Ep. 743: Stuffing Your Pet

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Rey Macias and Ace Alexander of Bischoff's The Animal Kingdom https://bischoffsanimals.com, Randall Williams, Seth Morris, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics Discussed: How much folks love their pets; buying a taxidermy business when you've never done taxidermy before; more on stolen valor and taxidermy; the films and shows that Rey and Ace have contributed to; the Frenchie and its heart; playing counselor; freeze drying and aquamation; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 0:46Steven Rinella?

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• 1:22Speaker 02

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• 1:37Steven Rinella?

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• 2:19Steven Rinella?

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• 2:39Steven Rinella?

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case underwearless.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.

• 2:48Steven Rinella?

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• 3:13Steven Rinella?

  A lot of talk these days about the death of late night television.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:18Steven Rinella?

  You probably don't know where I'm going with this.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  I don't know where you're going with it, but I've been paying attention to the talk.

• 3:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, someone even said it's a, it's a, Colbert losing his show is a, it's bad for the, it's against the constitution.

• 3:35Steven Rinella?

  You aware of this?

• 3:36Speaker 00

  I was not aware of that claim.

• 3:38Steven Rinella?

  I read it today. Hmm. But, uh, um, I'm going somewhere with this real quick, but I mean, the dude makes, you know, he makes 20 million a year, $20 million a year, and the show loses $40 million a year. Reason I bring this up is, you know, in those kinds of shows, I always go, great show for you tonight, ladies and gentlemen.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Are you gonna start doing that?

• 3:58Steven Rinella?

  No, because they're not be, they're not gonna be able to do it for long. Someone's gotta carry on. Someone's gotta say it. Great show for you today, ladies and gentlemen. Good thing we record in the morning. That's why I said today.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  We should just try to have this air late night and you can be the new late night shtick thing.

• 4:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, or, yeah, or we do like a deal where we do some analytics and find out when people mostly listen to the show and just cater to that group. Yeah. Like at 10 a.m. We do a traffic report.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:30Steven Rinella?

  Well, no, because I want to steal the late night group. Wait till we get a band in here.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  I mean.

• 4:36Steven Rinella?

  One of those late night shows had their budget cut. I think that's gonna be. They had to get rid of their band. Phil, we can fit a band in here, right?

• 4:42Speaker 00

  We've got some very talented individuals, like I've seen Phil on all kinds of instruments for the kids podcast.

• 4:49Steven Rinella?

  We basically have our own.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Like tambourine, flute. Who plays the drums in here? You could bang on drums now.

• 4:54Steven Rinella?

  And then I gotta get a suit and tie. Those guys for some weird ass reason wear suits and ties. I'll never understand.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, new.

• 5:02Steven Rinella?

  Nighttime guys, nighttime show guys, wear a suit and tie.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  We could.

• 5:06Steven Rinella?

  Sports guys wear suit and ties, which seems.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  We could have first light make you a suit.

• 5:10Steven Rinella?

  Like you're doing sports. What's that?

• 5:11Speaker 00

  We could have first light make you a special suit for the show.

• 5:14Steven Rinella?

  Great show for you this morning, ladies and gentlemen. We have on, this is great. This is like, this is, this is mega producing on Corinne's part to bring this whole thing together. We have on the co-owners of, pardon me, Bischofs? Bischofs, yeah, you got it. The co-owners of Bischofs, the animal kingdom. A taxidermy shop in Hollywood, California. Ace and Ray. Okay. The shop, here, I'm, I'm, this is Corinne's intro. It's great. The shop is 300 years old this year.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  103.

• 5:50Steven Rinella?

  What did I say? 300. Dude, that's some dyslexic dude. God, sweet. 300 in history. By that number, I've been married 71 years.

• 6:03Steven Rinella?

  Goes back to Spanish California. I've been married 71 years and, uh, yeah, and I'm 15 years old. Uh, the shop is 103 years old this year. It's known for creating prop animals for movies and films, but more recently they've become famous as the go-to spot for pet owners who want to preserve dogs, cats, birds, you name it. The pet guys. Now, the reason, one of the reasons you boys are here.

• 6:35Steven Rinella?

  Ace and Ray, it's because we have a sort of, um, this is a little bit of a problem here. Cause we have a like official taxidermist. John Hayes from Hayes Taxidermy Studio. Don't you for a minute think, don't you for a minute think you're here to steal John Hayes's thunder? But Corinne put it to John Hayes, do you do pets? To which John Hayes said, no.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:05Steven Rinella?

  I'm not gonna get into why, but he's, he doesn't do pets. And so therefore we had to bring you fellers in to fill our pet niche. But also just a totally different world. But I just don't want you to start thinking that you're like all John Hayes now.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, but like, if you want.

• 7:24Steven Rinella?

  He's gonna get a hat that says, he's gonna get a Hayes Taxidermy hat that says better than.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  I mean, you did bring a hideout, so.

• 7:32Steven Rinella?

  No, no, that's nothing to do with John Hayes. Listen, I don't want to confuse. Yeah, we're gonna show them a bunch of Hayes Taxidermy work and say like, how could you improve upon this?

• 7:45Steven Rinella?

  So, uh, from, we caught Wendy, we caught wind of, uh, we caught wind of you guys because you were recently, uh, there was a recent article in the LA Times, which, which, uh, caught our fancy. Here's a passage from the article. Ace Alexander, raise your hand.

• 8:05Speaker 05

  For those of you listening, the guy in the middle.

• 8:08Steven Rinella?

  I like how they point out in the article, who is 40 years old? Are you still 40? I'm still 40. Okay. Yeah. And Rey Macias, am I saying that right? Macias. Macias. Who is 55?

• 8:21Speaker 05

  Can't screw that one up.

• 8:24Steven Rinella?

  The four, still 55? Still 55. Good. That shows how fresh this article is. Right.

• 8:30Steven Rinella?

  The fourth, the fourth owners in Bischoff's long history have steered the company to meet the new demand, meaning pet stuffing. Well, not stuffing, we'll cover details. Describing each other as good friends, the two men dressed similarly. This is such like weird things I wouldn't cover. The two men dressed similarly. Okay. They like to wear black t-shirts and black pants, which one of you is not doing. That checks out, though. Well, they're wearing black tops.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  They're like gray.

• 9:00Steven Rinella?

  What color are your pants?

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Grayish, dark wash jeans.

• 9:03Steven Rinella?

  Why do they care about that?

• 9:04Speaker 04

  I have no idea, yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 05

  If someone featured this place, they'd say the same thing. It's a lot of guys between the ages of 25 and 45, wearing olive and tan colored clothing.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  It reads like a, like a GQ feature, like, like the first sentence is, George Clooney takes a bite of his flan.

• 9:24Steven Rinella?

  We know who they usually do that to in the media, and I guess it pisses women off, but like, even women politicians, there always is commentary about what they're wearing. What they're wearing, oh, yeah. Always, like, what are they wearing, what are they wearing?

• 9:36Speaker 00

  So superficial.

• 9:37Steven Rinella?

  Uh, but this being the LA Times, I guess it's important for them to point out that you guys wear, um, you like to wear black clothes, because that way the blood doesn't show.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  Probably, in shop clothes, you know what I mean?

• 9:51Steven Rinella?

  It says you guys are so in sync, and we're gonna have 90 minutes to find out if this is true. The article says you're so in sync, you sometimes finish each other's thoughts. Damn.

• 10:02Speaker 06

  I didn't realize that.

• 10:03Steven Rinella?

  You start a thought. What are you thinking right now?

• 10:08Steven Rinella?

  You say, right now, I'm, say, right now, I'm thinking.

• 10:10Speaker 06

  Right now, I think it's, uh.

• 10:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay, then tell them what he's thinking.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  That is pretty wild to be here.

• 10:16Steven Rinella?

  Is that what you're thinking?

• 10:19Steven Rinella?

  I'll say it. Checks out. Yeah, so you got that right.

• 10:25Steven Rinella?

  Now, since taking over the business, both have transitioned to primarily vegan diets. Is it like the ice cream person that doesn't eat ice cream anymore?

• 10:36Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 10:36Steven Rinella?

  No?

• 10:37Speaker 04

  See, for, for me, I just like eating, I eat meat, I just eat clean meat, you know what I mean, so, it just means I like my greens and I like my meats, I don't, you know what I mean, it's not,

• 10:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  You know?

• 10:49Steven Rinella?

  You sound like a meat, meat vegetable type.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  I'm like, I eat healthy, you know what I mean, like, to my standards of what, everybody has their own idea of what healthy is, depending on what you read.

• 10:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay, we're just checking out the LA Times.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, was that inaccurate reporting?

• 11:02Steven Rinella?

  Primarily vegan. Primarily vegan would mean if you eat mostly vegetables.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, he, he leans more towards a vegan diet, for sure.

• 11:10Steven Rinella?

  You do?

• 11:10Speaker 06

  Once in a while, like, like, weekends, I, you know, I eat whatever I want, so, but, during the week, I kind of keep it, uh, try to keep it as. Clean as possible.

• 11:21Steven Rinella?

  Good for you.

• 11:21Speaker 06

  For my own, you know.

• 11:22Steven Rinella?

  And I'm not here to tell you what to eat.

• 11:24Speaker 06

  No, no, of course not.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  We're just fact checking.

• 11:27Speaker 06

  Right.

• 11:28Steven Rinella?

  Bischofs used to be the taxidermist to the stars in the trophy area, but now we're taxidermist in the pret- pet preservation area.

• 11:39Steven Rinella?

  Then you got a quote that I don't agree with.

• 11:42Steven Rinella?

  But it's probably true for your clientele. Yeah. He says, people no longer hunt, now they just love their pets, which I would mostly agree with.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  In Hollywood, California, Los Angeles.

• 11:53Steven Rinella?

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. So we asked them to come on and talk about their, their unique, uh, the history of Bischofs and their unique niche. And assuming you still, you guys are still in the movie business.

• 12:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, we are.

• 12:04Steven Rinella?

  Okay, cool. So we're gonna, we're gonna talk about all that, like an aspect of taxidermy that you're, uh, that our listeners are probably unaware of. But first, in the news, Seth's wife.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  In the news?

