Speaker 1: that we could actually get him back. When when I
Speaker 1: talked to my one tannery this spring and he's like,
Speaker 1: I was like, hey, you ready for a load. He's like, well,
Speaker 1: how many are we talking? I think I had a
Speaker 1: sixty eight or sixty nine of them put up at
Speaker 1: that time, and he's like, oh God, no, don't don't
Speaker 1: do that to me. Yeah, he's like, he's like, I'm
Speaker 1: still getting stuff from last year. He's like, don't. He's like,
Speaker 1: if you want it back, He's like, he can't send
Speaker 1: me that much at one time. So I was like,
Speaker 1: all right, So he started ship finding other places. Someone
Speaker 1: told me once that every mountain He might have been
Speaker 1: exaggerating slightly, but the gist was like, every mountain go
Speaker 1: in the country comes from the same tannery. You don't
Speaker 1: buy that absolutely, not that they're like mountain goats specialists. No,
Speaker 1: there's a mountain goats. The two ways that are most
Speaker 1: commonly done is you're just like a traditional tan whether
Speaker 1: it's wet or dry or bleached. And there's only that's
Speaker 1: only one place I know that there's like a real
Speaker 1: real bleaching on him. Um and I don't. We don't
Speaker 1: do bleaching. So you don't like them bleached. You you
Speaker 1: want to have its natural color variations. Yep. And bleaching
Speaker 1: is really hard on him. My ride almost it's like
Speaker 1: on the ragged edge of destruction by the time you
Speaker 1: get done with it, it's just cooked. That proxy had
Speaker 1: just it cooks the leather. That's too bad, man, Like
Speaker 1: the all the pigment color, like the black around the
Speaker 1: eyes and the nose and stuff, that's all gone when
Speaker 1: it comes back the leathers is I feel like the
Speaker 1: one I have getting done right now is getting bleached.
Speaker 1: But it was crazy because he had a lot of coloration. Man,
Speaker 1: he had a lot of gray, like, he had a
Speaker 1: lot of gray hairs blended into him. Was he near
Speaker 1: a burn at all? Yeah, in a burn probably from
Speaker 1: the burntwood. This guy. Look at a head on this guy.
Speaker 1: I got a couple from the martial that had gray.
Speaker 1: I was like, well, it's got gray hair in it.
Speaker 1: But it washed out no ship, Yeah, like it was
Speaker 1: the color of the hair, Yeah, I know for sure.
Speaker 1: It looked like it had just like gray charcoal hairs,
Speaker 1: the black scar In Alaska, we do we get a lot,
Speaker 1: we do a lot of work for guys in Alaska.
Speaker 1: A lot of guys stationed in the coast guard us.
Speaker 1: So they ship us goats and grizzly bears and all
Speaker 1: sheep and all over all the time. And the goats
Speaker 1: up there, they have a lot of when I first
Speaker 1: started seeing them, like they have black and so is
Speaker 1: that black sand from up there, but it all washes
Speaker 1: out like like on a goat, anything with for um
Speaker 1: like shoulder mountain wires. All the goats always get it
Speaker 1: full shampoo and condition And that master blaster that's just
Speaker 1: a huge commercial blow dry. It's atually for doing like
Speaker 1: car shows or bike shows. So you can blow dry
Speaker 1: your car not leave you know, marks on it from
Speaker 1: toweling it. And so between the shampooon and conditioning and
Speaker 1: then the blast you can get all the organic materials
Speaker 1: that you don't want in there out. You know, we
Speaker 1: recently had on We're gonna keep just so you know,
Speaker 1: we're gonna keep following this deer project. We'll speed it
Speaker 1: up in a minute. But we recently had a fur
Speaker 1: handler on, like a trapper fur handler on the show,
Speaker 1: and I realized, now what we didn't talk to him about,
Speaker 1: which I know that he does, is he has a
Speaker 1: washing machine in his first shed, just just dedicated to
Speaker 1: that and everything he skins, skins a raccoon before he
Speaker 1: flashes it, it goes into that washing machine. No soap
Speaker 1: yep agitated, And I was talking to a Bobcat trapper
Speaker 1: the other day that does all of his with brightening shampoo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: shampoo's him just for presentation. The white bellies whiter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like the goats. We use him bright and shampoo, but
Speaker 1: not dyeing it. Nope, no, no, like actual peroxide whitening.
Speaker 1: It's just like you know for guys with gray hair,
Speaker 1: you can use it too. If you got that yellow
Speaker 1: gray hair, it helps brighten it up. Got uh, eventually
Speaker 1: get all these eventually get these um to grow my
Speaker 1: hair bag and brighten. Uh. You get them all back
Speaker 1: they're tanned, and then it just looks like you gotta
Speaker 1: tan for it, right, I mean, yeah, most of our
Speaker 1: deer capes and stuff come back to try tan. And
Speaker 1: meanwhile all those antlers are were hanging on our hook. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We have a series of racks upstairs so we can
Speaker 1: keep like you know, white tails and mule deer, then
Speaker 1: keep the elk and the moose separator, got cariboo. Then
Speaker 1: we have spots for like when the African Safaris show up,
Speaker 1: we can keep all the African safaris separate. Why you
Speaker 1: worried about keep it separate, You're not gonna like easier
Speaker 1: to find oh if you keep it, yeah, to try
Speaker 1: to keep it species specific. And then so like a
Speaker 1: guy comes in his like your name on it turned
Speaker 1: into orcs. My just trying to trying to be able
Speaker 1: to find stuff easy because you know, I imagine your
Speaker 1: clientele likes that because it's like, well, I'm gonna swing
Speaker 1: in and show off my rack. Yeah, and you're like,
Speaker 1: I don't know where it's at. You know, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a lot nicer, and like you just go upstairs and
Speaker 1: you go back or there and from white tail section,
Speaker 1: your tags on it, your names on it, your invoice
Speaker 1: numbers on it, and then uh, you guys got to
Speaker 1: soak them right yep. So usually what I do is all,
Speaker 1: if we're gonna do like a dozen deer heads, I'll
Speaker 1: soak up those twelve capes. Contact everybody, find out what
Speaker 1: pose they want, if they want like looking left or right,
Speaker 1: or somebody sneaks or full sneaks or what they want
Speaker 1: that that might depend on where they want to put it, yep, yep.
