Weird Taxidermy

What do a dusty old crocodile, a man's severed foot, and a rat with human teeth have in common? If you're thinking a nightmare, good guess. Wrong though, because the croc, the foot, and the rat aren't the stuff of bad dreams at all, but they are stuffed. We're talking taxidermy, and today's story takes us from a medieval church to a scissor workshop in Tennessee where roadkill is lovingly transformed into art.

If you're ever lucky enough to visit Italy and you happen to make a pilgrimage to the very small town of Ponte Nossa, chances are you're headed to see the portrait of the weeping Madonna. The Virgin Mary, that is, not the pop star. See a miracle took place in this small village way back in 1511. A group of shepherdesses were visiting the town's small chapel and they were gazing at a portrait of the crucifixion.

Christ flanked on each side by Saint John and the Blessed Mother, the Madonna. As the young women gazed at the painting, they saw Mary's left eye open and close. Blood appeared on her cheek. As one of the girls used her apron to wipe away the bloody tears, the painted virgin spoke to them. She instructed the shepherdesses to share the news of this miracle far and wide, and she also declared that a church should be built in her name on this very ground.

So extraordinary was this event that the construction of the new cathedral was authorized just eight days later and was completed by 1533. Today it's called the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Immaculate Tears. OK, so maybe you're thinking, well, cool, cool, cool. But you have to be kind of a hardcore Catholic to make that trip, right?

I mean, it's pretty off the beaten tourist path, isn't it? Well, yeah, for sure. But there's another reason to pay a visit to the Cathedral of Ponte Nossa. Hanging from its rafters is the world's oldest known piece of taxidermy, an enormous stuffed crocodile. Now, where the stuffed croc came from has been lost to time, though the church has documents on this particular piece of taxidermy that date back to 1534.

So we do know for certain that the croc is at least 500 years old. It managed to go missing rather mysteriously for many years until it turned up in the 1700s right in the church attic. What'd they do? They dusted it off and they strung it up from the rafters where it's been dangling ever since. But why? Crocodiles are not holy creatures in the Catholic cosmology.

And for anyone out there who's thinking, yeah, but well, don't Catholics pray to statues? Maybe they also worship reptiles. No, and no, again, neither of those things are true. And the taxidermy croc in the Cathedral of Ponte Nossa actually isn't even the only crocodile on display in the European church. There are at least two more in Italy alone.

So let me ask it again. But why? Like all of the best random and weird human artifacts, this one is good and mysterious. Some people have argued that crocodiles were once native to Europe and used to harass and stalk and eat the people. Now, the problem with this idea is that there is zero evidence to support it, as in like none. And even if you decide to go with the notion that crocs once gnawed their way through the population of Europe, why would those like hunting trophies be displayed in churches? Other people have suggested that ancient churches were once packed with all sorts of taxidermy beasts, whole menageries even.

But only the crocodile's tough hide managed to survive the ravages of time. Again, no evidence out there to back up the whole churches full of stuffed animals hypothesis. The theory that does seem to make the most sense is that the crocodile is the one real animal on Earth that most closely fits the biblical description of a dragon.

And listen, there are some righteously dragon tales in the good book, like St. George. Anybody? The holy old crocodile in Ponte Nossa is impressive, but taxidermy is a far more ancient art than that. And you know who invented it, right? Say it with me, Max. Ancient Egyptians. Crazy how they seem to have invented everything but electricity and Dippin Dots, isn't it?

Back in the days of the pharaohs, it was common to preserve and mummify the ruler's animals, birds, dogs, monkeys, cats, all preserved with spices and oils, and they chucked into the tomb to accompany their masters into the afterlife. Taxidermy for the ancient Egyptians was a practical matter, not an aesthetic one. So they didn't trouble themselves with getting a monkey or a dog just right, which means to us their results would probably look both horrifying and hilarious.

Now, maybe you grew up around hunters like I did, and your whole idea of taxidermy is trophies. The 12-point buck mounted on the living room wall, the fox captured mid-prowl, the enormous moose head, keep in watch at a sports bar. Wildlife museums with enormous grizzly bears standing on two legs, massive paws and claws outstretched, mouths open in a permanent roar.

When you think about it, for a lot of us, taxidermy is the closest we'll ever get to a caribou or a bobcat or a bear. Movies like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for example, might have given you some pretty whack ideas about what taxidermy is or the kind of people taxidermists are. At the most fundamental level, taxidermy is about skin, and taxidermists are artists and preservationists.

There's even a natural history museum in Paris that has an entire exhibit devoted to the taxidermy mounts of extinct animals. They keep the lights extra low and the air extra cool to help preserve these final relics of animal species that once roamed the earth, but they're now lost forever. Like Schomburg's deer, a creature native to Thailand that was hunted into extinction for its ornate antlers.

And the quagga, a very peculiar blend of a donkey and a zebra. It got its name for its distinctive and weird cry, which sounded like quagga, quagga, quagga. Kind of breaks your heart a little bit, doesn't it? A museum of extinct animals. There is a lot of truly terrible, hilariously bad taxidermy out there, and some of the most famous examples are actually housed in museums all over the world, like the hugely overstuffed walrus at London's Horniman Museum and Gardens.