• 12:16Steven Rinella?

  No. Okay, let me find what we're gonna talk about with Seth's wife. Everyone knows Seth's wife, should know, Seth's wife is a.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Kelsey Morris. I was gonna say, does she have a name?

• 12:29Steven Rinella?

  Her name is Kelsey Morris, if you need to know. Where's my picture? So, we, we're, we're, right now, Randall and I are recording our third volume of Meat Eaters American History. We did The Long Hunters, seventeen sixty-three to seventeen seventy-five. And that was about Daniel Boone and the deer skin trade. Then we did The Mountain Men, eighteen oh-six to eighteen forty, which is about folks like Jim Bridger and the beaver skin trade. And now we're recording The Hide Hunters, which is about the buffalo skin trade.

• 13:09Steven Rinella?

  And that goes from eighteen sixty-five, the close of the Civil War, to eighteen eighty-three, which was the last big kill.

• 13:20Steven Rinella?

  Kelsey Morris, the artist, has done all of our covers.

• 13:27Steven Rinella?

  She did a skull, she did it, we had for Long Hunters. Should be in here somewhere. The original? What the hell happened to it? Oh, it's in the kitchen. For the Long Hunters, she did us a whitetail deer skull with a bullet hole punched in his head.

• 13:44Steven Rinella?

  For the Mountain Men, she did us a Rocky Mountain Beaver Trapper, a mountain man.

• 13:51Steven Rinella?

  Where's the, where's the thing we had a minute ago? That I was showing you?

• 13:54Speaker 05

  In your email?

• 13:55Steven Rinella?

  Is it?

• 13:56Speaker 05

  It's an email from Hunter.

• 13:57Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's the problem.

• 14:00Steven Rinella?

  He sent it to me. I can't find it.

• 14:06Steven Rinella?

  Must have deleted it or something. Oh, no.

• 14:11Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Got it, got it, got it. Where was I?

• 14:14Speaker 05

  For the listeners at home, there's now an image on Steve's computer.

• 14:17Steven Rinella?

  Well, I'm gonna show it to the camera if you give me a second.

• 14:20Speaker 05

  No, no, but this, I'm just, I'm doing the thing for the people that are driving right now.

• 14:24Steven Rinella?

  Oh. Oh, that's good.

• 14:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:29Steven Rinella?

  For the Mountain Men, she did a Rocky Mountain Beaver Trapper, a mountain man. For the Hyde Hunters, we did the thing that was most logical to us, because we want all the, when they're, when it's all said and done, it'll look like a collection. It'll look like a collection. You'll, you'll go on to Apple Books, wherever the hell, and you'll be like, oh, this is like a thing. Like, these all go together. And they're, they track through time. Well, we had her do a buffalo skull with...

• 14:58Speaker 05

  Bullet hole in it.

• 14:58Steven Rinella?

  Bullet hole punched in his head. But that's not where the Hyde Hunters shot him.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  That's a great point.

• 15:03Steven Rinella?

  So it's a factual problem. They didn't shoot him there. And we, we describe in great detail, Hyde Hunter's shot placement, which includes some horrifying shot placement.

• 15:17Speaker 05

  Deliberate. Deliberately horrifying.

• 15:19Steven Rinella?

  What's it, was an example? Well, I'll give you an example. For the most part, they shot for the lights, meaning the lungs. However...

• 15:30Steven Rinella?

  We explain in great detail what a stand was, like how they managed their shooting. The objective was that you get forty, fifty of them in a pile. You didn't want them scattered all over hell because it's hard for the skinners. You'd want them in a pile. So they do a thing called a stand. When doing a stand, you had to be careful about the first one you hit.

• 15:54Steven Rinella?

  If you hit it in the heart, it might run a hundred yards and that causes too much chaos. So they wanted to anchor them? No. Oh. It's just, it's terrible. They wanted them to wobble around for a while. They wanted to, as they put it, make them sick. They'd shoot the wound. They would call it making them sick.

• 16:13Steven Rinella?

  So the first one or two, they'd like to hit them right in front of the hips. Oh, gut shot. The only, we were, we were teasing Reeve because Reeve has been engineering for us. And the first woman that made, it's a, it's a, it's a male heavy story, the story of the hide hunters.

• 16:30Steven Rinella?

  I would imagine. Tends to be, for whatever reason, tends to be a lot of guys running around in the hide hunters. But we're laughing with Reeve because the first woman. That we quote. The first woman that we quote in the whole project is saying, it was so fun to watch daddy and the guys shoot. They would shoot and make them sick.

• 16:53Steven Rinella?

  It's like the most disturbing line of text in the whole thing. So we're like Reeve perked right up when a woman came in, but that was immediately disappointing.

• 17:03Steven Rinella?

  So they, but they rejected our, they rejected the publisher, not rejected, like it's not a good word for it. They asked for alternatives. They didn't like the skull because it looked too much like the other skull. With the hole in it. Which is fair. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and in these kinds of things, you can pitch a fit, but you're burning, uh,

• 17:23Steven Rinella?

  what are you burning? Capital? Capital? Yeah. You're burning capital. Do you want to spend it on that or on something else that really? Yeah. Or would you rather fight about if they come back and they're like, hey, how come there's only one woman and she's crazy? Right? Then you can, then you can, right? Fight about that. But so we don't want to fight about the cover. So Seth, we, we, we're going to settle up on the original.

• 17:47Steven Rinella?

  Picture.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:49Steven Rinella?

  So it's not a hit to your family finances.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  Good. That's what I like to hear.

• 17:53Steven Rinella?

  And now we're gonna do this. Where do I aim it, Phil?

• 17:57Speaker 03

  I just directly in front of you.

• 17:59Steven Rinella?

  Can that camera zoom in though?

• 18:01Speaker 03

  It cannot, but if, I don't know if you can slack this to me, Randall, I can put it on the screen, on the TV.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  How about that?

• 18:06Speaker 03

  That's even worse.

• 18:06Speaker 05

  Oh, no.

• 18:08Steven Rinella?

  Maybe hold this over there. Maybe hold this over there.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  No, it's, it's gonna be out of focus. All these cameras are on manual focus. So they, if you hold it right up to the camera, it's gonna be fuzzy.

• 18:17Steven Rinella?

  How about that?

• 18:18Speaker 05

  It's coming your way.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  I'll, I'll, I'll put it on, on the TV and on the screen.

• 18:23Steven Rinella?

  That's one way to do it.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 05

  The best way. You're surrounded by a bunch of barbarians, Phil. I'm sorry.

• 18:30Steven Rinella?

  Just make it work, Phil. That's good news. It's good news for Seth.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:36Steven Rinella?

  It's kinda bad news for Kelsey, cause she, she was explaining to me that she's a little bit in vacation mode right now.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  She is, but.

• 18:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  She can really be in vacation mode when she's actually on vacation. Till then, keep her busy.

• 18:51Steven Rinella?

  Um, and, and we're working on that right now, right here in this all, all damn day long.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  All week long.

• 18:57Steven Rinella?

  Here's a little tidbit that we, here, here's just one little tidbit from.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Look at that thing.

• 19:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Here's one little tidbit from Hyde Hunters. This is one of my favorite little tidbits. And it's just packed full of freakish stuff. There's a guy that she, there's, there's a Hyde Hunter. What was his name? Shoots a, shoots a buffalo. Goes up to skin it, or shoots it and it stands up and goes to attack him. No, no.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  Is it Kelly?

• 19:23Steven Rinella?

  Shoot, yeah, I think it is. Kelly.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  The Fort Benton guy.

• 19:25Steven Rinella?

  Shoots, shoots up by Fort Benton, Montana, shoots a buffalo.

• 19:29Steven Rinella?

  Realizes it's not dead. Gets his pistol out to try to finish it off. It stands up and comes at him. He's in such a hurry to get on his horse and get out of there, that as he's jumping on his horse, accidentally shoots his horse in the neck. So now the wounded buffalo is chasing the wounded horse and they both die.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  And he walks away.

• 19:51Steven Rinella?

  Kelly walks away unscathed.

• 19:53Speaker 03

  Jeez.

• 19:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  There's a lot of.

• 19:55Steven Rinella?

  Seventy thousand words of this stuff.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Rough day for a horse.

• 19:59Speaker 05

  And a buffalo.

• 20:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Seventy thousand words of this stuff. And it also explains in great detail, uh, not just that, but sciency stuff. A lot of sciency stuff. Like you never knew so much about, uh. Mills. Production, steam engines, industrial belting. History of guns. As you will, when you have this.

• 20:24Speaker 05

  Does this, do you cover a bunch of different states? Where, where does this mostly take place?

• 20:29Steven Rinella?

  The main. Action we get into occurs, I mean, it, it's all over. Because there's certain like, you know, one minute you're out in New England. Cause of hemlocks and tanning.

• 20:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:43Steven Rinella?

  Like how tanning worked, but the main action. Western Kansas. North Texas.

• 20:51Speaker 05

  Oh, really?

• 20:52Steven Rinella?

  Eastern Montana. The real big like.

• 20:56Speaker 05

  I would have thought like the Dakotas.

• 20:57Steven Rinella?

  No. No.

• 20:59Speaker 05

  I mean.

• 20:59Steven Rinella?

  That's in there.

• 21:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:00Steven Rinella?

  The real big shoot. Well, go ahead.

• 21:02Speaker 05

  He's, I was gonna say it's like eastern Montana bleeding into the western part of the Dakotas and northern Wyoming, but like the, the heart of it is. Along the train tracks and. Oh, yeah. I mean, cause it all falls the railroad.

• 21:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:15Steven Rinella?

  A way to think about it too is that like we begin to start the, the hide hunt.

• 21:21Steven Rinella?

  The big final hide hunt didn't kick in until the mid seventies. Eighteen seventies.

• 21:26Speaker 05

  Seventies.

• 21:27Steven Rinella?

  So.

• 21:30Steven Rinella?

  At that point. The, the population was kind of reduced down to these real core pieces of habitat, like the fringes.

• 21:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:39Steven Rinella?

  All the fringe was gone. Do you know what I'm saying?

• 21:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:42Steven Rinella?