Speaker 1: And then you always when they ask you, it's if
Speaker 1: you were the deer on the wall, which way would
Speaker 1: you turn your head? Not my left? Because I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know, let your left his left his lips.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's always what's the full sneak where the
Speaker 1: head is below the back, like when you see a
Speaker 1: trailer that I was, did semi sneak looking left or right,
Speaker 1: you know, Brody decentus of one. It was like it
Speaker 1: was a goofy, a little bit goofy, but that's not
Speaker 1: the right word for it. Beautifully done, but like a
Speaker 1: weird cod odd odd placement. It was a deer jump
Speaker 1: with a fence, but it was basically like the deer
Speaker 1: committing suicide off the guys off the balcony railing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but unbelievable, unbelievably well executed, Mike, when a white tail
Speaker 1: in the middle of one of those giant bounds that
Speaker 1: they do, but he was gonna land down in the
Speaker 1: living room. We're actually, when I when I get back
Speaker 1: next week, we're ordering a jumping white tail for a
Speaker 1: one eight class white tail and then there'll be about
Speaker 1: a hundred It was about a hundred and seventy pound
Speaker 1: mountain lion jump into the air to catch the white tail.
Speaker 1: That's some diorama. How does that work? Like went for
Speaker 1: and when someone's gonna do like a like a custom
Speaker 1: kind of thing like that, and like it's kind of
Speaker 1: based on the architecture of their house, like it needs
Speaker 1: to be in a certain position in a certain place,
Speaker 1: Like do they gotta do all the measuring or like
Speaker 1: how does that well? This particular one there in Texas,
Speaker 1: and uh, they got they found found out about us,
Speaker 1: got ahold of me. And then they've had an architect
Speaker 1: and a contractor at their place for like three or
Speaker 1: four years, they said, working on it constantly. And so
Speaker 1: he went up and gave me photographs of the study
Speaker 1: layout in the wall, and it was like I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: that's nice. We can pretty much do anything we want.
Speaker 1: You can get in put blocking in, so yeah, yep.
Speaker 1: And he gave me all the dimensions for the it's
Speaker 1: like a triangle shaped piece between two rooms and so
Speaker 1: that we have twenty ft lay that thing out with
Speaker 1: all the habitat and junipers. And because you'll see like
Speaker 1: mountain lions curled up in a corner like that, I
Speaker 1: do like that. Yeah, I'd like to do that someday
Speaker 1: if I had a high spot, like a mountain lion
Speaker 1: laying up there there, like perched up on a log
Speaker 1: or something. Looking you guys to know what the balcony
Speaker 1: rail represents on that whitetail. Right, let's jump on offense
Speaker 1: the neighbor. That's an important that you'll notice that he's
Speaker 1: hitting the back end. Almost got out of the neighbor's place.
Speaker 1: Here's a question that we used to get all the time,
Speaker 1: was um, velvet, velvet bucks, what's your recommendation there. It's
Speaker 1: like how it's going to turn out really is affected
Speaker 1: by what phase the velvet growth is in. If it's
Speaker 1: super early, where the horns like you know, you can
Speaker 1: shake him in the horns are still rubbery, that's a
Speaker 1: really difficult one to stabilize. In the middle where it's
Speaker 1: still alive, but you're getting good set up. That's one
Speaker 1: of your prime ones to be able to like embalm
Speaker 1: the actual velvet um and then at a certain point
Speaker 1: it's just fallen off. You know, when it gets where
Speaker 1: you just grab in your hands bloody. That's late. That's
Speaker 1: not early. I'm thinking about caribe, like you grab in
Speaker 1: your hand, this is like soaked with blood. That's early.
Speaker 1: Wherein the antler is still soft. I guess it makes
Speaker 1: sense because still full blogs it's growing. That's a dumb
Speaker 1: question forgive a lot a lot of a lot of times, though, uh,
Speaker 1: you can just have it stripped and artificial put back on, right,
Speaker 1: And and that was always the question, is like should
Speaker 1: we scrape all this off like in the field scraped off? Right? Yeah? Don't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna revelvet it, just leave it as is
Speaker 1: and then when it gets in on either just power
Speaker 1: wash it off or peel it and then take it
Speaker 1: in and just have it actually revelveted. And can you
Speaker 1: can you preserve the actual velvet when it's in that
Speaker 1: in the right stay you know, like yeah, kind of,
Speaker 1: but you always run the risk of like, you know,
Speaker 1: not quite getting it and then so that it still
Speaker 1: has proteins left in it, which would promote bug life.
Speaker 1: I wanted to make my wife braw lined with that
Speaker 1: antler belt off, but it was like, you don't know
Speaker 1: the first thing about what people want in a bracause
Speaker 1: I was like, how about a muskrat line bra. She's like, no, no,
Speaker 1: you don't want a muskrat line, Bra. It's not it's
Speaker 1: not what's going on there when you wear bra. What
Speaker 1: about a like a cactus buck that you kill in
Speaker 1: October November. That's still full velvet. If it was how
Speaker 1: you guys doing those? Like if it's something really unique
Speaker 1: like a cactus buck said it didn't have a freeze,
Speaker 1: dried the whole thing. My fiance shot a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago and got it done. I didn't know how
Speaker 1: they did it, but it's yeah, it's still They don't
Speaker 1: think they stripped it or anything. Yeah, if you you
Speaker 1: can have them freeze dride and they'll be perfectly stable.
Speaker 1: How the hell do you have a spirit of sturgeon
Speaker 1: spearing hoodie? This? Someone sent these into Hayden, and Hayden
Speaker 1: gave me this one fish hoodie talked to Hayden about
Speaker 1: sturgeon spearing hoodie. Ye, Hayden never had a spear in
Speaker 1: his life. Never. I've never even rolla never get a
Speaker 1: complimentary fishing. Steve doesn't like when you have cool ship
Speaker 1: that he doesn't have saw it Like I checked the
Speaker 1: free table. This didn't go on a free table. No,
Speaker 1: I must have went directs. I've never spared spear sturgeon
Speaker 1: or have gone sturdon experience a bit of a poser,
Speaker 1: but I just liked sweatshirt. I thought about the poser angle.
Speaker 1: I just like he's got chains on everything. A little shanty. Um. Okay,
Speaker 1: back to our hypothetical deer. You're soaking what water? Yep,
Speaker 1: I just do room temperature water and then you go
Speaker 1: on into your handy andy cattle catalog there, so you
Speaker 1: would uh, you've already established what pose they want, and
Speaker 1: then you just soak it up and then you stretch it.
Speaker 1: And part part of the learning curve when you stretch
Speaker 1: it over the form. Now you stretch it on the
Speaker 1: bench and then you order the form that fits those measurements.
Speaker 1: So this is this is a form that I use
Speaker 1: very frequently. So by measurements are like and then you
Speaker 1: have three points on the neck. Yeah, you order six
Speaker 1: nine dash seven to one L. That's not like secret sauces,
Speaker 1: and that's not like that expensive. Okay, those are quite
Speaker 1: reasonable compared to buy an elephant. How much is it?