The taxidermist who created it in 1866 had never even seen a walrus, and no one bothered to send any sort of description of the animal along with its hide. So he didn't know that walruses are wrinkly. He stuffed it till it looks like an exploding ballpark hot dog. Oops. And how about the legendary lion of Gripsholm Castle in Sweden?

The taxidermist there who gamely tried to capture the likeness of King Frederick's, the first deceased giant kitty best friend, ended up creating something so goofy that it resembles a stuffed toy dreamt up in the imagination of a lunatic. But let's forget mounted trophies and scientific exhibits for museums, because there's an entire world of taxidermy that has less to do with realism and everything to do with art and expression, weird taxidermy and gaffes, creatures that never existed anywhere except in the taxidermist's imagination.

The most famous taxidermy gaffe of all time is probably the legendary Fiji mermaid exhibited by none other than P.T. Barnum back in 1842. My personal favorite gaffe is the jackalope, that fearsome jackrabbit with a full rack of It was invented in Douglas, Wyoming in 1934 by a taxidermist named Ralph Herrick with some help from his brother, Doug.

Jackalopes are a nice, lucrative little business out west today. Quality mounts will set you back hundreds and hundreds of dollars. And as much as I begged my parents for a jackalope, we never had that kind of money to burn. But today, the True Weird Stuff HQ is guarded by our very own jackalope. His name is Dante. Don't ever give up on your dreams.

This is taxidermy that isn't aiming for scientific realism at all. Taxidermy is art and expression, anthropomorphic taxidermy, animals cast in human settings. Or how about taxidermy chimeras, fantastical creatures made by combining the hides, pelts, feathers, claws and teeth of all kinds of animals. The wealthy, you know, like the aristocracy and nobility dating all the way back to the Renaissance, collected these sorts of objects and showed them off to their friends in something they called the Cabinet of Curiosity.

Back in the days before we had Netflix and games and mp3 players, you had to make your own fun. And what could be more fun than having some folks over for a flagon of mead and to see your newly acquired mermaid? The enthusiasm for collecting these sorts of things comes in and out of fashion, but it's never gone away because people, people are just so odd and so weird and so very interesting. I met a taxidermist who specializes in the weird and the strange at an event called the Oddities and Curiosities Expo.

His name is Matthew Fite, and he's the artist behind Rogue Wolf Taxidermy in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. So I've always had a love for nature and animals, even, you know, as far as I could remember as a kid. You know, when I would walk around the yard, you know, I would find bird feathers and dead bugs and I would want to put them in like a scrapbook of sorts.

So I think that was kind of like the first starting of it all. But then later in life, when I was about 13, I joined Boy Scouts and that really got it started because in one of the handbooks, it kind of had like a diagram that would kind of start you off, like how to how to process, I think it was like a squirrel or something, and tell you all the steps to do it.

So, so did you at that age grab yourself a squirrel and and commence to trying to process and preserve the pelt? Not far after that I started, but no, at 13, I was more asking my parents for Christmas and birthdays instead of toys and stuff that a normal kid would ask for. I always wanted them to buy me like a taxidermy something, you know, those kind of like gift shop, like taxidermy gator feet and stuff from like Florida and stuff like that. And there's every time I saw like a taxidermy anything in like an antique store, I would always be like, I want that.

So it kind of started that way. But then I'd say when I was probably about 15 is when I actually started to dabble in it. So up until that point, I would also if I came across, say, like a dead animal walking in the woods or something, I would try to bury it and then I would come back and pull the bones up and I would collect the bones.

So I started in that side of it. But then one day I came across this dead rat that one of our outside cats had killed. And, you know, I thought to myself, you know, I can bury it. And, you know, if assuming something doesn't drag it off, then I'll have some bones and that's cool. But, you know, I reference back to that Boy Scout manual that kind of showed me how to do it.

And I was like, I'm going to try to do it. So I tried and it basically turned into a rat fur sausage. It had no structure in it. Very, very crude for sure. But that was definitely the start. I'm wondering if like your family and friends and neighbors were at all troubled by the sight of the young Matthew digging up bones and then, you know, turning the rat into a sausage. Like, I think we all can understand that for people who are not fans of or into taxidermy, that can look like some real unsolved mysteries level behavior.

And I'm sure they did. But if my family was kind of troubled by it, they never really showed it. They they're for the most part pretty supportive, actually. So, I mean, they would give me like, you know, the taxidermy things for Christmas and they were all they were fine with it as far as I know. So and I think it was that gradual transition rather than just kind of a, hey, I want to play with this dead thing.

You know, it was they always knew I loved animals. So I think that was less disturbing for them in that in that sense. If you're getting a young Jeffrey Dahmer vibe, I understand because that's the pop culture frame of reference we have. It drives Matthew crazy. You know, and I hate that media has to kind of portray the taxidermist as this Norman Bates kind of serial killer.

And that's that's like his starting approach. And then it goes into people. And, you know, a lot of us aren't like that. You know, most taxidermists are just a Bubba Ray good old boy who hunts and stuffs beer. And then the others like us have this possibly morbid fascination with it, but otherwise are the nicest people and the most harmless people you'll ever come across.