  It was just like, you had these sort of like main population, kind of like down, like down the center of the Great Plains.

• 21:48Speaker 05

  Gotcha.

• 21:48Steven Rinella?

  Uh. By that point. People thought of it, there was the northern herd and the southern herd. Because all the. Transcontinental railroads.

• 22:00Steven Rinella?

  And the Oregon Trail and stuff had kind of by that point. Cleared the middle out.

• 22:04Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 22:05Steven Rinella?

  And, and pushed everything away. So people would talk about it distinctly like.

• 22:08Speaker 05

  North of the plat and south of the plat.

• 22:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they, I mean, even in that era, there was the north herd and the south herd.

• 22:15Speaker 05

  Gotcha.

• 22:15Steven Rinella?

  And it was kind of that main, those sort of like main population centers. And so the hide hunt occurs in two stages. Like the southern herd.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  Northern, so.

• 22:25Steven Rinella?

  Who's, if you imagine like the core of the southern herd would be.

• 22:31Steven Rinella?

  The top of the Texas panhandle, the Oklahoma panhandle, and then up into Kansas from there. It was sort of like, that's where you could still go and, and see a million animals.

• 22:41Speaker 05

  Oh, really?

• 22:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Like, you could still go and lay eyes on a million animals in a group.

• 22:47Speaker 05

  Um. And northern herd was smaller at that point?

• 22:51Steven Rinella?

  That's a good question. Probably.

• 22:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I believe it was.

• 22:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, probably a little smaller.

• 22:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:55Steven Rinella?

  But you could still go to Mile City, Montana.

• 23:00Steven Rinella?

  And, and maybe not look at a million, but look at a lot.

• 23:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:04Steven Rinella?

  Look at hundreds of thousands.

• 23:05Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, there, I mean, in the early 1880s, they're, they're killing hundreds of thousands.

• 23:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:12Speaker 05

  Cool.

• 23:13Steven Rinella?

  Uh, speaking of buffalo, here's the thing we've been doing, working on. I'm guessing Phil can't see this. So our cookbooks, our wild game cookbooks, we always have jerky recipes in our wild game cookbooks. We're coming out with, uh, buffalo jerky, bison jerky, whatever the hell you want to call it. We call it, uh, American buffalo, but then just to, this is the first thing we talk about in our Hyde Hunter series. The first thing we talk about is why the words bison and why the words buffalo and which one is right. I'm a buffalo man myself. Randall tends toward bison, but I've bullied him into being a buffalo man. I buffaloed him.

• 23:50Speaker 05

  It's better for storytelling.

• 23:51Steven Rinella?

  I buffaloed him into being a buffalo man. Uh,

• 23:58Steven Rinella?

  there's a whole long story here. Ninety, like, there's, the fashionable number at one time, we had 32 million, 40 million buffalo uh, in our country. Now we got a half million. Of those, 94% are privately owned. Um,

• 24:16Steven Rinella?

  we don't get into this in our story really, but there's a part of this like, private producers, private ranchers save the animal from extinction. Um, and today they're the ones that keep it like ecologically viable, genetically viable and, and present on the landscape. Like when you're driving down the road and you see a buffalo, nine out of 10, it's because a guy owns it.

• 24:35Speaker 05

  It's livestock.

• 24:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. Which is like, I'd rather have, I'd rather have tons of wild ones. Um.

• 24:44Steven Rinella?

  Politically, I believe in maneuvering for more wild ones on the landscape. Like, we need to recover the species. But right now, uh, it's, it's strength comes from its popularity as a game meat or as a wild meat. A farm-raised wild meat.

• 25:01Steven Rinella?

  So we're doing these jerky packs where we take the recipes from our cookbooks and cook them into American buffalo jerky.

• 25:11Steven Rinella?

  Lot of buffalo stuff going on right now around here. You guys ever stuff a buffalo? Yeah.

• 25:18Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 25:19Speaker 00

  When's that available?

• 25:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  We're teasing it.

• 25:22Steven Rinella?

  Oh, sorry.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  We're a week early.

• 25:24Steven Rinella?

  August 11, 2025, I'll be fighting a big ol' halibut that day.

• 25:30Steven Rinella?

  August 11, 2025 is the launch date.

• 25:35Steven Rinella?

  We're just launching in classic pepper, more flavors to come.

• 25:40Steven Rinella?

  Stay tuned.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  Add a new site, meat eatersnacks.com.

• 25:44Steven Rinella?

  Meat eatersnacks.com.

• 25:48Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com. In military families, service is more than a job, it's a legacy.

• 26:32Steven Rinella?

  At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.

• 26:57Steven Rinella?

  What if you could save up for that new car or vacation just by buying the stuff you're already buying? With the One Pay Banking App, you earn 3% cash back on up to $150 in monthly spending in categories you choose. So it's easy to save. So what are you saving for? Maybe you've got your eyes on a new truck, or a new boat, or you're saving up for your first house. Download the One Pay App, or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  One Pay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Cash back is earned as points. Go to onepay.com/rewards/terms for redemption options and additional details.

• 27:45Steven Rinella?

  Now, is this, is the next thing, are we just into the show now?

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Yes. We can skip the stolen valor stuff if you want, but I thought it was funny.

• 27:57Steven Rinella?

  We're talking about, see, because you guys occupy like a unique niche in taxidermy. But we were talking about a guy saying like, like, at what point is taxidermy stolen valor? Meaning, like, if you, if you hunt deer, and you have a hunting cabin, and you go buy a giant buck, a giant stuffed buck, and put it in the taxidermy, in your cabin, to a way that people visiting your cabin might logically be like, he got that buck.

• 28:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:26Steven Rinella?

  But you didn't. You bought it. Is that stolen valor? And so we're trying to weigh out like, how this whole thing works. But you don't need to weigh in on that, because I don't want you to alienate your clientele.

• 28:37Speaker 04

  No, no, I mean, it feels, it just depends if they actually hunt, and then they go purchase, they go purchase something huge from us, then it seems a little bit like stolen valor. But if they're just like stylists, or house decorators, or people who just, you know, they're not in the hunting world, then it might not be stolen valor.

• 28:57Steven Rinella?

  That's where we landed. That's where I landed. I landed as like, are you using it in the way that could be deceptive?

• 29:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's one thing, yeah. Right?

• 29:07Speaker 05

  Or is it, I mean, I think like, if it's, if it's someone you know, if it's like a friend's animal or something, like, you have a sentimental connection to it, like, it has meaning to you.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just took possession of all my dad's taxidermy. Well, four pieces.

• 29:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, I've got a buddy's, I've got a buddy's fish in my garage.

• 29:26Steven Rinella?

  That's stolen valor.

• 29:27Speaker 05

  Your buddy?

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Wait, is that a?

• 29:28Speaker 05

  Who cares?

• 29:29Speaker 00

  Is that like an old?

• 29:30Steven Rinella?

  Now everybody's gonna think Randall caught that fish. Oh, your buddy passed away? I'm sorry, my condolences. What kind of fish is it? Huge?

• 29:36Speaker 05

  Uh, it's a big, it's a giant snook. And it was his dad's, actually.

• 29:40Steven Rinella?

  Is there, okay.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  So it's not like a replica?

• 29:42Steven Rinella?

  No, no, no, no, no. If I walked into your garage and you weren't home, what'd I think? Holy shit, Randall caught a big, what was it?

• 29:50Speaker 05

  Uh, snook.

• 29:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's stolen valor. Do you have a plaque that says, "I didn't catch this"?

• 29:55Speaker 05

  If I'm not home, though. If you're in my garage when I'm not home.

• 30:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but that's stolen valor. I would be like, oh shit, I didn't know Randall was a snook fisherman?

• 30:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, I guess, I guess in the absence of any context, you could jump to that conclusion, but most people walk in, they say, oh, that's a, like, where'd you get that? That's a big snook. And I'll go, it was my buddy's.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Does it look old? Like, it's, it's a, um, it's the originally. It's the original one, not a replica, right?

• 30:26Speaker 07

  I think like, if, there's been multiple times where you have given stuff away after a trip, like.

• 30:33Steven Rinella?

  I always regret it.

• 30:34Speaker 07

  Like, your, your bear from the spring, you gave, I think you gave to Chili. The skull.

• 30:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 30:40Speaker 05

  I gave my, I gave my shoulder mount to Chili.

• 30:42Speaker 07

  And Chili's gonna boil that up and put it on his shelf and be like, that's from the hunt I was on with Steve. Steve got that.

• 30:48Steven Rinella?

  You better, or else it's stolen valor.

• 30:49Speaker 07

  Yeah. I think that is just like, he, he's gonna display that as like a memory.

• 30:55Steven Rinella?

  But that bear was so small, it'd be stolen embarrassment.

• 30:59Steven Rinella?

  I wasn't gonna bring it up, but if you wanted to claim that, you can go ahead.

• 31:02Speaker 05

  Well, the funny thing about that snook too, is when I, I walked into my buddy's office one time, and I was like, holy shit, that's a big snook. Where'd you get that? And he goes, oh.

• 31:10Steven Rinella?

  Can you spread this out?

• 31:11Speaker 05

  He goes, my dad caught it, and then I got it when he died. And now I have that fish, and I do the same thing for people who walk in.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  Other way.

• 31:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh, here's a taxidermy question.

• 31:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:24Steven Rinella?

  So, uh, this, this, I got this bear, uh, oh, well over 20 years ago.

• 31:28Speaker 07

  Did you shoot all them holes in there?

• 31:30Steven Rinella?

  Dude, this bear's been through hell. No, I only shot it one time. It was actually like.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  Maybe that, maybe that's a.

• 31:35Steven Rinella?

  No, no, no, no. This has been, this has been employed as a half dozen Halloween costumes. I mean, this thing's been through hell.

• 31:44Steven Rinella?

  Is this, uh, here's the thing I worry about. There's nothing you can do to save this now, right? Or how would you save it? For the audio listeners, what are we doing here? Oh, sorry. Sorry, Phil. I was like, up until this point. I have what looks like a polar bear, but it's a black bear. And I, and it's, it's sun bleached. I keep, I keep it out. We have a, like an outdoor patio that's kind of covered. And I keep it over the couch. And so over the years, it bleached to like a polar bear. It's my favorite thing.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  It's really.

