Taxidermy: Taxi to forever – TimesLIVE

Every year, thousands of SA’s beasts are stuffed and shipped to the mansions of tycoons.
As dawn breaks at Durban harbour, two elephants that once roamed the African plains set sail for the Pacific Coast – in crates. They’ll be frozen in that pose, trunks aloft, for the next 100 years.
The Californian hunter had them mounted at a Centurion taxidermist. "Her roof was removed so cranes could lower them into her trophy room. It’s landscaped, with a waterfall," says Thomas Ochsenbein of Highveld Taxidermists, where I’m gazing up at another freshly varnished elephant, a bull hunted by a Romanian tycoon at Hoedspruit.
"We used two wheelbarrows of concrete per foot. The skin moves as it dries, so Ronald’s busy reshaping it," he says of a man perched on a scaffold, "otherwise it looks like an elephant after a facelift."
A team hammers a crate around the pachyderm for its sea voyage. "Sure, an elephant can fit in a C-5 Galaxy military plane, but none of the commercial liners."
But a lion will. "That lion’s off to Las Vegas." He points to one of the crates piled to a warehouse roof. They’re about to be trucked to international departures. "I use Delta, Lufthansa, and Cargolux a lot. We fly the animal as close to the client as possible, then it gets delivered to their door." I picture a zebra, zooming into LAX.
He pulls out a crate to show me. Inside, there’s a hartebeest, impala, porcupine, nyala, jackal, steenbok and bushbuck, each sealed in bubble-wrap.
"We get regular surprise inspections from nature conservation."
To the UAE, a hotspot, he whisked off a crate of elephant tusks. "72 sets. One client." I scan some of the freight labels. Turkey. Holland. Argentina. Australia. Sweden. New York. Moscow. Ninety-five percent of their creations are exported. "We turn this warehouse monthly, at least."
Poland and Russia are also big markets for them, but the US leads by a long shot. California, Texas and Florida, where retirees have time to kill, are particularly big game. A few of these crates will go to the Tinseltown stars among their 1000-odd regulars, but he won’t say if George Clooney has any wildlife in his penthouse.
Game farms refer business. "Clients pop in on their way back to the airport to discuss their animals. I meet everyone from a Romanian billionaire to a Texan police officer who saved up his entire life for this hunting trip and brings the family. It’s the African experience: they can never sell that in Texas." And where he comes in? "I preserve memories."
But memories don’t come cheap. He charges $50000 (about R520000) to mount an elephant, with fibreglass tusks. The ivory tusks are capped in brass for a separate display. "Clients often request this as it looks more impressive."
They do the same on rhino as a security precaution. "We’re busy shaping fake horns on these," he tells me of two rhino he says were legally hunted by a Chinese client. The real horn display can be locked in a safe. They charge about $20000 to mount one life-size rhino. "We used to do at least 30 rhino mounts a year. Now it’s down to two, so the market’s taken a big dip."
Regular plains game are popular choices for taxidermy. "Then people move onto exotics like Ethiopian mountain nyala and then big game." Most animals come from South Africa, but they do get imports – a big shipment just docked from Tanzania. "We did a walrus the other day. That was something special." For one client’s personal Eden, they mounted 170 animals, including polar bears, complete with ice-caps.
"The nice thing about polar bears is that the hair is about 10cm long, so you don’t have to get the mould even half as right as you do for our short-haired animals." He sips from his coffee mug. It says: "Do shit."
His father, Dieter, a Swiss hunter frustrated by the lack of good taxidermy when he emigrated here, began the 70-man, multi-million-rand operation in 1981 with two staff and a few tanks of sulphuric acid. Thomas, who joined "the firm" 16 years ago, was a baby when Dieter propped him in his backpack for his first hunt. "Hunting is like smoking: you either love it or hate it."
In his office, a leopard regards us. "It looks exactly as it did in 1983." Cats are popular – last year they sold 60 life-size lions. If a taxidermist can do a cat well, he’s worth his Forex. "Often you see cat mounts with a table-top back. It just looks wrong." He smiles, then takes me to see his 100000 skins.
That’s about how many they process a year. "Volume-wise, we’re the largest taxidermist in the world." We’re just outside The Red Zone, a quarantined area where skins are disinfected before being pickled and tanned.
"We just get the skulls and skins from game farms. We don’t assemble bones like they do for your average museum T-Rex."
Fun fact: it takes six people three days to shave a 7cm elephant hide to a few millimetres. Blades glint as slivers of skin fall at our feet. They do this with every hide to make it easier to manoeuvre. Plus, you don’t want one-ton baggage.