So let's talk about the kind of people that are drawn to taxidermy as an art form. I mean, for a lot of folks, they think about it as something hunters do. Right. You go and you get a trophy buck or an elk or whatever and you take it to a taxidermist and there it is mounted on your wall. Proof of your great hunting skill.

But that's just one kind of taxidermy. There's an entire art world and there's a spiritual component to it. So when you're when you're making when you're making something and you're making it for a person, who are the people that are coming to you? You know, a lot of the people that come to me are actually what I would call just regular people. Usually they're looking for a pet that they're that they're missing, that they recently lost and just want to keep that that part of them forever.

So a lot of the people that I do clientele work with are pet owners and then I get all sorts. So as far as taxidermy goes, I mean, a lot of people don't look at it. But if you look at old Victorian era taxidermy, it's not very different than what I do now with the anthropomorphic rats and frogs and things like that. They they were still doing that back then.

So. Like you said, it kind of has this first start out of deer heads for hunters or turkeys for hunters, but there's this whole. Grouping of people that you just kind of like the odd people that are into it and tattoo artists, reptile owners, kind of this punk rock era of people all kind of tend to flock towards it. Your work is is kind of surreal and dreamy.

Let's let's talk about some of the pieces that you do. I saw some of Matthew's work at an Oddities and Curiosities Expo, which is a kind of a traveling convention for, say it with me, Oddities and Curiosities. And one of the things that made me jump backward from your work were the your use of human teeth with some of your pieces.

So let's let's start talk to us about that. I'll start by saying that they're not real human teeth, you know, you can definitely find those places, but I use just acrylic denture sets, you can buy just like individual teeth as a set for for making dentures, basically. So they're acrylic plastic, basically. And I use that in some of my pieces and I started doing that fairly recently.

And it's just let's go weird, let's go macabre, like how weird can I make it and how do people react to that? So a lot of my inspiration comes from both fantasy genres of books and movies and like those horror for sure. So horror is a big one. And, you know, eyes, teeth, that tends to give people the heebie jeebies. And I like to see the reaction in that.

There's kind of a reckoning that you make with your own mortality when you see pieces that are meant to represent, because I know you're not using real human eyes and real human teeth. Right. But when you see parts of the human anatomy kind of transposed onto an animal's body, there's like this weird like feeling that goes through you, because on the one hand, you have to remember that you, too, are an animal.

And on the other hand, you have to remember that you, too, are mortal and impermanent. And I think that's what that's the unsettling aspect of of your particular work as a taxidermist for me, is that it's an it it kind of lives in that that corner, that intersection of stuff that is completely familiar and you expect to see and stuff that should never, ever exist in the real world.

I've never heard it worded so perfectly, actually. That's that's really good. Yeah, that's basically what it does to you. But yeah, I agree. I think it is seeing just parts of of human anatomy mixed in. It kind of does give like this. We, too, will eventually die. And, you know, is this real? Is this a real eyeball or tooth or, you know, it does kind of bring an awakening to your own mortality.

And you mentioned how a lot of the client work that, you know, people come and they commission amount. Is that the correct way to say it in taxidermy? They commission amount. And it's for a pet. So I've read a lot of interesting things about pet taxidermy and how, you know, you trying to capture is this sort of ineffable spirit of this beloved companion animal.

And and even the best, most skillful and soulful taxidermy work doesn't give you that. And then what happens to it when, you know, like when you die and your kids are are are dealing with stuffed muffy or whatever it was. So do you have conversations right to have conversations with the people who come to grieving the loss of these beloved animals and what it is they're hoping for?

Yeah, so ironically, I do try to kind of steer people away from just a traditional taxidermy mount, say for a dog where you really do have to get that expression perfect or else that's not their dog. That's just a dog. So, you know, when it comes to stuff like that, I try to actually gear towards skeletal preservation. So it's a lot easier to look at a skeleton and not see exactly Rover, but then know it's there symbolically.

Things like that, things like just preserving some parts of the skin, even having a frame, so you basically have just this kind of hand fur and you can kind of pet and it'll still feel like your dog that you miss and everything. But certain animals are easier than others. So dogs are obviously the hardest. I mean, I would say getting a dog's expression right would be trying like to get a person's expression right.

It's nearly impossible. That's interesting. But I get a lot of getting capturing that sort of spark of identity that you see in a dog's eyes and faces that that's just as if you're that is so fascinating. That will be as hard as a person. That says a lot about dogs, doesn't it? It says a lot about dogs. I mean, they're man's best friend.

So, of course, you know, we we see all those fine details in their expression and in their faces that that you would have the same details you would see in a person recognizing your dog versus, you know, someone else's dog or your grandmother versus someone else's grandmother. So it's just that detail that you can't really get.

But I do a lot of cats and they're a little bit easier. They still have that expression, but cats are. I guess not as. In tune with people as as a dog is, so it's a little bit easier that way, and. You know, I do a lot of like reptile and birds and those are the same way, you know, a reptile's face is like any other reptile's face for the most part.

You're right about cats. I've read I read once that the reason that cats took over the Internet and are so memable is because cats have very expressive faces, but but their facial looks there's like a catalog of cat faces and it's rare to find a cat with a face so unusual that it can't be like universal. Right. So, I mean, I hear what you're.