• 32:13Steven Rinella?

  Not my favorite thing, but one of my favorite, uh, specimens. I feel like it's gotten wiry. It's, it's, it needs a good shampooing.

• 32:22Steven Rinella?

  So I was saying. It's not soft. Among other things, yes.

• 32:26Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I want to give it a good shampooing, but I'm afraid if it gets wet, it's just gonna fall apart.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  It's gonna get stiff and fall apart on you.

• 32:33Steven Rinella?

  You agree?

• 32:34Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 32:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you can't. What could I do? What could I, is there anything I could do?

• 32:39Speaker 04

  You could oil it.

• 32:40Steven Rinella?

  I did feel it.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Maybe, maybe a little longer.

• 32:47Steven Rinella?

  What oil would you put on there in your professional opinion?

• 32:50Speaker 04

  You know, even Mackenzie oils is, you know, there's plenty of taxidermy companies that have oils. They're just a leather oil, baseball glove oil, you know, any kind of oil to just kind of seep into there a little bit, brush it on. And then, um, on a sad lay a mesh and then latex it just cause you see these tears over time. You wear that thing, you pull it together. You need something to hold it together. Otherwise it's gonna, it's gonna end up breaking on you eventually.

• 33:14Steven Rinella?

  So if I shampoo it, I'm screwed.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. It's gonna be stiff as rock. I mean, it's, it's, yeah, you can't, cause you're rehydrating it. So unless you're gonna mount it.

• 33:22Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 33:22Speaker 04

  It's, it's gonna, you know, it's not gonna work.

• 33:25Steven Rinella?

  But I, out of sentimental value, I could latex it.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  Well, you'd have to, you'd have to lay like a little layer of mesh over it with adhesive, like flexible adhesive.

• 33:37Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  Cause that'll create a bond pretty much. It'll be like a skin on the skin, just kind of holding it. So if you're gonna tear this, that holds it together. And then you could like a latex over that or back it with something else, whether it's felt.

• 33:47Steven Rinella?

  Like a drywall patch.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. Like a drywall patch.

• 33:51Steven Rinella?

  Except it's gotta be flexible. Flexible. Do people ever bring you stuff like this in your shop?

• 33:56Speaker 06

  All the time.

• 33:57Steven Rinella?

  Do you turn them away usually if it's like?

• 33:59Speaker 06

  Most of the time we, we really, it's not because we don't want this, because we're so busy with other things that, uh, you know, we don't really have the time. And then our guy, like he mentioned, he passed.

• 34:09Steven Rinella?

  Or your rug guy?

• 34:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it's like, unfortunately, we haven't found anyone yet. You know, so we, we mostly turn them away.

• 34:20Steven Rinella?

  So if I came in and I was like, please, you'd turn me away?

• 34:27Speaker 05

  Well.

• 34:27Steven Rinella?

  Depends how much capital you have.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  We take some, but then it just, it pulls us away from bigger, more important projects sometimes.

• 34:35Steven Rinella?

  More important.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Or better paying.

• 34:42Steven Rinella?

  This looks like a passion project. It doesn't look like a. I wasn't planning on getting this out, but in our, when you guys came in, we got to talking about just, obviously taxidermy. It brought to mind my main problem in life right now, but I'm going to pursue, you might think it's crazy. Cause it's probably like a lot of money for what I'm sitting here with, but I'm going to pursue this mesh adhesive solution.

• 35:07Speaker 06

  Definitely.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 35:09Steven Rinella?

  What am I looking at? How much, how much money am I looking at to fix that up?

• 35:12Speaker 04

  I mean, it's not, it's just time, honestly. I'm in for us.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  Four fifty.

• 35:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh, oh, that's worth it to me. It's worth it to me. It's sentimental. It's my first bear. You know, I mean, it's a simple. First bear. Wow.

• 35:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:28Steven Rinella?

  How old? You wouldn't have guessed it from looking at it. It was a huge bear. You couldn't roll that sucker over. Should have seen this thing when it started.

• 35:37Steven Rinella?

  So did you guys go to taxidermy school? How'd you, how'd you, you know, how'd you get in?

• 35:43Speaker 04

  Just the old timers at Bischofs. Yeah, yeah.

• 35:46Steven Rinella?

  Well, so you started out working there?

• 35:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So it was, uh, old man Larry, he was like my mentor. And he was part of the, some of the original Bischofs. He was there maybe the forties, fifties and he's passed on, but uh, yeah, I just came in and I was doing just music before that. And I, um, a friend of mine was like, hey, Gary's going out of town, blah, blah, blah. Can you watch the shop? And then I met Larry and he was mounting a crow in the back. And he's like, hey, come here. Yeah. I'm gonna show you how to mount a crow. And I was like.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  This is kind of interesting, you know what I mean? And it just kind of went from there. But you were working there, though. I was, yeah, I'd been working there for like, yeah, yeah, four or five months. And then Larry came in and then it just, it's just, you know, started picking things up while working there. Yeah. It all started coming together. Uh, Ray, what about you?

• 36:40Speaker 06

  Well, uh, a little bit later on, uh, he mentioned that the, uh, Gary wanted to retire and they wanted to sell out. So we just jokingly said, well, let's jump in, let's buy it, you know? Cause he knew the numbers, he was running the shop, so.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  Oh, but how long had you been there at that point?

• 36:59Speaker 06

  Well, I had, I had just been there once or twice to visit.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  Oh, so you guys were buddies?

• 37:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  What, what, how were you guys buddies?

• 37:10Speaker 06

  Well, we met through, uh, music.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Like what kind of music? Just rock music. Like you guys like to play?

• 37:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, we had different projects and then he had some songs and then I was gonna do some vocals on the songs. And then just through the years, we became friends. And I think for whatever reason, we were driving by the shop one day and I was just like, dude, you gotta check out the shop.

• 37:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:30Speaker 04

  And then he checked it out. He's like, oh, like, wow, this is impressive. It's like a natural history museum that you can be up close with. But you didn't know anything about taxidermy?

• 37:37Speaker 06

  I mean, I knew about it, but I really, you know, it never crossed my mind like to, you know, get into it. Oh my God, you know, like I want to learn or anything like that. I just thought it was so cool, like to see this specimen, you know, all the species out there and beautiful and, uh, it's like he said, like stepping into a museum. So it was, you know, just so impressive, but, uh, I never really thought about how is it done, you know? Why is it done or, uh, to really go deep into it until he mentioned that, uh, you know, they wanted to retire and, uh, He said the numbers look good, so.

• 38:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so he says to you.

• 38:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:21Steven Rinella?

  You're aware that taxidermy is a thing.

• 38:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 38:25Steven Rinella?

  And you like looking at it and then Ace says, do you want to buy a taxidermy studio? To which you're like, yeah.

• 38:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, let's do it. Let's jump on it, you know?

• 38:38Speaker 05

  It's the classic, it's the classic rock music to taxidermy pipeline.

• 38:43Speaker 06

  It's a slippery slope.

• 38:48Speaker 06

  So, you know, we just jumped in and we got into it and I just rolled with the punches, you know? So one time, I remember we were about to close the deal, right? And he said, hey, I'm staying late. You know, I wasn't really there yet, huh?

• 39:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you weren't there yet.

• 39:07Speaker 06

  I'm staying late. I'm skinning a coyote. And I said, hold on, I'll go over there and let me do it.

• 39:13Speaker 06

  So I go, I just show up in the evening and I started skinning a coyote, you know? He was like kind of showing me around. So that's kind of my first try at actually.

• 39:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 06

  Doing, you know.

• 39:25Steven Rinella?

  How many people, how many, like, what, what, what is the, like, bishops at the time? What was the scale of the business?

• 39:33Speaker 04

  I mean, employee wise?

• 39:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, or just whatever, like, you're cranking out what kind of work and.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  I mean, it's hard to say because it just depends on the size of the project. So sometimes it'll be like a big movie project and they want like an animatronic cow that's laying outside with a lot of servos and stuff going on. So that.

• 39:49Steven Rinella?

  A lot of what?

• 39:49Speaker 04

  Servos and just electronics.

• 39:51Speaker 06

  Mechanical, yeah.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. So it'll be like a, you know, RV, whatever, those little motors. And then, um, so that project takes a lot more time, you know what I mean? So it just depends. And we're doing a lot of things at the same time. So you'll see a mount being done. A pet being finished, you'll see.

• 40:11Speaker 07

  Like a hunting mount being done.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:13Speaker 07

  A pet being finished.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  A fake life-size bear that's ten foot, you know, being fabricated for something where they don't want to use real fur for whatever it is, you know, so like we have a bunch of different projects going on at the same time.

• 40:26Speaker 07

  In a studio.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  In a studio. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 40:29Speaker 07

  But how many people are working there?

• 40:31Speaker 04

  Depends on projects normally about.

• 40:33Speaker 07

  Bring them in, depending on what's going on.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, so on average, like six, six is kind of like the, or straightforward number, but then we bring in subcontractors on electronics. There's phenomenal sculptors, Jesse, we got a lot of people who are just great.

• 40:47Speaker 06

  Mole makers and things. It depends on how big the, the, the project and how our timeframe. So sometimes, you know, the studios, the movies are always like, can you do, you know, can you have it by Friday? And it's like, sure. Yeah, that's like when I call Seth's wife bar.

• 41:08Speaker 05

  Did you guys have like, uh, other than music, did you, did you work in like a, another, I mean, did you, were you in art, like a physics? Did you sculptor or painting or drawing or did you have a mechanical background?

• 41:20Speaker 06

  I had, I have a mechanical background.

• 41:22Speaker 05

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 41:23Speaker 06

  So I used to, uh, I used to have a, a smoke check station in California. We do, uh, you know, emission inspections for vehicles. So they don't pollute. So I had a license. Uh, I was a technician, you know, uh, so.

• 41:36Speaker 07

  So you were handy.

• 41:37Speaker 06

  I was handy and I did, I, I did go to school for the electronics, you know, like low voltage stuff. So that kind of came in handy when it came down to, uh, servos and, and mechanical stuff and electronic stuff. So.