Speaker 1: But I imagine, like if you could lay out the
Speaker 1: the conversation you would like to have with everybody who
Speaker 1: walks in the door, right, because I imagine there's a
Speaker 1: lot of like, hey, I want this mountain, and you're like,
Speaker 1: well you're in the right spot, but yeah, trying to
Speaker 1: talk him off the ledge sometimes where you're like, okay,
Speaker 1: so this is what we can do. This is the
Speaker 1: way we need to go about do anything like that.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, and be like and and these are
Speaker 1: like the price ranges that you're gonna come in too
Speaker 1: if you just want something that that is your dear
Speaker 1: looking back to you. But you're not you're not going
Speaker 1: for the jumping white tail with the mountain lion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that price range. Yeah, we're There's not a lot of
Speaker 1: like sliding scale on anything we do. It's pretty pretty set.
Speaker 1: The only time there's any like additional charges, Like you
Speaker 1: have a traditional shoulder mountain, but if they want habitat
Speaker 1: on it, then you have to pay for the habitat
Speaker 1: to go with it. But you're still basically just you're
Speaker 1: buying accessories at that point. You still have a base
Speaker 1: price of what your dear head costs. Ball park me
Speaker 1: a like a nice job on a standard white tail
Speaker 1: shoulder mountain. Yeah, so you don't you don't do a
Speaker 1: lot of haggling that gather. No, okay, how do you
Speaker 1: handle this? Every single taxidermy studio, any time you go
Speaker 1: in there, there's somebody bullshitting with somebody who obviously needs
Speaker 1: to be how do you handle them and they want
Speaker 1: to drop it off? Yeah, it's it's very difficult to
Speaker 1: handle that because you can't be like, you know, dude,
Speaker 1: it's time for you to go, because you know they're
Speaker 1: more likely a client. You can tell them, all right,
Speaker 1: your thing's gonna rot start, uh, you know. Just the
Speaker 1: secret is just to keep working and eventually a lot
Speaker 1: of times they're like, well, you know, I probably probably
Speaker 1: should let you go. That's the approach to, Yeah, just
Speaker 1: keep going. Do you get people trying to work you
Speaker 1: like if they bring in, you know, a little danker
Speaker 1: buck that their kids shot, and they're like, well it's smaller,
Speaker 1: you know, can you yeah? Yeah, all right, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: the only working around the big old antler because he
Speaker 1: got in the standard. Right, this is only half the
Speaker 1: buck that that one was. Yeah, I know, there's it
Speaker 1: seems like it doesn't a job opportunity for like the
Speaker 1: old retired fish cop or somebody who just wants to
Speaker 1: have those conversations all day, right, right, and you put
Speaker 1: them up in front like a Walmart greater, where'd you
Speaker 1: get that? You like, you're a guy to bullshit up
Speaker 1: front like a caged off air. They could look at us,
Speaker 1: but they couldn't actually get to us. And then you
Speaker 1: hire an old feller to sit out there and be
Speaker 1: like you like talk there but run into but they
Speaker 1: can knock out the paperwork. Yeah yeah right, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know how you talked everybody the grocery store come
Speaker 1: down to do it. Speaking of speaking of fishing game cops,
Speaker 1: how often are they popping in and out of your place?
Speaker 1: Oh man, I was going down that same path. Go
Speaker 1: go ahead, like uh sorry, no, no, right now. When
Speaker 1: COVID happened, trying to get all the bears tagged, and
Speaker 1: then like wolves tag you know, any of the first
Speaker 1: bears where you actually have to have that seal put
Speaker 1: in there, they had closed down like the public coming
Speaker 1: into like normal tagging areas there was. They waved it
Speaker 1: the first year and then last year they did it
Speaker 1: where we did a transfer possession for him, so like
Speaker 1: you would shoot a bear and bring it to my shop,
Speaker 1: and then we would fill out the paperwork like where
Speaker 1: you harvested it, when you harvested it in your courtings,
Speaker 1: you know a lot long um. Then we'd signed a
Speaker 1: couple of pieces of paper and then you leave and
Speaker 1: I would have present that that was my possession. So
Speaker 1: then the fishing game, they were coming every two to
Speaker 1: three days to my shop. Well, so you could call
Speaker 1: them and be like, yeah, I got a whole bull
Speaker 1: at a bulk deal for you. Yeah, so I try
Speaker 1: to accumulate a stack of them, because it took a while,
Speaker 1: you know, because then they have to go through all
Speaker 1: my paperwork and then register the state seal to it,
Speaker 1: and then I have to register that into my paper
Speaker 1: and they're pulling the tooth at your place. I ended
Speaker 1: up we They finally gave us the tooth puller, the
Speaker 1: elevator tool, because you can aunt pull a tooth when
Speaker 1: it's frozen, and I can't stacks of rotting heads laying around.
Speaker 1: So we just would pull the tooth and put it
Speaker 1: in the envelope and write their a LS number and
Speaker 1: with sex of it, then put it in their paperwork,
Speaker 1: and then they'd come and just grab everything and go.
Speaker 1: Have you had have you had situations where something didn't
Speaker 1: smell right? And see that's the question. I was dying
Speaker 1: like somebody somebody trying to forgot. Yeah. Guy walks and
Speaker 1: he's like, I want to get this eagle mounted. Oh
Speaker 1: I'm not I was going more like some big buck
Speaker 1: and you're like, man, something, just sayesn't I've turned I've
Speaker 1: turned people in that I know absolutely. I mean it's
Speaker 1: if if I was in Cahous at all, the state
Speaker 1: is who provides my business license, and that's go on.
Speaker 1: So you can't. You can't be like body, you better
Speaker 1: just go on your own way. You gotta be like,
Speaker 1: now you've made it my problem. Yeah. If if it
Speaker 1: comes to the shop and I know that you're like
Speaker 1: intentionally doing that, it's your problem. Seth and I were
Speaker 1: in that's gotta be I don't want to say awkward,
Speaker 1: but that's gonna be awkward. Issh like, you know, honestly
Speaker 1: most of the time, and they don't do that. People
Speaker 1: don't do that ship. It's not as common as one might. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess yeah, I've only ever seen it a couple
Speaker 1: of times where I like, you just absolutely know that
Speaker 1: they poasted that thing. You're like, m so, then well
Speaker 1: I got a for instance, right, Seth and I were
Speaker 1: in this cafe truck stop Baits store in Kansas Place.
Speaker 1: Was awesome opening day a deer season. We got done
Speaker 1: duck hunting. It's probably like ten thirty in the morning,
Speaker 1: and you can also get licenses and tags there right,
Speaker 1: You're talking about that certain spearing poser next to you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're sitting there having breakfast, talking about our next move.