Saying about that. And of course, you know, fish, birds, lizards. Do you get do you get requests for bunnies and guinea pigs and little tiny things like hamsters? I probably get that second to most. Actually, I'd say that's first over over the reptiles and the cats, small rabbits, you know, hamsters. I get clientele looking for those all the time.

And, you know, for the most part, I think they're already into the taxidermy business already, and that's probably how they got my name. But that's kind of like one that's an easy one to start out with. You think about a rabbit and a hamster, they live, what, between three to maybe 10 years at best. So, you know, it's no less love, but.

They kind of come through our lives a little bit faster than, say, a dog who might live up to 20 years. And when you when you do like let's say you've taxidermied a bunny for someone and they've come to you and said, Matthew, this is Mr. Mr. Buttons, and I would like to keep him forever. And I'd also like him wearing a tuxedo when he's finished.

So have you had to also master the fine art of teeny tiny taxidermy animal seamstress work? Like because when we're going to send everyone, I'm going to post links at True Weird Stuff dot com for Matthew's social media and we're going to share pictures so that you can see his work because it's just so surreal and delightful. Like some of it you'll go and some of it you'll laugh out loud.

I mean, it's just so playful. But these these little outfits and little props and stuff, you're making all of that, too. Yeah, so I like to tell people as an art form, taxidermy is a mixture of painting, sculpting, carving, hairstyling. And for me, with the anthropomorphic things, it involves seamstress and clothes designing fashion.

So it's all these things tied into into one whole piece that kind of collabs together. I could probably stand to be a little better with my clothing. So a lot of it is held together with glue instead of actual sewing, just because it's faster and a little easier to do. But I do love when I finish, say, a tuxedo for a rat and and see it just perfectly matched and just fitted to the to the the rat itself so perfectly in detail that it does put a big smile on my face when it comes together in the end.

Let's go through a project. So take us take us from beginning to end with a project animal of your choice. OK, I'll start with one of the more popular ones that I do just because they're the easiest. So let's say you get a rat. Like I said earlier, I don't kill anything. I don't hunt. None of that stuff. I'm a pure scavenger.

So rats are easier to come by because you can go to a pet store or a website and buy frozen dead rats. And typically, you know, you'd feed that to a python or something, but I'll take some and use for myself. So I start with a rat, thaw it out, and then you make an incision. Depending on what kind of piece I do or what kind of animal I'm using, there's different forms to skinning.

So there is more than one way to skin a cat. Typically, I'll make a small incision from about where you would think the belly button is down to the groin and kind of. Start peeling the skin away from the muscle, so it's just held there with membrane, which is surprisingly easy to detach and think of it as just this clothing, one piece suit that's over your muscle body.

So you're able to just kind of unzip the rat's pelt or skin or whatever the outer covering of the rat is, you're able to just kind of work that off. Yep, you just kind of work it off. It's kind of like rolling the thumb between the membrane and it all kind of comes off from itself. So, you know, the feet, small animals like that, I'll just cut the feet right there. So whether they're still attached to the skin itself and I'll just kind of cut them at the joint and they'll dry out just fine.

And the tail, you just kind of flip off like a glove. But let's say you finish all that, the gory details of the skinning job, you got the body by itself. Put that aside. I have pets that will that will eat that. I have a possum, so he gets to eat the body parts that we don't use for bones and stuff like that. And then you have the most fun I've had in a long time, I'm going to be honest with you, Matthew, you are the most fun.

So I didn't know possums. I guess I never really, no, I never really thought to consider like what a possum's diet is. They're omnivores, they'll eat pretty much whatever. They're also scavengers. Pretty much whatever. They have a really sensitive amount of, they get metabolic bone disease quite easily. So they have to have a good amount of calcium that you want in their natural diet.

So in the wild, they would eat rats and mice and whatever other little critter they might be able to catch. So it's just a good way for them to get those those nutrients and calciums in the bones and stuff naturally instead of having a poor diet, basically. And I like to make sure that the animal is always used. Right, so you're not because you said you're a scavenger and a true scavenger doesn't waste anything, right?

I mean, everything has a purpose. Exactly. You've unzipped the rat and you've set its outer fur aside because taxidermy, and I think as a kid, I thought that taxidermy was the fur, the skeleton, the bones, all of it. And it isn't, is it? No. So, I mean, if you if you break down the word taxidermy itself, it basically means to move skin.

So, you know, I can't say when it actually started, like the term itself, but it was only the skin that you would keep. It probably started in classification where, like, they go to the Galapagos Islands and have all the Darwin's finches. They're all skins that were just stuff to keep as a specimen. So, it's kind of all changed now.

So, taxidermy is kind of this broader term, at least in the oddity community. And I could be anywhere from just a mummified cat that was just found under a house, or it could be just a skeleton or just bones themselves, but in different art forms. It all kind of gets called taxidermy. But technically in itself, taxidermy is the process of preserving the skin.

So, that is when you're working with a mount, with an animal, that that is your primary objective is to get the skin off as cleanly as possible because that's going to be what you're working with. That's your medium. So, one of my common questions I get from people is, are the eyes real? Or where are the guts? And that sort of thing.