• 41:51Speaker 07

  So on the average day, you guys could be mounting a buck from some Joe Blow that brought a buck in that killed one hunting.

• 41:59Speaker 06

  Right.

• 42:00Speaker 07

  To like making stuff for movies.

• 42:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, sometimes he's working on a, on a, you know, on that or a taxi in peace and I'll be working on a, on a structure for a, for a dead dog or something that they're gonna need, you know, like.

• 42:13Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  That's so interesting.

• 42:15Speaker 06

  So and then we do, uh, he does the final details. I'll get him ready for, you know, just for the final. Painting and brushing and details. So we kind of like switch over like.

• 42:28Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm. Huh.

• 42:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we got to see, I mean, like he could weld, he does all the other stuff, you know, a lot of the that kind of stuff. I do more, I do like the finish work, the airbrush and all that kind of stuff. But um.

• 42:38Steven Rinella?

  God, I want a good job down there, man. At least an internship for a while.

• 42:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:44Speaker 06

  It's interesting. I mean, it's it's challenging because every time, you know, you gotta, we start from scratch and we gotta figure out. You know, every time's a little different because they always want some different, you know, it's.

• 42:56Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 42:57Speaker 06

  It's rare when we do like the same thing, you know, like the same uh kind of prop. So they always want something special about it, you know, yeah.

• 43:07Steven Rinella?

  Um, let's back up to music for one sec.

• 43:09Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 43:10Steven Rinella?

  So the Blizzard of Oz just died.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 43:15Steven Rinella?

  You guys, you guys like, so if I, just give me thumbs up, thumbs down.

• 43:18Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:19Steven Rinella?

  Uh, War Pigs.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 06

  Good.

• 43:24Steven Rinella?

  Crazy Train? Yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 06

  Really good.

• 43:27Steven Rinella?

  That's all. Let the record show that to both of those questions, they responded to the affirmative with a thumbs up. War Pigs was like a tentative. It was like they thought about it, but Crazy Train was like a.

• 43:37Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 43:38Steven Rinella?

  That was a no brainer. Yeah. Oh, I don't. War Pigs is. Okay, let me hit you with this one. Him doing all them stupid reality shows.

• 43:44Speaker 06

  Oh, I don't know about that.

• 43:46Steven Rinella?

  They didn't thumb it, but it felt like a thumb down to me.

• 43:49Speaker 06

  I'll go, I'll go between.

• 43:51Steven Rinella?

  You don't want to speak ill of the dead.

• 43:52Speaker 06

  But he did that somewhat entertaining, but.

• 43:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the Osbournes is very entertaining. Yeah, for sure.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  I never watched it.

• 43:58Steven Rinella?

  Uh. I could tell you a long fifteen minute story about Crazy Train that involves me and Craig Kemp from high school, but I'm not gonna.

• 44:08Steven Rinella?

  Um. Somewhere. That leaves us one more. It'll be like an appendix. Can we do, we should start doing appendixes on the show. Ah. Post credit scenes? Yeah, like an appendix. After the show, you.

• 44:21Steven Rinella?

  Do the parts and you couldn't fit in it. Yeah. Footnotes. Yeah. Uh, how, how does the, how does the movie, uh, trust me, I'm like, I'm gonna get to like just the, the emotional aspects of the pet trade. But, or the pet business, but how, like, how does movie business come to you? Do you know what I mean? Like, like who, who comes to you? Is it an agent? Is it a director? Like, like, how do they explain their vision?

• 44:45Speaker 04

  I mean, it's, they just, everybody reaches out, whether it's prop master, whether it's product, you know, anybody in the production will reach out. I mean, at this point, I think it's established enough, I mean, even long before we were there, uh, Gary, Mary, we're there, the previous owners, um, that they just give us a call. Literally, it's just, we pick up the phone, fish offs, and they'll be like, hey, we're working on the show. We need a fake pig. Someone's got to stab it. There's gotta be blood coming out the other side. We gotta drag it, make it flexible, make it heavy. The actor does, you know what I mean? And then, and then they'll be like, but we need it in two weeks.

• 45:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 45:22Speaker 04

  And then you gotta, you know, you gotta figure it out.

• 45:25Speaker 06

  And then we tell them, yeah, we need at least two weeks. And then they're, they're still working on it. And then wait, uh, five days go by and they give us a green light. So, for the same deadline.

• 45:34Steven Rinella?

  Oh. Oh, my gosh.

• 45:36Speaker 06

  Well, they go back and forth and figuring things out.

• 45:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Are, are you able to na, like, um, can you name some films that people might've seen some of your stuff in?

• 45:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. We did, uh, Westworld, we worked on Landman.

• 45:47Speaker 06

  Yellowstone.

• 45:48Speaker 04

  Yellowstone, a lot of Yellowstone stuff. Um, the night, all the nineteen twenty-three, a lot of the television stuff, we definitely worked on. Um, I was just in, what was those snakes for? I forgot. I was just, I mean, the thing is, by the time the shows come out, I don't even know what it was for.

• 46:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:05Speaker 06

  Sometimes we don't even know the show. We just have the, the production company name and, and we don't know.

• 46:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so you never, you never like follow along?

• 46:13Speaker 04

  No.

• 46:14Steven Rinella?

  It's out of your life. Are you ever watching a show and you're like, oh, no shit?

• 46:18Speaker 06

  That's when we find out. We be watching something Netflix and, oh shit, that's, that's, you know, that's us.

• 46:24Speaker 05

  Now, some blood comes out of that pig going left to right. That's it.

• 46:29Steven Rinella?

  So do you often, because of the, because of the rules in filmmaking, um, and I know it's not a hard and fast rule, but there's like, there are way, you know, when, when you started seeing Once Upon a Time, you started seeing like no animals are harmed in the making of the movie.

• 46:48Steven Rinella?

  Does that like, how does that fit into your work? Meaning if you have an old specimen that was already dead for another reason, are you able to use it? Or does everything have to be synthetic?

• 47:00Speaker 04

  No, no. So, um, yeah, it's just pretty much you didn't kill it for the purpose of the film.

• 47:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  So if we had an old hide, for example, like even, um, we've had donated hides from like the Wolf Conservation Center, say, for example, and they naturally pass, they'll, you know, they're like, you guys can process it because otherwise we're just gonna do a commutation.

• 47:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 47:18Speaker 04

  So we'll save the hide and we can use that hide. And it's not, you know, we didn't kill it for the purpose of the film. We just had the hide.

• 47:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like in a movie when they're eating a steak.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Right. Exactly.

• 47:28Steven Rinella?

  They didn't go out and.

• 47:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 06

  That's how one of us did.

• 47:34Speaker 06

  Same with that.

• 47:40Steven Rinella?

  So you guys don't like go get the, go get the rifles and go try to figure out what's gonna happen.

• 47:46Steven Rinella?

  Hit me with the, hit me with the pig one, okay? So they, they want, there's a pig.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:50Steven Rinella?

  They need a pig. They want a pig. Oh, I was just watching the other, um, it was a Corsican movie. Can't remember the name of it. Anyways, in it, they got a pig hanging there.

• 48:00Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 48:01Steven Rinella?

  It's about Corsican.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  Oh, I saw that. Is it like a gangster? Like it's like the father's.

• 48:06Steven Rinella?

  What's the hell's the name of the movie?

• 48:06Speaker 00

  The father is involved in like, like local mafia and then it's like his daughter.

• 48:12Steven Rinella?

  The Corsican mob.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  I forget the name of that film.

• 48:14Steven Rinella?

  Either way, in it, they got a pig. They show up, there's a pig in a truck, pretty soon the pig's hanging there.

• 48:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:21Steven Rinella?

  So you get a call about a pig. Like, or let me just, let, let me give you a fake example.

• 48:28Steven Rinella?

  Um, because you already brought up the pig. Let me bring up one like, I say, I'm doing a movie. A guy, the, the protagonist hits a deer at night with his car. And it's a key part of the movie that he hits a deer at night. So we need a deer, we need a, he needs to hit it. It needs to be that there it is on the road.

• 48:48Steven Rinella?

  There's gonna be quite a bit of focus on the deer because of the plot. How would you, where do you start? Like, how would you think about that problem?

• 48:56Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, that's probably an easier one because there's a lot of deer hides we have.

• 49:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:00Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, I mean, just truthful. I mean, it's not something super exotic that you're looking for.

• 49:05Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  You know, and then we just see the hide, see what they want, if they needed to move or be flexible.

• 49:11Speaker 06

  So we'll probably start with the, uh, two of them for, for the, for the purpose of, you know, you're gonna shoot it. You get a frame when, when he's gonna get hit by the car. One of them will be standing, right?

• 49:21Speaker 07

  That's what I was gonna ask, like, in, in a scene like that where there's like a standing deer, a deer like flying through the air and then like a dead deer.

• 49:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, so that we would probably.

• 49:28Speaker 07

  There's multiple deer.

• 49:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's, there's multiple deer.

• 49:31Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 49:31Speaker 06

  If you're gonna get out of the car and then drag it somewhere and, and obviously it has to be floppy, kinda freshly dead, killed, you know, whatever. So you need a floppy one, so you would need a couple of them, at least two of them.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  And when you have a floppy.

• 49:44Steven Rinella?

  And you're making it look, like, obviously, you gotta make it look banged up.

• 49:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Oh, for sure. Yeah, you gotta do the blood, the guts, the whole, we do like silicone. So we'll make molds, we'll sculpt pieces and then lay silicone, paint that up. Then you can put blood over that and then it just looks gruesome when you, when you go up to it, you know?

• 50:03Speaker 00

  When it's floppy, what are you stuffing it with?

• 50:06Speaker 06

  Well, so we.

• 50:08Speaker 00

  Or is that a trade secret?

• 50:09Speaker 06

  It's kind of a secret, but we try, but we try to keep it, uh, you know, the structure of, or, or the anatomy as close as possible. So that's kinda, we learned that.

• 50:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 06

  Uh, you know, through a lot of, uh, the ones that weren't so good at the beginning. So we learned that we, we need to have the, the anatomy kinda, you know, certain parts need to be, uh, like really.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  More firm and less firm.