Speaker 1: And I just can't help but notice. The oddest thing,
Speaker 1: if you've ever been in the hunting and angling community,
Speaker 1: was every person in line getting a deer tag in
Speaker 1: the morning. Am. It was female. And I was just
Speaker 1: like that or something about that, you know. And then
Speaker 1: and then you hear the questions like now, what do
Speaker 1: you need and you're like, well, I just like the
Speaker 1: what do you need to deer something? For an extra
Speaker 1: buck that's laying on a property. Man. Our mom I
Speaker 1: shouldn't say, because she's still alive and I'm still alive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: our mom had a few deer tags. It was just
Speaker 1: like we didn't even know. It was just so when
Speaker 1: I was little, it was like you would it was
Speaker 1: so not hidden. It's like you would go to show
Speaker 1: and tell at school and be like, my mom tagged it.
Speaker 1: It was just like it wasn't even if you didn't
Speaker 1: give me like a polygraph or something about breaking the rule,
Speaker 1: Like my heart rate wouldn't have gone up because I
Speaker 1: wouldn't have know. I didn't know you weren't supposed to
Speaker 1: do it? Like did you? In fact, I'd be like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, because I would have known. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: have known them to be nervous, right, you know, I
Speaker 1: know it needed a tag my mother. Anyway, in a
Speaker 1: very circular fashion, I could see how situations like that
Speaker 1: could come back to you, where it's like, here's the
Speaker 1: tag that goes with the rack, and then eventually somebody
Speaker 1: comes in and says, hey, did somebody turn in the rack?
Speaker 1: And what was their name? So, like, I've always been fortunate.
Speaker 1: We maintain a good rapport with our wardens um and
Speaker 1: we've had quite a few wardens circulate through our area
Speaker 1: because we were right in the corner there, so we
Speaker 1: have like three up to three wardens that come through,
Speaker 1: and all we've been very fortunate, very very nice, very
Speaker 1: professional wardens. And if they call call me up and
Speaker 1: ask me, you know, hey, you did so and so
Speaker 1: bring something in and having I'm like, yeah, it's in
Speaker 1: the shop. Oh yeah, could we come get it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the shop. Have you ever had any sort of
Speaker 1: strange things where everything looked up to speed but then
Speaker 1: some other guys in there, and he's like, where'd this
Speaker 1: buck come from? No, I haven't had the Hey wait
Speaker 1: a second, that came off my property yet that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff like never any kind of crazy stuff like
Speaker 1: that a lot. I mean, it'd be hard to like
Speaker 1: have much visual time with the deer where we live.
Speaker 1: They're always in the timber. So a couple of trail
Speaker 1: camp pictures floating around, I know, did you hear that
Speaker 1: crazy story? Um, someone actually got prosecuted off this and
Speaker 1: we talked about it, but it was it occurred between
Speaker 1: Tennessee and Kentucky, and I can't remember which direction it went.
Speaker 1: But there's like a Big Buck road show, right, and
Speaker 1: there's a buck there that was the state record of
Speaker 1: wherever the hell the state record or some it was
Speaker 1: honored by the state of Kentucky is being some such thing.
Speaker 1: And a guy it happens to be at the Big
Speaker 1: Buck show and he's like, that book was not killed
Speaker 1: in Kentucky. I have trail camp pictures of that book
Speaker 1: a couple hundred miles into Tennessee and I'd get it
Speaker 1: every day and then it vanished and that buck was
Speaker 1: not killed in the state. And the guy was prosecuted
Speaker 1: over it for receiving all the like award money or
Speaker 1: he even had that. He even had the what's the
Speaker 1: commedy move across state lines O Lacy act? And this guy,
Speaker 1: I mean, it was such an unusual buck and this
Speaker 1: guy is like, nope, it's on my place. There he
Speaker 1: is there, he is there, he is there, he is
Speaker 1: is the last we ever saw him. He gets some
Speaker 1: guy moved him, shot him and tagged them from another
Speaker 1: state and moved him over and started praying them around. Wow. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It was covered and it was covered the
Speaker 1: press of it, you know, That's all I was kind
Speaker 1: of think about that. If you've ever been involved in
Speaker 1: any stories like that, No, nothing, nothing quite that exciting.
Speaker 1: A friend of mine was a l e O up
Speaker 1: in that neck of the woods a long long time ago,
Speaker 1: and and he's like he because of what you said, right,
Speaker 1: it's like big dark, timber country. He would volunteer for
Speaker 1: every game check station as he's like, you just never
Speaker 1: knew what was going to come out of the woods,
Speaker 1: like crazy white tails, you know, crazy mule deer um.
Speaker 1: And because you're not in country where you're like seeing
Speaker 1: this stuff, right, they're not getting profiled by a bunch
Speaker 1: of people. Yeah. I was in a taxi during the
Speaker 1: studio one time after e h D came through real
Speaker 1: bad in the September, and holy ship the bucks down there, man,
Speaker 1: because people just bringing them in. It was like bucks.
Speaker 1: You did not know existence he was bringing in deadheads,
Speaker 1: dead heads. Get him cleaned up and stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: but just incredible bucks man. And he's like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: during hunting season, they don't come in, but then here
Speaker 1: they all are because it's like August like there they are,
Speaker 1: like all the ones that no one's probably gonna look
Speaker 1: at during hunting season. Yeah, go nocturnal, stay stay out
Speaker 1: of the view. Uh. So back to our our deer.
Speaker 1: You stretch it and measure it. Then you order up
Speaker 1: your form. Put the hide in the freezer till the
Speaker 1: form arrives, and then the form comes in. Then we
Speaker 1: take the hide out of the freezer and thought out
Speaker 1: and then we can start mounting and you like drape
Speaker 1: it over it and I see, I said, come down.
Speaker 1: Sometimes catch you guys like mid stride and he's all
Speaker 1: pinned and ends holding the eyes and get all your
Speaker 1: adhesive on there. And depending on how they how you
Speaker 1: prefer to do your ears, whether you do like a
Speaker 1: bond o, your cartlete replacement, your liner. Um, get all
Speaker 1: that done, get all your eyes set on the form.
Speaker 1: If you're doing a change out nose or putting septums
Speaker 1: into the existing form, get all that done ahead of time.
Speaker 1: Um short wine in decision. There's no stitching on the back,
Speaker 1: so you set your antlers and then you take them
Speaker 1: out and have a clay clay edge around it. Then
Speaker 1: you pull the cape on and then just have just
Speaker 1: that ye incision open up on the top to take
Speaker 1: the antlers out and put it back on it, and
Speaker 1: you just have that small white and sew back up
Speaker 1: and you're sewing it by hand the needle and thread.
Speaker 1: Once he started on that, is it like once you start,
Speaker 1: you gotta finish it? Or can you walk away from once?