And a lot of people don't understand that that's not how you preserve the animal. All that stuff is thrown away, basically. So, you don't use any of that. It's just the skin that you then put over the mannequin, which back to the next step in the taxidermy process would be getting the mannequin. So, I use polyurethane foam and it's just an expanding foam that I'll either pour into a fitted mold of said rat carcass imprint, basically.

And when it dries, I can just pull it out and it'll be the shape of a rat. Or I'll kind of put it into a potato-sized mass that then I can kind of carve out and slice and dice it until it is carved out into that shape of the rat. That's two different ways to make a form that I typically use. There's other methods as well, but I find the polyurethane the most easy to work with.

Okay. So, sometimes you hand carve the shape and sometimes you use mold. Okay. Then what happens? So, then you want to process the skin. And ideally, you'll have the mold already done before you even do the skinning. But you want to process the skin so it'll stay preserved and bugs and stuff won't eat it and it won't continue to rot.

And so, with a rat, I start by soaking in an alcohol that'll help kind of tighten the skin around the fur. Small animals like rats are really easy to slip. That just means that the fur starts to fall off from the skin itself, which then you got to either get really creative or kind of throw away that one altogether. So, that's the first process I use.

Then I start to dry them out. I use Borax. That's a kit that I learned from other taxidermists along the way in my form. And that'll help dry it out. It'll also help keep bugs from wanting to eat it. Borax is just basically laundry detergent, but it tends to do a good job. And while you're drying it out, you want to get every bit of muscle, fat, extra membrane, everything off that skin.

So, it comes off quite easy from the body, but it always leaves a little bit of subcutaneous fat or little bits of muscle that pulled along the way. So, you clean that off to where it's just one clean piece of skin from the inside and then fur on the outside. And if it's a big animal, you would want to tan it out, at least what's called a wet tan.

Essentially, it's completely prepped to be tanned. You just don't put that softening oil agent on it, or you do a regular tan and you do put that softening agent. That's basically making leather, but just with fur on one side of it. When I first started, of course, I was doing it just outside my house when I lived with my parents.

And all the dirty stuff, let's say, was done outside. Once it became a cleaned off skin, I might move in the garage and start doing that. But I was living in a one bedroom apartment, which didn't give me a whole lot of room to do much of anything. I had an outside porch that I could do. Luckily, I was in a third story, so kind of kept out of the eyesight of most people.

But I did the dirty work there. And then I would just go into the living room. Of course, I had a table and everything covered to work with. But yeah, I was pretty much working in my one bedroom apartment. But recently, I have a house now with an offset barn slash garage. That's kind of now my workshop. So I do most of all that stuff in there.

And then when it just comes to decorating or the fine detail work, airbrushing, that sort of stuff, I will bring it inside to work on in the living room or in our art room, basically. So when you were, Matthew, when you were in the one bedroom apartment, the third floor one bedroom apartment stage of taxidermy, did that make dating kind of challenging for people like to come back to my place?

Don't mind. Don't mind the pelts and tiny feet. I luckily met my wife before I started doing taxidermy like as intensely as I do it now. I did it since high school. And yeah, dating was a little hard. But in college, I wasn't doing it as often. And I met what was to be my wife back then. And luckily, she was kind of into the same thing.

So she didn't do taxidermy. What she was collecting bones and doing that sort of stuff. So it was very welcomed. And it was just a smooth transition into it. Good, good. Because I mean, especially after the Netflix Dahmer documentary, it could be it could be challenging. You know, say you're single. You meet a nice city girl.

You bring her over. She sees the possum in one corner, the little pile of rat feet on the table. You're going to bed alone, I think that night. So I'm glad that it worked out for you. Oh, yeah, for sure. I'm definitely glad I found somebody now and not trying to be in the dating world. You know, right now, because that would definitely be pretty rough.

So we've got we've got we've unzipped the rat. We have the pelt. You've tanned it or at least, you know, cured it to the degree that you're going to. You've got your form that you've made out of polystyrene. Now what happens? All right. So think of the form as a JCPenney's mannequin. Okay. So the skin is the clothing.

If it's fitted right, then you will just start to shape the skin, pull the skin over into the form using that incision you originally skinned it from. If it's a big mount or a medium sized mount, there's different. It's basically hide glue. It's a glue paste that you would put on the form that adheres the skin to it. And it kind of gets those fine details around the muscle and that sort of thing and keeps the skin from shriveling or doing anything that it shouldn't.

So that's one thing you would kind of put on as you're as you're mounting it and putting the skin over the form. But essentially, you just flip the form on or the skin on and then you start to fit it around the hips and around the thighs and get those all fitted into itself. So you do that and you'll start to pin it in different areas, especially around the face.

You'll pin the mouth and the nose area. So that'll give it a little expression. In my rats, I always like to upturn one of the pins and give it on its side of its mouth a little bit of a Mona Lisa smile, if you will. That's just one of my signature moves. Um, and then once you have it pinned, you get the fake eyes, you put those in there.

Uh, you'll use, um, I use like a mesh screen, like a bendable mesh screen. And I'll kind of bend the ears and kind of fit those ears in place so they don't shrink or shrivel or anything. And then you wait. You basically sew it up and kind of pin it into the position you need it to be in and let it sit out and dry. That's the longest part of the process right there.