• 50:34Speaker 06

  Structurally firm than, than, uh, yeah, so.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 50:38Speaker 04

  Especially like the hips and the shoulders.

• 50:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, and the head, obviously.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  Huh, it's like a new kinda, a new kinda mount. I know John Hayes does like soft coyotes and we have a soft bobcat, but, uh.

• 50:50Speaker 07

  He always wants them to look alive.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:52Speaker 07

  He doesn't want them to look.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Right, right. But I'm just wondering, like, you know, who knows? Maybe you want a different kinda, you want a floppy.

• 50:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  Floppy, uh, I don't know, roan at home that you just got in Tanzania, maybe.

• 51:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:06Steven Rinella?

  Oh, by the way, I know a guy. I know a guy that has a full sable and a full rhenid. Okay. So if you get a movie call. Oh, definitely. If you get a movie call, come talk to me.

• 51:19Speaker 05

  And he might be willing to trade them for a mesh backer.

• 51:24Steven Rinella?

  Okay, okay. I mean, like professionally done, flashed and salted. Okay. Everything down to the nutsack. Wow. Tanned and ready to go? No, not tanned and salted. Just keep me in mind.

• 51:41Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com. In military families, service is more than a job, it's a legacy.

• 52:25Steven Rinella?

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• 53:08Steven Rinella?

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• 53:17Speaker 02

  OnePay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Builder Card results may vary and aren't guaranteed. Learn more about banking through OnePay at onepay.com/podcast.

• 53:32Steven Rinella?

  So let's say we do this deer, that we're gonna do this deer thing, as I described. I don't, I don't wanna pry.

• 53:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:37Steven Rinella?

  But I'm like, hey, what uh, what should I budget for this? Now, don't, don't, just like, like, are we talking? I don't wanna pry. Yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 04

  He's prying.

• 53:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay, let's put, let's put it this way, let's put it this way.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  Talk about it in the number of figures.

• 53:55Steven Rinella?

  No, yeah, let's put it this way.

• 53:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:56Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I go and say, hey, I just killed a nice buck, I want a full body mount of my buck to, to, to display in my house, and I want it to look like the second before I shot it.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:08Steven Rinella?

  Alive and well, beautiful.

• 54:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:12Steven Rinella?

  And then I come with the same deer, and I say, hey, I want it to look like I just ran it over. But bad.

• 54:21Steven Rinella?

  Which of these projects is more expensive?

• 54:24Speaker 04

  As long as you bring it and you give us good amount of time, they would both be, you know, I mean, it'd be cheaper to get you a busted up looking thing.

• 54:31Steven Rinella?

  It is.

• 54:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure.

• 54:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but you gotta make all the latex.

• 54:36Speaker 04

  But we already have all the molds and everything for it. So we, you know what I mean, and we, we do it so often that it's just. You don't have to like re-sculp guts and stuff.

• 54:44Speaker 05

  And you're probably not doing a ton of detail work with something like that.

• 54:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, we just throw dirt on it if you want it really much.

• 54:55Steven Rinella?

  Then you build, when they read their invoices, there's a, there's a line item for dirt.

• 54:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:03Steven Rinella?

  All right, so, uh, there's that business, which is very different. You had traditional taxidermy, which people can't understand that.

• 55:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:11Steven Rinella?

  Um, how in the world, like, in, in Bischoff's history, how did, how did the, the, the, the pet?

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Oh, hold on.

• 55:21Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  You can continue, continue the topic.

• 55:23Steven Rinella?

  In company history.

• 55:25Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:27Steven Rinella?

  What was the moment that someone said, like, we're laughing about Crin has John Hayes. Do you do pets? John Hayes says, no. What was the moment in Bischoff history? What, what, okay, tell me the name of the animal. It's not called Bischoff's.

• 55:41Speaker 04

  It's Bischoff's. Yeah, Bischoff's is the name of the company and the animal kingdom is just like the slogan that goes with.

• 55:46Steven Rinella?

  I got it. At what point in Bischoff history? Was it, the answer is yes.

• 55:53Speaker 04

  Well, I think Roy Rogers' trigger was done at our shop.

• 55:58Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 55:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, I mean, that was a pet.

• 56:01Steven Rinella?

  And Roy Rogers' horse?

• 56:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, Everett mounted it. Yeah, at our shop, many years ago.

• 56:08Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 56:11Steven Rinella?

  That is incredible.

• 56:15Speaker 06

  And also a buck.

• 56:16Steven Rinella?

  Unbelievable.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  Buck as well.

• 56:21Speaker 05

  I mean, if you walked up on that.

• 56:23Steven Rinella?

  I'd kick it.

• 56:23Speaker 05

  You'd have no.

• 56:26Steven Rinella?

  It's like, wake up.

• 56:26Speaker 05

  You would have, let the, let the record show that there's now a, a stuffed dog.

• 56:32Steven Rinella?

  Wow. What kind of dog? Is that a pug?

• 56:34Speaker 06

  No, it's a Frenchie.

• 56:35Speaker 05

  There's a, there's a stuffed Frenchie on the table that is, uh, sleeping.

• 56:42Steven Rinella?

  And it looks very real.

• 56:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's got wrinkles and.

• 56:46Steven Rinella?

  You got a picture of you sitting here, Randall?

• 56:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:50Steven Rinella?

  Whose heart is this?

• 56:52Speaker 04

  That's a client's heart, actually. It's a free.

• 56:55Steven Rinella?

  That's that dog's heart. He wanted his dog's heart?

• 56:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:58Speaker 06

  Yep. Smile.

• 57:01Speaker 04

  After saying that.

• 57:03Steven Rinella?

  So how do, how do you do that? Is it freeze dry or something?

• 57:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, freeze dry.

• 57:06Speaker 05

  So I had a question about that.

• 57:08Steven Rinella?

  So you got a lot of questions.

• 57:09Speaker 05

  You can grind that up and eat it.

• 57:11Speaker 06

  Technically, technically, yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 04

  I mean, not with what we inject it with, but.

• 57:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you inject.

• 57:17Speaker 05

  The strange part about the heart to me is like, if I took my dog to you and said, I want my heart. And obviously we can't, you know, these are your clients, so we don't, but like, when they get it back, they're like, oh, I've never seen that before. You know?

• 57:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I've never seen my heart.

• 57:34Steven Rinella?

  You ever think about that?

• 57:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:35Steven Rinella?

  You'd never get a good look at your own heart.

• 57:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's true.

• 57:38Speaker 06

  Well, they've seen it done, you know, they've seen the the sample, so.

• 57:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:42Speaker 06

  They get a good idea of how, what they're getting, so.

• 57:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. That is.

• 57:47Speaker 07

  I could see tracker.

• 57:48Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 07

  Getting done like that.

• 57:50Steven Rinella?

  And it wouldn't be that different than the way it is now.

• 57:53Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 57:53Steven Rinella?

  It just kind of lays there a lot of times.

• 57:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I I spend, when I'm at home, I spend ninety-five percent of my time around sleeping dogs.

• 58:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:02Speaker 05

  And.

• 58:03Steven Rinella?

  You could spend one hundred percent of your time.

• 58:04Speaker 05

  And I can't, but like, I I could never tell you that that wasn't a live dog.

• 58:09Steven Rinella?

  That is an amazing bit of work.

• 58:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:12Steven Rinella?

  That's freeze dried.

• 58:14Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 58:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a, it's a hybrid, it's a.

• 58:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 58:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, we do a little bit of everything, it's mixed, it's like a weird, yeah.

• 58:23Speaker 05

  So what?

• 58:25Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 58:27Speaker 05

  How, what is the freeze, like, could you explain the freeze drying process? I mean, I think most people are familiar with, like, standard taxidermy, you're you're tanning the hide, you're putting it over a mold, then you're, you know, molding and and painting and stuff like that, but what is the freeze dry process, like, you start with a dead dog?

• 58:46Speaker 06

  Right.

• 58:46Speaker 05

  And what do you do?

• 58:47Speaker 06

  So we prep it, obviously, we gotta do some skinning.

• 58:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:51Speaker 06

  In our case, you know, uh, all the, uh, uh, organs and fatty tissue has to be removed, because those things don't freeze dry well, except, you know, obviously, if you do it separately, but so we prep them, uh, we, we actually cast a, a mold out of their body, so we have the same, the perfect, same dog's body, so that's how you get to replicate.

• 59:19Speaker 07

  So you know where to end up.

• 59:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, uh, but the head, the skull is still, it's still there, it's intact, you know, the legs, uh.

• 59:28Speaker 04

  All the skeletal structure remains. Like that leg will freeze dry good, because there's just nothing to it.

• 59:33Speaker 06

  Right.

• 59:34Speaker 04

  It's just fats and oils is what makes it difficult in the freeze dryer. So you gotta get rid of it. Pretty much fats and oils just don't freeze dry. Okay. Yeah, that's the biggest thing. And then we um, sometimes we'll 3D scan and then digitally print. The, you know what I mean, some of the like body portions and stuff like that. Um, because we, we're big on 3D printers and scanners because we got quite a few of them just for the film industry. Huh. If they want like a quick paw that matches something, we can 3D, 3D print it, you know what I mean? And then figure that out. So we've meshed a lot of different, you know, I mean, uh, industries into what we do.

• 1:00:07Speaker 06

  Into the pets, yeah.

• 1:00:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. Who's uh, who, whose dog is this? Um, this is, this is, I don't know if he wants to be named, but it's a client. It's a client's dog. Does he know it's here? Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:19Speaker 04

  That's incredible. Yeah.

• 1:00:21Speaker 07

  It really, it really is.

• 1:00:23Speaker 04

  Dude, that dog looks like it's laying there sleeping.

• 1:00:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  I'm getting all emotional.

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  Think of all the moments.

• 1:00:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Think about your own dog.

• 1:00:32Speaker 04

  So he's laying there thinking about when he's alive. Doesn't it look like that?

• 1:00:35Speaker 07

  How big of a dog, like, does the size matter?

• 1:00:39Speaker 06

  It does. Obviously bigger dogs, it's a lot more work and it takes a lot lower in the, in the actual freeze dryer.

• 1:00:44Speaker 07

  You should see Corinne's dogs.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, we got a Great Dane and my new Finland is upstairs, so they both.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  How, how, how many pounds, but?