Speaker 1: When I start doing any amount, you're pretty much there
Speaker 1: until you're done. But how do you do how do
Speaker 1: you do the last stitch for like the tie off? Yeah,
Speaker 1: but like you don't see it? Well, do you take
Speaker 1: it back off and do the last stitch then pull
Speaker 1: it back on it again? No? Usually, like I do
Speaker 1: a full dorsal cut, so it's usually tight um. There's
Speaker 1: no taking it off once back on, you'd have to,
Speaker 1: but you still have to when it's all done, you
Speaker 1: still have some stitch you gotta make. It's uh so
Speaker 1: you're on like a shoulder mount. Your stitch dead ends
Speaker 1: over the back and is stapled onto the form, so
Speaker 1: when it's on the wall, you can't ever see the
Speaker 1: left stitch where it ends. I got you. You'll have
Speaker 1: one that you'll bring over from the first antler base there,
Speaker 1: and then the next one. You can just catch that
Speaker 1: one and then go back down, so you don't have
Speaker 1: a knot with a piece sticking up at the top,
Speaker 1: but you are sewing it on the form. YEP. I
Speaker 1: still understand how you could get like I want to
Speaker 1: see because I don't get how the hair lay back
Speaker 1: so nice. So like in the early days, you know,
Speaker 1: you got it on there and you sewed it on
Speaker 1: and brushed it all out and let it dry. And
Speaker 1: that was what we did. I mean, that was what
Speaker 1: we That was the standard. That was how you did it.
Speaker 1: And then I had an opportunity to have a guy
Speaker 1: that was actually he took He took a blue ribbon
Speaker 1: first place in the world show in the Master's division
Speaker 1: for white tail text for me, and which is a
Speaker 1: really hard division. I mean, everybody does white tails for
Speaker 1: the for the most part around the country, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of guys that are really good at it.
Speaker 1: Where where is he from? Scott Brewer, He's in Washington
Speaker 1: right now, and so Scott, he is working for another
Speaker 1: artist in town. And in your town. There's there we
Speaker 1: have at one time when we had Scott and Phil
Speaker 1: and Daniel May was in town. All three of those
Speaker 1: guys have taken best in the world. You all get
Speaker 1: big fights at the bar. You know, there has been
Speaker 1: a lot of like historical bickering and pissing matches. But
Speaker 1: there was fourteen taxidermis and Liby at one time when
Speaker 1: I was a kid, and then there and like there's
Speaker 1: some really high end talent that is still there. There's
Speaker 1: some talent laden town. Small town of small town. A
Speaker 1: lot of tax and spat come from like you stole
Speaker 1: my technique or most of the time with those guys
Speaker 1: was like you stole my client. You know, I had
Speaker 1: done a deer for him and now he's at your place.
Speaker 1: You you've cool wurst him somehow or some ship like that. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: there there there was a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: bickering amongst a lot of the tax Germans in town
Speaker 1: for years. But so if Scott ends up in town
Speaker 1: and I'm trying to make connection with Scott, I wanted
Speaker 1: him to come out and look at my work that
Speaker 1: you know plateau. I really thought I had a pretty
Speaker 1: good rip on. You know, I've done by that point,
Speaker 1: I've probably done, you know, a few thousand deer heads.
Speaker 1: She should be fairly skilled at that point. So Scott's
Speaker 1: a certified judge for World on white Tail, and so
Speaker 1: they can't really get a much better critic than that.
Speaker 1: So I finally made him and I was like, would
Speaker 1: you come out and look at a deer head if
Speaker 1: I do one? And He's like okay, So I was
Speaker 1: like cool, So I do the absolute best white tail.
Speaker 1: It was like the cape was perfect. It was like pristine,
Speaker 1: good hair, length, good color. It was a nice buck
Speaker 1: you know. I was like, I was like, oh man,
Speaker 1: that's great. And so Scott is. He's a huge guy too.
Speaker 1: Like when I first met Scott, it was wasn't at
Speaker 1: all what I was expecting. Scott's like six three two
Speaker 1: d and fifty pounds. He was a Navy seal instructor.
Speaker 1: So he's intimidating, large guy, his hands just huge guy,
Speaker 1: very delicate touch. It's really amazing to watch him. Those
Speaker 1: giant myths and a little teeny breast, you know. So
Speaker 1: talk Scott into coming out to the shop and I've
Speaker 1: got it set up. You know, everything's cleaned out of
Speaker 1: the way, and the deer's on the mounting stand straight
Speaker 1: up right when you open the doors, like lights on
Speaker 1: it look good. Scott opens the door and he's like,
Speaker 1: is that the deer? And I was like, that's the
Speaker 1: deer and he's like that sucks. I was like really.
Speaker 1: I was like, do you need to get any closer
Speaker 1: to it? And he's like no, I can tell it
Speaker 1: sucks from here and it's like twenty ft away. Like
Speaker 1: I'm like wow. I was like, that is not at
Speaker 1: all what I was expected. I said. I was thinking,
Speaker 1: like you give me a gold star or something. He's like,
Speaker 1: here a long ways away from gold stars. What did
Speaker 1: you like about it? Which that was the thing, right,
Speaker 1: Like I had no idea what was wrong with it? Like,
Speaker 1: I had no idea. So when I finally time, like
Speaker 1: would you tell me what's wrong with it, and he's like,
Speaker 1: are you gonna get like all, well, I like doing
Speaker 1: it like that or that's the way I think it
Speaker 1: should look. And I was like no, I said I
Speaker 1: would really like to know. And he's like, if you
Speaker 1: really want to know, i'll help you. So he came
Speaker 1: out and worked with me for a few months, and uh,
Speaker 1: like the direction of hair, the way the hair grows
Speaker 1: like you look at a picture of a live deer,
Speaker 1: the way it grows around instead of just slicked back,
Speaker 1: the cow licks, your eyelash alignment, how big your bottom
Speaker 1: lip exposure is to the with your nose padman like
Speaker 1: a lot. How long your earbud is if your ears
Speaker 1: back is it actually rolled in the right position? You know,
Speaker 1: the anatomy of it. I had no idea about that.
Speaker 1: And that's what gives the good ones like that looks.
Speaker 1: You don't have to know why it looks like, what
Speaker 1: made it look like that? But you can look at
Speaker 1: the two anybody can and be like, wow, that's clean,
Speaker 1: it looks nice. It looks like a deer. Yeah, when
Speaker 1: I shot him, he didn't have newspaper coming out, right,
Speaker 1: So just just getting the opportunity to have those guys
Speaker 1: that like that next level up or five levels up,
Speaker 1: wherever you happen to be, come in and actually help you.
Speaker 1: That's that's been the key for any anything that I do, well,
Speaker 1: had some really good and help over the years. How
Speaker 1: many deer you done at this point? I have no
Speaker 1: idea A lot thousands, how many bears passed through your hands?