Most things are typically done within a week's time. Some things take longer, some things take less. For instance, I actually just did some frogs the other night and they're dried out and So now they're ready for just some of the, the finer detailing. So I want to talk about the soul of the animal. You know, not everyone believes that animals have souls.

So maybe we'll just say the word essence. And we can all agree that every, every living thing has some force inside it. However you want to characterize it. Right. And I'm wondering if when you're working with these animals, um, if those essences or souls speak to you, and I don't mean out loud and in words, you know, but, you know, it kind of guides you toward, well, this, this particular animal, this handsome gentleman is going to get a Victorian frock coat.

And this particular animal probably should be sitting on a tiny motorcycle. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, do the, do, does the form, does the body, does the animal itself kind of lead part of your process? I would say probably. I don't know if I've, if I've ever given it as much thought, um, what I think of most when I'm, when I'm processing an animal, I do tend to think about that animal's life and how it must have lived.

And, and I, I'm sure that has some subconscious way of, of kind of guiding me where I want to take it. Um, but I, I definitely like to think about the animal itself. It's a hard thing not to kind of dull yourself about the animal's life and, and kind of animal's death in that sense, uh, when you are constantly around it so much.

So it kind of naturally dulls you. But, um, I, I do tend to think about that a lot about how the animal lived and, and what its last moments must've been like, and not in a weird, morbid way, but just in a sad way. Like it tends to make me kind of sad when I think about him. Um, and I think that's part of why I geared toward taxidermy.

It's not so much a love for the dead animals. It's a love for the live animals and trying to, trying to bring it back to life in a way. Um, even if it's not actually alive, at least it, it looks alive and it's preserved and it's not just going to just kind of rot out and, and disappear from the earth altogether. I think a lot of people that are into taxidermy in these unconventional ways, I think it is because they also love the animal.

And it is their chance to be able to get up close and, and see them and appreciate the, the real artist at hand. And that is nature. Like you said, the, the intricate hands that they have, the, the way their joints form and move. And, and I think it is that appreciation for life, uh, but using death to, to get it. Which is very Victorian, isn't it?

I mean, were the Victorians not just obsessed with death? They worship, they had like death cults. And so unsurprisingly, there's this, as you mentioned earlier, giant tradition among the Victorians of anthropomorphic taxidermy. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, I think it, it does. And that's as far as I've ever seen it stem to that, that Victorian age, that, that kind of cabinet of curiosity era.

But, you know, it probably extends a lot further than that. Then we just don't realize. Well, of course, you know, the ancient Egyptians have to get credit for everything because they invented everything. And taxidermy goes back to ancient Egypt. Um, I, I, in the same conversation where I was defending like my enthusiasm for your work and this kind of art form in general, um, I said, you know, you, you might think like, oh, taxidermist, that's probably a weird person or a strange person.

I did, um, a news archive search. I scoured the country for like a century looking for taxidermists who've gotten in trouble with the law. And 99% of taxidermists who ever get in trouble with the law, get in trouble because they've done amount with, um, game that was illegally, illegally obtained, right? Protected game animals from Africa, for example, but also protect the game here in the United States.

And I could not help but notice when I was looking at your website and your socials, that that's something you make a big point about, that you don't work. You will only work with, um, animals that are lawful and legally obtained. Cause that's pretty much the only time I see taxidermists get in trouble. How about you?

You know, and I hate that media has to kind of portray the taxidermist as this Norman Bates kind of serial killer. And that's, that's like his starting approach. And then it goes into people and, you know, a lot of us aren't like that. Most taxidermists are just a Bubba Ray, good old boy who hunts and stuffs beer. And then the others like us have this possibly morbid fascination with it, but otherwise are the nicest people and the most harmless people you'll ever come across.

You know, as far as like keeping your hands clean of, of unlawful animals. So, you know, I get far too many people who like to ask me if I would do this hawk for them that I got hit by a car and just happened to be in their yard and they want it. No, sorry. Can't touch it. Not gonna touch it. That's, you know, some animals are illegal and you gotta respect the wildlife laws in your area and, and kind of adhere to that because if you do that, then you'll be fine.

But if you don't, then you can possibly lose your entire business. So, yeah, I definitely stick to the lawful things. And most things I stick with nowadays are kind of domestic, like the rats and the pets. And, and I don't do a whole lot of wildlife itself. What's a dream animal that you would love to work with? Well, one of my dream animals was a baboon and a vervet.

I'm a big fan of primates. That's kind of partially what I went to school for, anthropology and, and kind of that tie between humans and nature and like that middle ground, which is, you know, these missing links of ape and people, basically. But so that's one of my dream things that I did get to accomplish. Aside from that, I would love to do like a large bear mount.

I think that's one thing I've always wanted is just a big old grizzly bear in my house. But one of my really big dreams isn't technically taxidermy at all. And I really love prehistoric animals. So I've always wanted to make a replica, like woolly mammoth or woolly rhino, possibly using real skin from like a musk ox or something.

But I think that's my biggest dream I have is to create something like that, which is definitely further along in the art side than it is the taxidermy side. Listen, your woolly mammoth dream might be closer than you know. There was an article that hit my newsfeed a couple of weeks ago. And it was scientists have isolated the DNA of the woolly mammoth.