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  One, one, one twenty and one thirty something.

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. So he's calculating how much time it's in the freezer.

• 1:01:01Speaker 04

  We just got one in.

• 1:01:02Speaker 07

  He's working up an invoice.

• 1:01:04Speaker 04

  Someone came in from the east coast that he's, and it was uh, about a hundred and sixty pounds.

• 1:01:08Speaker 06

  Yeah. So that's the biggest so far.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Wow, what kind of dog is that?

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  You want him frozen, probably. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. And that's the biggest thing is people sometimes. I mean, they're, they're not, it's not like a hunter who knows what they're doing the prep work for, so they don't know to freeze. So they, you know, there's times where like they've, you know, you're mourning.

• 1:01:28Speaker 06

  They're mourning and they, they just have him out for twenty-four hours or.

• 1:01:33Speaker 04

  Hair starts to slip.

• 1:01:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Speaker 04

  Latex.

• 1:01:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  And age, you know, honestly, age, sometimes they lose a lot of weight. And we gotta be honest with you, if you bring in a seventeen year old.

• 1:01:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  Dog who lost X amount of pounds and you're like, and you show me a photograph of when they were three, four years old.

• 1:01:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Speaker 04

  We could add a bit of weight, but we gotta be realistic about. Yeah, but that goes in Hollywood, that goes on all the time, get it?

• 1:01:59Speaker 06

  Try to make him look good, yeah, I mean.

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  If we had a band, this is where they would play.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Hey, we've got some two musicians in the room.

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. There you go.

• 1:02:09Steven Rinella?

  Huh. All right, I, I don't even know where to begin. Um.

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  That's just, yeah, it's wild. It's wild.

• 1:02:17Steven Rinella?

  It looks great.

• 1:02:21Steven Rinella?

  Back when I was, uh, I don't know where, I don't know where things stay in a taxidermy now, but. When I was younger, it would be like, you just order all these molds. I mean, like, let's say you're, let's say you, let's say you do whitetail deer. Right? You just order a mold, right?

• 1:02:36Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:02:37Steven Rinella?

  For the most part, I mean, like, for most work be that you go on to taxidermy.com. And it's like. Head tip, you know, shoulder mount, looking right.

• 1:02:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:49Steven Rinella?

  But in your guys, there's no.

• 1:02:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's why.

• 1:02:52Steven Rinella?

  You don't be like, what kind of dogs is?

• 1:02:54Speaker 06

  Get into it.

• 1:02:54Steven Rinella?

  What is this dog?

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  Frenchy.

• 1:02:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, so there is no, no forms pre-made. French bulldog.

• 1:02:59Speaker 04

  No French bulldog.

• 1:03:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you don't go, French bulldog, twenty-five pounds.

• 1:03:03Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:03:03Steven Rinella?

  Sleeping.

• 1:03:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. Four inch nose to eye.

• 1:03:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  The cute little paw cross thing that he used to do. Yeah.

• 1:03:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, so that's where, I think that's where, uh, the big difference is, there is nothing pre-made or, or there's nothing we can order. That's.

• 1:03:19Steven Rinella?

  It's all from scratch.

• 1:03:20Speaker 06

  It's all from scratch.

• 1:03:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22Speaker 04

  Everything.

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  His little heads on his little paw with the little like, it's like, yeah, like cheek extra skin.

• 1:03:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:29Steven Rinella?

  So is the first, is the first step.

• 1:03:33Steven Rinella?

  So he he never got, you never sent this to get tanned?

• 1:03:36Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:03:37Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 1:03:38Speaker 06

  That's where the freeze dryer kinda takes over, you know, the freeze drying kinda is like the tanning process, but it's it's uh it's done by the uh removing the moisture off and uh kinda it's pretty much the same result.

• 1:03:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:03:56Speaker 06

  Obviously, this is brittle, you know, it's it's it's, I mean, it's stiff.

• 1:04:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Speaker 06

  Uh.

• 1:04:01Steven Rinella?

  Would you would you expect that this is this is this will last?

• 1:04:05Speaker 04

  Well. Yeah, because because we do a little bit of a weird hybrid thing. We we make sure that if you just put this in a freeze dryer without doing kinda like the hybrid thing that we do with it, it wouldn't last.

• 1:04:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Speaker 04

  Cause fats and oils just they're they're not gonna freeze dry. It's, you know, man, you'll two, three years, you'll have slippage, you'll have.

• 1:04:26Speaker 06

  It's gonna fall in apart.

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:29Steven Rinella?

  But when you, here's a.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  Are those like the actual ears?

• 1:04:32Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:04:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Steven Rinella?

  No insert in there.

• 1:04:36Speaker 04

  No insert.

• 1:04:36Speaker 06

  No insert.

• 1:04:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Okay, so when you thaw, when you thaw an animal out,

• 1:04:42Steven Rinella?

  is it is the clock, like the clock's ticking now, right?

• 1:04:45Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:04:47Steven Rinella?

  That's why I'm just curious, like, without it,

• 1:04:51Steven Rinella?

  how are you hustling so much to wind up with something so realistic with like the proper folds in its neck and all that? Like, once you thawed out, you gotta start working on it. I mean.

• 1:05:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we.

• 1:05:01Steven Rinella?

  You have how many, how many hours, days till it's gotta be kinda like done?

• 1:05:05Speaker 06

  So we probably, we start working on, let's say, start on it today, and you get to a certain point, and then you put it back in the refrigerator. So next day, we pull it out.

• 1:05:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:05:15Speaker 06

  And you continue until probably two days.

• 1:05:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, two, three. I mean, you gotta, you gotta keep it cool, you gotta keep it frozen. So it I mean, it's not like you gotta get it all done now.

• 1:05:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, not at one go.

• 1:05:26Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:05:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, like I could start on it, you know, have it pretty much ready to go, maybe I got the mold, and then I'm like, okay, wait, it's Friday, you know, I wanna go have a good weekend, whatever it is, pop it in the freezer, then maybe Sunday night, come out, pull it over to the fridge, by tomorrow morning, Monday morning, it's, you know, thawed out, and then we can go to the next step.

• 1:05:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Steven Rinella?

  Uh, how distraught are people when they bring you their pets?

• 1:05:52Speaker 06

  Well, we get a variety of people. Some people are just normal, you know, uh, not too emotional. Some people are really emotional. Sometimes even when they call, we, we, you know, we understand. So we try to be, you know, empathetic to their situation. And so that's kind of a different,

• 1:06:13Speaker 06

  it's like, uh, we're talking about going back from a deer to a pet to a fake thing. So you're on the phone and you're on the, yeah. So you're on the phone with someone that wants a, a, a a snake for a show. And then the next call is someone crying over the dog, you know, over their pet. So it's, it's

• 1:06:32Speaker 07

  A range of emotions.

• 1:06:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a range of emotions. And also when they come in, you know, we have people from the studios come in checking out, hey, I want, I want to look at your crows. And they're going, and then we got someone bringing on, you know, their pet. It's, it's, it's it's a very contrasting, you know,

• 1:06:49Steven Rinella?

  Different energy.

• 1:06:50Speaker 06

  Different energies with different clients.

• 1:06:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So we made a little like, there's like a little side pet room, like almost like morning when you bring your pet in.

• 1:06:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Steven Rinella?

  You go to this private room and you kind of, you know, you could sit there, take your time, just so it doesn't take away from your experience, you know? I don't want a studio person to come in just like, hey, man, how's it going?

• 1:07:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, you got like some old lady crying over her cat. Yeah.

• 1:07:11Steven Rinella?

  I can picture that.

• 1:07:12Speaker 07

  Yeah. Do you, do you wash the hides on those dogs?

• 1:07:15Steven Rinella?

  Thoroughly.

• 1:07:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, we do.

• 1:07:16Steven Rinella?

  A lot of washing.

• 1:07:16Speaker 07

  If I did my dog, I'd want it to smell like my dog, like kind of half rotten.

• 1:07:23Speaker 06

  We could do.

• 1:07:24Speaker 07

  Keep some dead fishes.

• 1:07:33Steven Rinella?

  What, this, this is gonna be a tricky one. I like, I don't want you guys to damage your business or anything. There's gotta be, right? Like people are gonna have expectations. And then they're gonna come in, you know, and you gotta be like, here it is? Yeah. And then they're gonna respond.

• 1:07:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Steven Rinella?

  That seems to me fraught. That seems to me, that's gotta be a tricky moment. You gotta be having your fingers crossed.

• 1:08:00Speaker 06

  Well, at this point.

• 1:08:01Steven Rinella?

  They're gonna be like, oh, perfect.

• 1:08:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Steven Rinella?

  And not some other emotion because they're, because again, it's emotional.

• 1:08:08Speaker 06

  It is.

• 1:08:09Speaker 04

  It's different.

• 1:08:10Speaker 06

  Well, so far we haven't had a bad experience, so we're pretty confident. So now when people come in and pick up their pets, we're pretty confident they'll be, you know, happy.

• 1:08:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh dude, if I owned this dog, I'd be thrilled.

• 1:08:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:21Steven Rinella?

  I don't know if the son of a bitch slept like that, but I'd still.

• 1:08:25Speaker 04

  Well, you gotta pick your pose, is the thing. So if your pet sleeps a different way.

• 1:08:29Speaker 06

  You can take your pose.

• 1:08:30Speaker 04

  You know, we just get.

• 1:08:31Steven Rinella?

  Cause people got pictures of their dogs sleeping.

• 1:08:33Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. And I always say like one to three pictures, because sometimes they'll send me like an album, but thousands.

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  So which one do you want?

• 1:08:43Speaker 04

  One for the body pose. One for the facial expression.

• 1:08:48Speaker 07

  If you guys did my dog, it'd be super easy, because when my dog sleeps, it just looks dead anyway.

• 1:08:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:54Speaker 07

  So just be like, just make it look like a dead dog.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  Can we get it between Ace and Ray, just for like a really nice, clean shot of it? Cause we've gotten some good shots, but not, not the whole body or anything like that, just for the audience.

• 1:09:05Steven Rinella?

  Is it okay to slide it? I don't know how one handles a stuffed dog.