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have a guess. Really, yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: bet we skin close to a hundred a year, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean thousands of bears. So what what would given
Speaker 1: all that experience, like, what would be the thing that
Speaker 1: gets your your creativity flowing? Like? What do you get
Speaker 1: excited about at this point? The thing that probably makes
Speaker 1: me the most excited at this point is if it's
Speaker 1: a really good conditioned specimen, not necessarily the size of
Speaker 1: it anything, but if it was like just really good
Speaker 1: condition and somebody wants to do a unique piece with it,
Speaker 1: that's that's great. But I still, I mean, I still
Speaker 1: love doing just a game head with nobody else. They're
Speaker 1: nice and quiet, just sitting there by myself. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: like I can have my little spot. Everybody works over
Speaker 1: there that I work over here, enjoy it, oh very much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's still still my face. It is actually hands on,
Speaker 1: get to do it. What was it like with wolves?
Speaker 1: We're all, you know, one minute, there's no wolf hunting,
Speaker 1: you know, and all sudden there's wolf hunting and you're
Speaker 1: in the thick of it, and and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: like there's wolves coming in. Locally, I I had always
Speaker 1: been known for kyot hunting, like that was my favorite
Speaker 1: thing to most of the time its kyotes. So everybody
Speaker 1: known we did a lot of kyotes. People in Laska,
Speaker 1: the Coastguard guys, they ship as wolves and stuff. So
Speaker 1: I had a lot of cane though you're getting wolves
Speaker 1: of all the place. And then when the wolf hunting started,
Speaker 1: I could already see that we were gonna have it
Speaker 1: was gonna be another viable piece to bring into the business,
Speaker 1: you know. It wasn't just going to be like, well,
Speaker 1: we might do a wolf. So like how we do
Speaker 1: have our own sculptings for the coyote heads I made.
Speaker 1: I made my own head for a pillow or a
Speaker 1: life size gun and used it for either way. And
Speaker 1: then I made a rugshell for an open mouth, like
Speaker 1: the relaxed open mouth, not the snarl. And at the
Speaker 1: place I got a ko like that you did. I
Speaker 1: think at one time, if it was an open mouth wolf,
Speaker 1: back back when the season first came out, they were
Speaker 1: always like heavy snarls, like way heavy snarls. Um, and
Speaker 1: I just I never liked that look. So I just
Speaker 1: went for a passive open mouth. And then I just
Speaker 1: actually redid that mold. Just about October or so, um
Speaker 1: that came out with a new mouth cup for it,
Speaker 1: So I redid the mold to accept the new mouth
Speaker 1: cup and just that nice clean pass. I think I
Speaker 1: posted that one, I think on my Instagram. Tell people
Speaker 1: what your instagram is. Hayes tax d me h a
Speaker 1: y ees, Hayes tax d me Studio. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: good page. I like looking at that stuff. Man, it
Speaker 1: just comes so far. Yes, I think the discipline has
Speaker 1: come a long ways. And then like you're like, uh,
Speaker 1: like an exemplary practitioner of a thing that's already like
Speaker 1: just so far beyond what it used to be. The
Speaker 1: the part where people are not just wanting to just
Speaker 1: just have my head stuck on a wall. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's my antlers, and yes, it's got I think
Speaker 1: it's cape on there. And that's good enough because I'm
Speaker 1: never going to look at anything below the antlers anyways.
Speaker 1: People want to see better work. They want their animal
Speaker 1: to look life like, They want them to be clean.
Speaker 1: They don't want it to smell. You know that was
Speaker 1: people that they're walking out the door and I don't
Speaker 1: want it to smell. I've had I've had so many
Speaker 1: mounts come in. People bring them in and they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: it's kind of old, it's funky, and you start opening
Speaker 1: them up to take them apart, and that there had
Speaker 1: been a healthy population of things living inside the mountains
Speaker 1: in their house for years until they completely consumed everything.
Speaker 1: Like I've had schools that I found and you wondered why.
Speaker 1: I was like a little cone of sawdust underneath them
Speaker 1: all the time here like something one of those beatles,
Speaker 1: or there was the working at it, or the little
Speaker 1: bit of hair people like, I'm noticing some hair on
Speaker 1: the coffee table below the deer head. Do you know
Speaker 1: what that would be from? Like something's eating it. It's
Speaker 1: like i'd get it out of there forward at first
Speaker 1: light when uh he drew his at a whole mountain
Speaker 1: goat like most you know, first time nonresident applicants do
Speaker 1: in Idaho, like all the other first Light employees. Draw Um.
Speaker 1: It took him long time because to go back and
Speaker 1: he's like, yes, it's most a smell like this it
Speaker 1: had like He's like, you kept taking it back. There
Speaker 1: was a smell, and I was like, man, you know,
Speaker 1: not supposed to like that, supposed to go inside your house.
Speaker 1: Goats and antelope. Those are two of the ones that
Speaker 1: I've seen come in where people are like, stinks and
Speaker 1: most of the time they didn't sweat the horn off.
Speaker 1: Oh that though, don't you check on that if oh,
Speaker 1: when they're dropping it off it smells. Yes, they're like
Speaker 1: they bring a mountain and they're like, this thing smells.
Speaker 1: One of them. They were like, we put it out
Speaker 1: in the shed for six months and it still stinks.
Speaker 1: And but not that you didn't stuff it. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: we take the horns because you make to that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I noticed, I want to use to check and
Speaker 1: see if that if they did a shitty job, that's yeah,
Speaker 1: if they did a shitty job, because they might have
Speaker 1: bondled it back on there. But like it's a bunch
Speaker 1: of goog up in there. Horned. Most your horned and
Speaker 1: go ahead, explained horn sheath and horn. Yeah case and
Speaker 1: point point my massive antelope. Huh, I wonder about my analope.
Speaker 1: Let's well, I was going to bring up your antelope
Speaker 1: skull because your folks they sealed. I noticed they sealed
Speaker 1: around the bases of the horn sheath, which I'd never
Speaker 1: seen before. Most horned animals have a bone core and
Speaker 1: a horn sheet, not antlered, but horn horn. And there's
Speaker 1: a lot of There is a lot of those between
Speaker 1: those two. Man And if you don't get that off,
Speaker 1: you can do a couple different methods, but for most
Speaker 1: practical purposes, we call it sweating. You get it all
Speaker 1: skinned out, and then you just wrap it in plastic bags,
Speaker 1: like three or four bags and leave it in like
Speaker 1: room temperature area for three to five days. It's called
Speaker 1: that rotting them off. Yeah, you guys called right, And
Speaker 1: then you can just twist and pop them off and
Speaker 1: then on the inside just like just like goo in there, right,
Speaker 1: the gooey ist of goo is the sheep. That one's
Speaker 1: always that's impressive taking big horns and pop those off.