And they think they're about four years away from being able to bring the woolly mammoth back, at least in the form of one specimen. Now, you know, there's going to have to be some cloning involved, right? Because we don't have, you know, when a man woolly mammoth loves a lady woolly mammoth very much, they make babies.

We don't have that. So you know that there's going to be some gene splicing and some cloning involved here. But scientists feel pretty confident that they're going to be able to return the woolly mammoth to life. So like cue the Jurassic Park theme song or whatever. It'll be interesting to see, right, how this plays out.

But you think about the role that taxidermy has played in the museums of natural history around the world. And in giving people their only way to visualize animals that no longer wander, like the Great Plains buffalo, right? We no longer have giant herds of buffalo stampeding across the American West. We no longer have woolly mammoths.

We don't have saber-toothed tigers. We don't have dodos, right? We have all these animals that have gone extinct. And between science and taxidermy, that's kind of people's only way of having any grasp of what that animal actually was. Like the dodo and the thylacine, like we wouldn't have those things if they weren't preserved by a taxidermist or at least somebody who knew how to do the process.

And we would just have like written accounts and descriptions and possibly some drawings. But we all know how those don't look as accurate as they should. So yeah, absolutely. I mean, if it weren't for taxidermy being done to those animals at that time, we wouldn't have anything, possibly not even DNA to work with, to clone a woolly mammoth or a thylacine.

So what are... I mean, obviously one big misunderstanding about taxidermy and taxidermists is that, you know, you're all like in your basements, being all freaky and creepy and menacing when that just isn't true at all. What are some of the other misunderstandings you've come across in your conversations with people when you tell them what you do?

I think the biggest misunderstanding I get is, aside from them thinking I'm a serial killer, is that they think I'm going to kill the animals or that I did kill the animals. Kids will kind of hit me with that a lot when I'm at an expo vending and we'll see these little cute rats and everything. And they're like, oh, why'd you kill them?

And just because you work with the animal, a dead one, doesn't mean you're the reason it's dead. I think that's the biggest misunderstanding. That and the other side, a lot of people think, oh, you must be a hunter as well. You must, you know, what caliber do you shoot and all this? And I don't do that. I just work with the animal because I love the animals.

So I think thinking that I'm the reason it's dead would probably be the number one misconception with a taxidermist. And also that, you know, like you kind of put it in that voice. We're not weird kind of crit keepers that you would point out in a room and say, hey, that guy, yeah, he's a taxidermist. I like to think I look fairly normal.

Well, have you had any requests from customers for commissions or potential commissions that struck you as, all right, dude, each their own. That's a little weird. Matthew shared that he'd had kind of an odd request from a man to turn his mother-in-law into a taxidermy mount. He declined and hoped the guy was kidding.

But you know, the truth is, you really can't preserve a human being through taxidermy. For starters, there are super strict laws and regulations around the handling of human remains. But even beyond that, humans lack scales, feathers, or fur. There's nothing to hide the discoloration and deterioration of human skin after death.

It's not elastic enough. It's not durable enough. It looks radically different once it's dried or tanned. Gotta trust me on this. I know you love your grandpa. And I know it seems like it will be a comfort to park his preserved remains in his well-worn recliner for all time. But it's just not a thing that can or should or ever will happen.

Okay? No, no, listen, seriously. You have to promise that you're not even gonna try this. You gotta promise. That said, humans are so abundantly freaky and fun that you never have to wait long for a fun little surprise to come your way. I don't know how far I can go with this. But I did ask or have someone ask if I would do a butt plug.

And... You can go as far as you want. A taxidermy... A taxidermy... Well, I wanted a taxidermy butt plug squirrel, basically. So essentially, it would look like a squirrel was either going in or going out. I didn't stick around for the whole conversation. I kind of shut it down. But yeah, I've gotten some weird things.

Some weird requests. And sometimes a scavenging taxidermy artist like Matthew finds himself with a little splainin' to do. So I was pulled over one time. I accidentally ran a stoplight, or a stop sign, rather. You know, sue me. But I did happen to have a half of a dead beaver in the back of my car. A stuffed one, I should say.

So I did have a stuffed beaver and that was a kick from the officer. He enjoyed that immensely. Which half of the beaver did you have? Which half was the beaver? Yeah, I did just kind of like a shoulder mount. So it was just like the front half kind of in a mock swimming pose. I think when I bought just a pre-tanned skin that didn't have the back half.

So I just kind of worked with what I was given. And then my biggest thing, a lot of my taxidermy does come from roadkill. So a lot of the possums, the raccoons, and the squirrels and stuff, that's where I get them. Just take a Sunday drive in the morning and start collecting. So I've not been pulled over. But one time I was collecting a mink that was on a fairly busy highway.

And a cop did pull up behind me. But I gave him an awkward little wave. I think he was just thinking I had a broke down car or something. So speaking of the cops, let's talk about that scissor happy nurse. Back in late winter 2022, a 62-year-old man in Wisconsin took a bad fall in his home. The heat had gone out and Wisconsin happens to be cold as balls in the winter months.

Think I'm exaggerating? It was so cold in that house that the poor man suffered extreme frostbite in both feet. He ended up in an assisted living facility while he recovered. Now medical staff there did seem to agree that at least one of his feet was graveyard dead. Blackened, foul smelling, and hanging on by a tendon.

