How to Stuff a Pug: A Day at the Taxidermist’s

October 2013

Curran Manzer’s walls are covered in dead animals.

His taxidermy shop is on the edge of Springfield, about a mile east of the last strip mall on Highway 126. In his showroom a black bear stands over a water fountain meant to look like a creek. A pug stares eagerly upward from his bed in the corner, as if someone were teasing him with a biscuit—but he doesn’t move.

“That’s Chaos,” Manzer says. “His owner’s making payments on him, she’s got about $300 to go.”  Smaller animals are run through the freeze-dryer—an expensive machine to run, Manzer explains. During October – peak hunting season – big game animals take priority until they collect enough pets to run a freeze-dry load.

Manzer opens the doors to the workroom where he and colleague John Eden are working this Thursday morning. Unpleasant fumes pervade: a potpourri of burnt bone, ammonia, and what Eden calls “the pure smell of death.” Big black flies buzz around small chunks of flesh on the ground, fur pelts hang over old office chairs, and dried blood is smeared on the concrete floor. Manzer sits down at a desk to inspect a cougar, which bears its teeth at him.

In the back corner, the head of a large male elk is laying on its cheek, propped up by its perfectly symmetrical antlers, and trailing a 6-foot hide of dark brown fur.

Today Eden will begin making a European mount of this elk, whose eyes are still intact and staring at Eden’s feet. “We gotta skin the head, cut the antlers out, then we gotta blast out the brains,” he says.

A European mount is the exposed skull of the animal, not the familiar head and neck stuffed and staring from a wall. The process of removing the skin and prepping the skull takes several months. It’s a job that requires patience, precision and attention to detail, says Eden.

He sits on his knees, cradles the elk’s head between his legs, and begins to cut with his pocketknife. He cuts around the antlers and begins to peel up the flesh, revealing a layer of white fat marbled with bright red blood.

He moves from the top of the head to the mouth. Blood oozes as he cuts along the perimeter of the elk’s gums, making a squishy sound. With bloodied hands he cuts around the teeth, continuing to alternate his incisions to remove the skin in one piece.

Before the brain matter is blown out into a bucket, the animal’s eyeballs are removed. “Lately we’ve been boilin’ ‘em to make ‘em into super-bouncy balls,” Eden says. “See that mark on the wall?” He points across the room. “That’s from when we shot one through a PVC pipe.”

The next step involves what they call “the bug room.”

Above the garage is the attic, wherein “the bug room” exists. Inside, a civilization of little black insects hum as they crawl around fresh animal bones. “African flesh-eating beetles,” Eden declares.

Commonly known as the dermisted beetle, this species feeds on animal products and has a lifecycle of about twelve days. “They get all the extra flesh off in a few days, but we have to let ‘em run their cycle,” John says as he holds up a beetle-covered skull with his bare hands.

Manzer says the bug room is what makes his taxidermy shop unique. “Most people just don’t want to deal with bugs,” he says.

Once the flesh is off, the next step is to “cook” the skull. Most taxidermists boil the skull in a grease-cutting solution, but Manzer and Eden warn against this. They say that boiling is too harsh on the connective tissue that binds the cranial bones together. “We simmer ‘em,” says Eden, which makes them stronger over time.

A simmered skull is nearly finished. When it’s done drying in the large, skull-filled back room, Eden gets to pull out his paintbrushes. Since the natural color of animal bone is a dingy yellow, he’ll paint it with a potent concentration of hydrogen peroxide to bleach it out.

Before mounting the finished piece on a wooden plaque, Eden will submerge the skull in a pot of acetone and plastic beads to form a seal around it. “The acetone melts the plastic,” he says, “which makes it shiny and keeps it from chipping.”

It will take a day or so of drying before Eden can begin the sealing process, but that doesn’t mean he and Manzer get a break. “We’ve got a pile of about five pets in the back,” says Manzer. “That means it’s almost time to run a load in the freeze-drier.”