Speaker 1: But and then that you're saying, like that's what's kind
Speaker 1: of rotting inside? That would give because they will try
Speaker 1: in place if you left it out and like you know,
Speaker 1: if you brought it in, the guy just takes the
Speaker 1: skull cap off and left the horns on and underneath
Speaker 1: the horns. In a year's time hanging up in a building,
Speaker 1: it will dry on there and you would have to
Speaker 1: soak it in water get it to come off. Never,
Speaker 1: it's never gonna smell right. My brother Danny, he's got
Speaker 1: when he's doing doll sheet, he takes a cooler and
Speaker 1: takes a contractor bag, puts a sheep head in there,
Speaker 1: pours a cup of water in there, waits a long time,
Speaker 1: pulls it out, lays out a piece of plywood on
Speaker 1: the ground and hooks it down and pop, you know,
Speaker 1: also do you wiggle the horn? Pop right off. He's
Speaker 1: got his whole little system that's got a special piece
Speaker 1: of plywood for that purpose. Like a good what it
Speaker 1: is unbelievably foul though, like the beer mugs are making
Speaker 1: now out of horns, sing and drink out of it.
Speaker 1: I would never drink out of one. I've spent too
Speaker 1: much time. Like when I see him, I always like, huh,
Speaker 1: you just smell it looking at like a little vix
Speaker 1: vapor rub in a mask, you know, to help cut
Speaker 1: down on it. And I'm like, I'm not drinking out
Speaker 1: of that thing. How do if people wanted to bring
Speaker 1: something to your studio but they don't live around you,
Speaker 1: how do you how do they like make that decision?
Speaker 1: Not how do they make this that's not the right
Speaker 1: word what they like? You don't just like stick a
Speaker 1: deer in the mail. We get a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: shipped in through FedEx, FedEx and ups. We get stuff
Speaker 1: shipped in. They can skin their deer down to the
Speaker 1: base of the head, sever the head yep. Use most
Speaker 1: commonly like even like this tote here, that's just stuff
Speaker 1: that we get stacks of totes brought in there and
Speaker 1: you'll talk him through the process, yep. And that we
Speaker 1: usually recommend doing FedEx second day air um, not overnight
Speaker 1: because usually it should be frozen. And asked the thought
Speaker 1: out and they got to have the paperwork square and
Speaker 1: help with the paperwork, and they go down and get
Speaker 1: everything set up. And we had a deer show up
Speaker 1: on last night actually from Wisconsin, so he has wanted
Speaker 1: you to do it. That's not a problem. Nope, No,
Speaker 1: we get most of our work and you created and
Speaker 1: shipping back to him. Yeah, yep, we ship all over
Speaker 1: the country. She got a guy that just making crates
Speaker 1: m hm. And then we also this year there was
Speaker 1: another company with the the rise on like the materials
Speaker 1: for creating all the lumber prices. They started doing crate lists.
Speaker 1: So this company doesn't do anything besides ship taxidermy. They
Speaker 1: just travel around and so you don't have the cost
Speaker 1: of the crate factored in. And they have the same
Speaker 1: systems of plates that we mount all of our stuff
Speaker 1: to the stands when we're actually working on them, and
Speaker 1: so they'll just take it and put a plate on
Speaker 1: it and mount him in the trailer and then just
Speaker 1: travel around drop it off. There's a guy in Alaska.
Speaker 1: There's probably motile guys in Alaska do that. They like
Speaker 1: Their business is at the end of the year transporting
Speaker 1: hauling all that ship down to the lower forty eight.
Speaker 1: And then they got drop off points. Yep, we just
Speaker 1: had big moose and adul sheep dropped off at our
Speaker 1: tannery and then I'll go pick up the antlers at
Speaker 1: some point. But we got a long time until its
Speaker 1: stand and then uh like uh, I have to go
Speaker 1: over to John Edwards from standing is Um, they harvested
Speaker 1: a big Yukon moose and us so I'm gonna pick
Speaker 1: up the antlers from them today. And their cape got
Speaker 1: drop shipped right to one of our tanneries in Michigan.
Speaker 1: And then we just got confirmation yesterday that it'll be
Speaker 1: here next week. So we'll make that loop and pick
Speaker 1: that up and they're gonna do a half life size
Speaker 1: in the store. Really yeah, yeah, just the ass end
Speaker 1: my old man had, My old man had, my brothers
Speaker 1: stole the ass when you went in the bathroom. Inside
Speaker 1: the bathroom was the pig's ass, and outside the bathroom
Speaker 1: with the pig's head. But he did that thing the
Speaker 1: guys used to do in the old days, where like
Speaker 1: when they price still do when you glue the toss
Speaker 1: in you barely stick the tuscan and then glue it
Speaker 1: so it looks like it's got like huge like fives
Speaker 1: going out of it, you know. And now then you'll
Speaker 1: see old where they would like really exaggerate bear fangs. Dude,
Speaker 1: they let a lot of hang out, let a lot
Speaker 1: of it hang out to make it look more ferocious.
Speaker 1: That's not your scene, no, no, I honestly, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: more into just the details of trying to make it
Speaker 1: look alive again. Yeah, well, I'm Johnny Man the bear
Speaker 1: the barry did the close mouth bear rugg you did
Speaker 1: for me. I don't wait to see you. It's I'm
Speaker 1: still waiting for Chester. I supposed to be hanging at
Speaker 1: some pitch up. But these guys Seth and Chester actually
Speaker 1: have a little desk these Chester is not here, but
Speaker 1: they have a little desk next to each other, and
Speaker 1: they call their little area the bear Den. It's like
Speaker 1: in the Muppets. It's two old man. They have that
Speaker 1: little booth, you know. It's called the mediums the medium sketch. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't raring. It certainly wasn't done. But they're in
Speaker 1: kind of a recessed area. But my bear is hanging
Speaker 1: over the rail and the bear den right now, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get a hung up as clay as going up
Speaker 1: there too. I don't know what we're gonna do with
Speaker 1: ex seed now. It's gonna take a while, but we Yeah,
Speaker 1: never mind that thing is there's a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1: Is I get moved to a new place at some
Speaker 1: point soon, meaning all of our ship, all of your ship.
Speaker 1: So it's just hard to get excited about hanging anything
Speaker 1: up right now? Right competitive delivery serve us? Were you
Speaker 1: factor in the cost of me listening to how you
Speaker 1: got the animal I delivered, not to show up to deliver.