It’s delicate work. "The trophy price on a mountain nyala is up to $50000. If you ruin that skin for the client, there’s no going back. We’re not selling widgets here: we’re taking care of a hunter’s pride and joy."
Taxidermy has come a long way since Victorians padded critters with bits of wool. "We don’t stuff; we sculpt."
Hunched over his latest creation, Dieter hums as he sandpapers a humerus – of clay. "I’m vurking on our new drop-shoulder, medium kudu manikin," he says with pride. The "mother dummy" is shaped using a plaster of Paris dead cast of the animal species – a four-month process – then sealed in fibreglass to cast a mould.
Their menu spans 300 standard options that are then customised. "A guy will say he wants the kudu looking 15 degrees to the right," says Thomas. "Some even specify the position of the tail." Action poses are trending. "We’ll do a lion catching an impala, for instance. I’ve been asked to do mating poses and I tell people straight: ‘We don’t do that’. It’s demeaning to the animal." But he did agree to an elephant penis lamp. "I thought: ‘Thomas, you’ve reached the lowest form of redneck’. Not everything is glitz and glam."
The pièce de résistance of taxidermy is sliding on the skin. It’s a little like fitting a suit, since: "No two impala are the same, like humans." It takes about three fittings to get it right. You can find an American taxidermist’s demo on YouTube. "You wanna line up yur antlers with yur eye sockets, okay?"
On average, the process, from mould to makeup, takes four months, but their backlog means you’ll only get your crocodile in about a year.
"We’ve divided animals by species so there’s my eland there, my blesbok there," says Thomas, who leads me through one of their storage warehouses, shelves sagging with skins and horns. "We pick stock from here daily. A guy could have, say, 12 animals and they’ll all be tracked by an order number. We run SAP software. That’s the database SARS uses."
I have to push aside skins that hang from the ceiling. A lioness eyes me in the shadows, gathering dust. "The world economy has taken a dive, but eventually people pay for their stuff and it goes out." A pair of elephant legs is propped against a wall. "For barstools."
Their eight taxidermists did a two-year apprenticeship here – there is no formal college in the country, he says. "They get a production list every week. Alfred’s prepping the warthog for tomorrow." Smoke plumes out its nostrils. "That’s just an exothermic reaction. Spot of tea?" In the finishing department, someone paints an ostrich’s lips. "We insert every feather by hand."
He gets many requests, but says: "We don’t do pets. I think that’s silly."
"Ja, we can do pets, no problem," says PE taxidermist Paul Smith of Relive Africa. How much? "Well, that depends. A Jack Russell will cost you up to R4500. Now for a Great Dane, you’re talking R15000 ."
Today, many overseas taxidermists use freeze-drying, which preserves the whole body like a space Popsicle, but Thomas snubs it. "It’s a shortcut."
He’s doing his rounds. "Once you’ve worked on an animal for two hours, you get myopic, so I walk around and pick things out: ‘Hang on, your left ear is too low’."
You need a fresh set of eyes, agrees Pretoria taxidermist Izelle Nolan. Some are in her drawer.
"These are for lions," she says, pulling out glass orbs. "Now for a snarling lion, you want more of a yellow eye." Her dad took her along to a taxidermist at 16. "I knew then and there: I want to do that."
She met her fiancé, Neville Pretorius, while they were doing their apprenticeships. They fell in love, doing a fine stitch on a zebra head. They’ve run Taxidermy Sculpt for seven years. "We’re a small taxidermist – there are people who do 10000 heads a year."
She sits blow-waving a cheetah. "Each animal is a bespoke art piece. We shape every ear from scratch."
For the US World Taxidermy Championships, where they’ve won twice, they trucked a lion across the ‘burbs of middle-class America. "Competition is tough. If the eyelashes aren’t the same length, you lose a point."
Most of their clients are hunters, says Pretorius. "Sheiks come here and shoot everything from the smallest to the biggest animal, male and female, for their private museums."
They get non-hunters, too. "Interior decorators, people who hit a civet on the road or bring in electrocuted owls."
"I’ve never met any taxidermist who doesn’t have a passion for animals. You notice how an impala’s nose flares, the eye colour. You see things about crappy taxidermy, but you don’t see a photo of a lion mount in all its glory." Nolan says simply: "We don’t do funny."
"People say, ‘How can you do this work?’ and I’m like, we didn’t kill them, we’re just making them look good again." It’s the elephant in the room.
"You know," says Pretorius, airbrushing an antelope, "Bill Clinton once told us he’d like to hunt, but it just wouldn’t be PC." LS

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