Please let me remind you that this is not a tale from the olden times before we had modern medicine. But a tale from last year in America. Okay? Okay. Anywho. Nurse Mary Kay Brown made the decision to snip off the gentleman's foot with a pair of scissors. Three other nurses were in the room, witnessed this ad hoc amputation, and reported that Nurse Brown declared her intention to epoxy the severed foot.

Her plan was to park the preserved piggies by the cash register at her father's taxidermy shop with a sign reading, wear your boots kids. Clever and callous and more than a little bit crazy. See here's the deal. There was no medical order issued for the amputation. And though Brown told investigators that the patient felt no pain from the procedure and that she had planned to freeze the foot so that it could be buried with the body when the time came.

Her fellow nurses told a different story. One reported that the patient was moaning as his foot was scissored off and three days later was still complaining about how much it hurt. No reports were filed on the removal of the foot and nothing was noted in the patient's chart. The CEO of the facility was like yeah yeah you're supposed to get a doctor's order before you hack off a body part but Nurse Brown didn't have any malicious motives so can we please just move on.

But law enforcement was like yeah no. Nurse Brown was charged with physical abuse of an elderly person intentionally causing great bodily harm and mayhem just one of my favorite charges with increased penalties since the victim fit the legal definition of an elderly person. The man died a week later. The criminal complaint against Brown doesn't state that the amputation caused or contributed to his death.

Maybe it didn't. Maybe he was just caught in the eye of a hurricane of pure suck. Kind of like the one Mary Kay Brown is currently riding out. She's facing up to a hundred thousand dollars in fines and or 40 years in prison if convicted. And her poor daddy never did get his epoxy human foot to prop next to the cash register at his taxidermy shop.

This is the kind of story that has a way of making you give other taxidermists a side eye which is really really really unfair. I think that's the main takeaway I would like people to get is you know taxidermy is is a way to memorialize nature even even the hunting side of it it's it's all about the appreciation of nature done right and and conserved correctly it it helps So I think this this idea that taxidermy is is is this creepy kind of of embodiment of death in itself that's not what we're trying to show you.

We're trying to show you the life of this animal in a traditional mount or otherwise. We're trying to show that this is what this animal looks like in life and it's pristine and it's in a majestic state and I think that would be a better takeaway for people than than ooh gross dead squirrel. But by the time you finish with it it's not ooh gross dead squirrel it's like holy cow is that squirrel wearing a nurse's hat?

Like it's a it's a completely different it's a different animal to use that phrase altogether which is what I like about your work because we have a lot of traditional taxidermy all over different relatives houses. I mean like I said I grew up with it and you're like that that is a man that's a nice looking buck but but that buck that traditional mount speaks only of itself it's it's a nice buck somebody really had a good day look at their rack whatever but when I look at your work those animals are so whimsical and they carry with them like a whole story a whole story that comes to life in your imagination.

It's a very different it's not tax it's not it's not your daddy's taxidermy is what I'm saying. Absolutely yeah and that is rogue taxidermy that's kind of the the term that's been coined for for that style that anthropomorphic the weird the odd the non-traditional that kind of opens you up so you can do different things and say different stories you can make it political you can make it whimsical you can tell this fantastical world and and sometimes you know I get into that when I when I do a really odd mount or something one of my favorite pieces was this this little dead um starling bird um and I put a like a small led within its chest kind of in its dead pose and I I put these uh crystals on top of the led so when you turn it on these crystals kind of lit up and they were kind of erupting from the the bird's chest and you know when I was doing it I was kind of telling myself this whole story about you know this fungus or or organism that that ate off of the dead body but its kind of fungal state was these crystals so it was just this kind of very fantasy world that I kind of built around this this little mount that I was trying to tell that kind of story about how it uh kind of grew its life from the life of this dead body basically and when you finish a piece and you kind of sit back from it and you look at it um do you have moments where you think to yourself yeah I found her or I found him that was exactly what this animal was trying to speak into being for me yeah I definitely um nothing's more satisfying than being able to step back from from a mount and and know that I got it but that that is just perfect and of course you know an artist is their own worst critic so of course like as far as some things go you can never be perfect but to get that story or that um expression right is definitely uh the most satisfying thing in my job you can check out Matthew's work on Instagram just follow rogue wolf taxidermy and hey maybe treat yourself or someone you love to a Mardi Gras squirrel or a demon goat or a banjo playing raccoon you're gonna want it all and kids if you learn nothing else today remember wear your boots next time on true weird stuff America's first celebrity serial killer wasn't a lone male described by his neighbors as the quiet type no it was a family a family of four who set up grizzly and gruesome shops smack in the middle of the heartland what they did and how they did it will but you got to give them this the family that slays together stays together and if you listen to us on apple podcast hit the plus button in the top right corner now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered and we really appreciate it if you subscribe rate and review true weird stuff hit our website true weird stuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff.com and follow true weird stuff on Instagram and Twitter true weird stuff is a Now! Media production our executive producer is Anthony Garcia the show is written and hosted by me Sheri Lynch along with my deeply weird director Max Sweeten our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call our digital witch and social media

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