Speaker 1: I will give you an hour of happened? How far
Speaker 1: did you go? Good? Hit on it? All the questions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can sell that you got all the retired Border
Speaker 1: Patrol guys and stuff for that stuff. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: hanging out with the coffee shop. But they could a
Speaker 1: little more new faces to what's the ballistic coefficient on that? Alright,
Speaker 1: Hayes tax jermy studio, Libby Montana. Do you got more
Speaker 1: room for more business? Your business? And I got a
Speaker 1: hide in a freezer I told you about. You got
Speaker 1: to take that absolutely bring with him right now. Yep.
Speaker 1: Did you get Yanni's Bobcat yet? Not yet? Not yet?
Speaker 1: We just got actually when I was pulling up here
Speaker 1: this morning, we just got confirmation on the reproductions going
Speaker 1: there in the works for the sheep. Now that's gonna
Speaker 1: be cool. Yeah, should be pretty new. Big horn. That
Speaker 1: was the first bear ever skinned all and it was
Speaker 1: all by myself in the middle of the night. So
Speaker 1: hopefully I didn't does he miss an appendage? That's that's
Speaker 1: old stumpy. You can do a recreation on the appendage.
Speaker 1: Put a fish on it, you mean like head, is
Speaker 1: it black? You got a human arm? You can is
Speaker 1: it a black color phase? Yeah? Black? Yep, we could
Speaker 1: put another one on there. Kind of like the way
Speaker 1: it was, keep it the way it was, like Clays bear,
Speaker 1: yeah whatever, Like did you reconstruct that bear's face or
Speaker 1: did it stay the same? That looked like it been
Speaker 1: a hit about lawnmower, the opera kind of stuff. The face, Um,
Speaker 1: you can only do so much before you distort the
Speaker 1: shape of the face. We were able to take out
Speaker 1: as many of the shave outs. And my boys just
Speaker 1: watched that episode like a week ago there, like what's
Speaker 1: wrong with that bear's head? And then we uh, the
Speaker 1: ears were so far gone. We had to cut the
Speaker 1: ears off another stock bear we had and lay those
Speaker 1: onto you know, you guys talk about different bears. A
Speaker 1: you're talking about the bear Clays bear had gotten in
Speaker 1: a fight. He'd been in a fight and had his
Speaker 1: muzzle all bit up. He thought about Clay had, oh,
Speaker 1: like the biggest black the biggest black bear rug because
Speaker 1: not just a length but I mean it's huge, just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: did you do? It was all messed up? He had
Speaker 1: it was all destroyed, messed up, and he rejuvenated it.
Speaker 1: Got it was. It wasn't taken care of. He didn't
Speaker 1: know what he's gonna do with it. He had a
Speaker 1: hanging around his house as just like a rug that's
Speaker 1: like a tan hide. My bad. I thought we were
Speaker 1: talking about, Oh the bear that got bit up by
Speaker 1: a bear. I don't know what he did with that bear. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it turned out great. It was. It was lucky.
Speaker 1: We luckily we had the right bears in stock to
Speaker 1: us to take pieces after place parts and stuff. So
Speaker 1: it was definitely yeah, I got lucky on that. And
Speaker 1: my bear is beautiful. Man, my clothes mouth bear rug.
Speaker 1: I'm a real soccer for rugs. Man. I like those
Speaker 1: bear rugs. I like rugs. Always did a great job,
Speaker 1: enjoyed doing him. A lot of places to kind of
Speaker 1: look down on rug work. They're like, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: I have my my wife do that or something. I
Speaker 1: didn't know that. Yeah, it's not really not really likestigious thing.
Speaker 1: I got like I gave some away, but yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I got like a mountain lion rug, Himalayan tar
Speaker 1: rug that gave my body. A lot of bear rugs,
Speaker 1: rugs the old. Yeah, yeah, I always like a lot.
Speaker 1: I think a well done rug is really beautiful. Bad
Speaker 1: rugs for bad you know I'm saying bad anything, you know,
Speaker 1: bad rugs for bad people? All right, Hayze Tax Durny
Speaker 1: Studio yourself. No, it does beautiful stuff. Go look at
Speaker 1: the crazy ass kyote squishy thing as Steve Hornella. Make
Speaker 1: sure to hit following you there on Instagram. Go to
Speaker 1: Hayes tax rest. Go and see for yourself beautiful work.
Speaker 1: I'll live in Montana and I'll send a box over there.
Speaker 1: We'll be there. Rough skin it so it's got a
Speaker 1: lot of fat meat on it. Throw a jar, assault
Speaker 1: on Aaron. Do they need to send you an email
Speaker 1: beforehand that like, hey, I'm sending a box or do
Speaker 1: you just get boxes from I strongly encourage before contact
Speaker 1: before Yeah, we actually had a amount of animal ship
Speaker 1: to us with no name, no times, act, no nothing.
Speaker 1: And I was like, well, you know, run it through
Speaker 1: the tanning process. And it was probably the most patient
Speaker 1: customer we ever had. It was about four years later
Speaker 1: this guy calls up and He's like, hey, man, where's
Speaker 1: my or whatever it was? And I'm like who are
Speaker 1: Like who are you? You know? And he gives me
Speaker 1: his name and I was like okay, So I go
Speaker 1: to the alphabetical file trying to find him. I was like,
Speaker 1: when did he send it? And he's like it's been
Speaker 1: a long time, all right. I'm rippling to there. I'm like,
Speaker 1: you're not even on file and I was like, wait
Speaker 1: a second, was it did you ship? He's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's me. I'm like, well, you gotta put your name
Speaker 1: in it. Before he ascended to me, there was nothing
Speaker 1: there and he's like, oh, you still got it. I
Speaker 1: was like, we still got it. We were doing yeah,
Speaker 1: able to get it down and get it to him.
Speaker 1: That's great, that's happy. End the story. Oh Everyboddy John Hayes,
Speaker 1: thanks a lot for joining. Thank you very much. Send
Speaker 1: send all your text and re ordered John who get
Speaker 1: you squared away? Those beautiful work. And I should point
Speaker 1: out the Freedom Mounts look amazing. I call him, You're
Speaker 1: I don't like remember how they had to rebrand French
Speaker 1: for during the Iraq invasion. Yes, I don't like calling
Speaker 1: the European Mounts freedom Mounts. Freedom mounts, whether that yeah, beautiful,
Speaker 1: less or more, it's called the freedom mount. Judge a
Speaker 1: little less, a little less just the skull, but the
Speaker 1: bear is beautiful. I think it's pinned this way. When
Speaker 1: your kids picking up to show their friend and the
Speaker 1: jaw doesn't fall off the floor break in half, you
Speaker 1: prevent all that from happening. I feel like there's two
Speaker 1: things around without the European mounts a little more expensive,
Speaker 1: and it's gonna smell like cigarette Freedom mount over here.
Speaker 1: All right, thanks a lot, everybody,