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  Pop it up over. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:11Steven Rinella?

  Oh, even the bottom. Show the bottom of that thing.

• 1:09:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:09:15Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 1:09:18Steven Rinella?

  Damn.

• 1:09:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, cause you can't round that.

• 1:09:20Steven Rinella?

  God, that dog looks great.

• 1:09:21Speaker 00

  Phil, is that good?

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

  That looks, that looks great, yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 05

  It's, it's really kinda spooky how.

• 1:09:27Steven Rinella?

  That makes me wanna get our dog's stuff.

• 1:09:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Speaker 06

  See, that's the thing with people.

• 1:09:31Steven Rinella?

  Like tracker combi.

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  Killed for the making of this product.

• 1:09:37Steven Rinella?

  The difference is you wanna get him stuffed today.

• 1:09:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, so people, uh, it's not for everyone, you know, some people get.

• 1:09:47Steven Rinella?

  No, of course not.

• 1:09:48Speaker 06

  You know, like. They have a negative reaction to the actual aspect of

• 1:09:52Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:09:53Speaker 06

  preserving your

• 1:09:53Steven Rinella?

  Oh, a hundred percent, dude. You're you're dealing with a

• 1:09:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Steven Rinella?

  fraction of pet owners.

• 1:09:57Speaker 06

  Yes, and but people don't realize like when they see the final product with the final outcome, it kind of changed their perspective on on how to look at the the the actual, you know, process.

• 1:10:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Speaker 06

  Or the or the or the just the thought of, you know.

• 1:10:17Speaker 04

  And then also, we do have, we have a bunch of other options. So like a common person will come in. We have an aquamation machine, for example. So you can just do the ashes and we have an artist that can get you a custom portrait. We can do the podcast. So a lot of people go for like the generic normal.

• 1:10:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:33Speaker 04

  Kind of preservations. And then some people do like a partial preservation. Some people just want the skull bronzed.

• 1:10:37Steven Rinella?

  Did you just say a podcast?

• 1:10:39Speaker 04

  Um, yeah.

• 1:10:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, yes.

• 1:10:40Steven Rinella?

  I thought he said a podcast.

• 1:10:42Speaker 05

  But I knew he didn't, but I thought that's what he a podcast, yeah.

• 1:10:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:47Steven Rinella?

  Oh, just like an imprint for him.

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  Exactly. We do like bronze, you know, podcasts or, I mean, and then some people want the skull, you know, they want like a bronze skull. So we'll do that as well. Really, everybody has. I mean, that's the way the heart came about. One person asked for

• 1:11:02Steven Rinella?

  Like Vincent Price or something wanted that. Like, who wanted that?

• 1:11:06Speaker 04

  I can't even remember who the first person. Yeah, it was. But then it's like somehow other people start to know about it. And then we just said, well, we might as well.

• 1:11:13Speaker 06

  Same thing with the with the paw. Remember someone?

• 1:11:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Speaker 06

  Just asked, you know, oh, my God, I would just love to get his paw and preserve. So like, OK, well, we'll do it.

• 1:11:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, but unless it has that yeasty smell. That's, I mean, for me, that's

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  The Fredo's.

• 1:11:28Speaker 05

  The attraction of a dog's paw.

• 1:11:31Speaker 05

  I I'm wondering about like, I mean,

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  Just dust some Fredo's on.

• 1:11:35Speaker 05

  Because there are there are certain animals, I feel like, out there, like wild animals, game animals, that when you taxidermy them, they don't ever really have like the full Magic, you know?

• 1:11:45Steven Rinella?

  They're dead.

• 1:11:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know, but like this, like, like if you saw a mountain lion like that or so. I'm sort of wondering about like the the bleed over between this freeze dry technique and what we think of as traditional taxidermy.

• 1:11:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, why, why are people not doing? Well, I guess they do because I remember I used to sell otters to a guy that would freeze dry them and sell them. Long time ago.

• 1:12:07Speaker 05

  Like that.

• 1:12:07Steven Rinella?

  They didn't look like that, I can tell you that.

• 1:12:09Speaker 05

  Bear paw would be wild.

• 1:12:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you can do.

• 1:12:12Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, can you do bear paw?

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, we could do bear paw. I think the biggest thing is just.

• 1:12:16Steven Rinella?

  Great mount.

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 04

  Some of the chambers, a lot of the freeze dried chambers just aren't too huge. So you you got a size issue. And then also like the amount of space that you do, you know, we could fit fifteen of these these guys in one chamber. If we fit in a mountain lion, we're going to charge you a lot of money for that mountain lion to sit there. For four months in the freeze dryer.

• 1:12:33Speaker 06

  Well, we could have done four of these guys.

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  Four of these guys.

• 1:12:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Cause it's filling up your real estate.

• 1:12:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:39Speaker 05

  A squirrel? That'd be cool.

• 1:12:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, we freeze dry, I mean, I think it would would great like if you have like a caracal cat or whatever, you know, like. I think because you'd have the skeletal structure in there and I think that's what messes up those mounts a lot of times.

• 1:12:51Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:12:52Speaker 04

  Some of the forms are great, but not as good as a natural skull.

• 1:12:54Speaker 06

  So when you order the forms, they have no, no detail. They're just plain, uh, you know, foam, uh, forms with no detail. So that's why you don't, you don't get the, uh, you know, the wrinkles, the expression, uh, on the actual.

• 1:13:07Steven Rinella?

  That's a really good point that like the, the, the, the native structure, meaning the skull, like the native structure is there.

• 1:13:15Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:13:15Steven Rinella?

  And the paw is like the structure is there.

• 1:13:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. You got all the skeletal structure and same thing with the faces. I mean, the face is the core of the mount. So if you were to do any kind of wild cat, I mean, it's just, it would make more sense to have the natural skull and everything, the natural ears. Cause I mean, I've done them traditionally, but it's just, you're sculpting now, it's up to the sculptors, up to the artist. You know, and it's not up to the, the way he really was naturally.

• 1:13:41Speaker 05

  So that dog's skull is in.

• 1:13:42Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:13:43Speaker 05

  This mount right here.

• 1:13:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:13:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:13:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, wow. If you guys married?

• 1:13:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're both, yeah, married. Yeah.

• 1:13:50Steven Rinella?

  What do they think about your line of work?

• 1:13:52Speaker 06

  Well, they love it. I mean, they're okay with it. I mean. It's, it's, it's, it's for us, it's interesting, you know, it's, it's.

• 1:14:03Steven Rinella?

  It's fascinating.

• 1:14:04Speaker 06

  It's fascinating. It's not like even when people ask, oh, so what do you guys do? What is, you know, it's just interesting to spark a conversation just on the fact that. Yeah. It's so random, you know, so out there.

• 1:14:20Steven Rinella?

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• 1:15:00Steven Rinella?

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• 1:16:17Speaker 00

  I'm still fascinated by how you guys took over the business and even got into doing this at this level.

• 1:16:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  You know, I mean, this is, this, you know, this looks incredible, amazing, and it seems like all the techniques that you've developed to apply to this work is just, you know, it's not like you were, you know, apprenticing for decades, you know, and it's just mind blown.

• 1:16:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, I think it's a lot of the, just the random stuff like we're talking about that every day, and I think the studios pushed us a lot.

• 1:16:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Speaker 04

  Cause we've, we've had to come up with so many ways of like how, I mean, there's times where we've sold a job and we're like, now how are we gonna do it?

• 1:16:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:59Speaker 04

  They want an elephant, they need it in this, you know what I mean, like whatever it is, I'm like, okay, it's gonna take this long to make the mold, we gotta do the fiberglass, we gotta, so I think all those freak out moments led us to like piece it all together to be able to do something.

• 1:17:14Steven Rinella?

  Do you, do you ever do work on, on like time and material, because you don't know what you're getting into?

• 1:17:21Speaker 04

  We do, but we, yeah, I mean, we do time, I mean, we definitely, we price it all out, of course, material, time, also just what we're getting out of the way, cause a lot of the studios, like I said, it's all last minute stuff.

• 1:17:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:17:35Speaker 04

  So it's not, it's not like a hundred just drops off, hey, man, I'll pick it up in six months.

• 1:17:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:40Speaker 04

  No big deal, if you go seven months, just make sure it looks great.

• 1:17:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  Whereas the studio's like, hey, can I get progress pictures?

• 1:17:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Speaker 04

  I get it, but like, right now, I don't wanna send you a photograph of a foam form that looks nothing like what it's supposed to be.

• 1:17:55Speaker 06

  And then they're gonna try to change the, you know, the, oh my God, I wanted, you know, and they're gonna kinda make changes while we're in the, we're in the middle of the process and then.

• 1:18:06Steven Rinella?

  What I meant by time and materials, like in the trades, we, like, when I used to work for my buddy Ronnie, we would do jobs that were a bid.

• 1:18:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:14Steven Rinella?

  Right, you're like, it'll, it'll be this, and if we lose money or make money, that's the price.

• 1:18:19Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:18:20Steven Rinella?

  Or some things that were more open ended, it'd be like.

• 1:18:23Speaker 04

  We're gonna work on the project at blank dollars an hour.

• 1:18:29Speaker 04

  Plus our materials, because we don't know what we're getting into. So you normally come back with a, it'll be this.

• 1:18:34Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:18:35Speaker 04

  And then you lose money or make money on how, on how well you can fulfill.

• 1:18:39Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:18:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, at this point, I think we got a good idea of where it's gonna land. So if we say, oh, it's gonna be whatever, sixty, a hundred. They'll be like, okay, well, you know, and we kind of know we're, you know, what we're banking on it. What, how much the latex is, the foam is, the, you know, whether we use natural hide or faux furs or whatever. Got you.

• 1:18:57Speaker 06

  So, yeah, no.

• 1:19:00Speaker 04

  I was gonna ask, what other pets have you guys done? Other than dogs?

• 1:19:05Speaker 06

  Well, we do, uh, cats, uh, uh, hamsters, uh.

• 1:19:10Speaker 04

  Hamsters?

• 1:19:11Speaker 06

  Rats, yeah.

• 1:19:13Speaker 04

  Rabbits.

• 1:19:13Speaker 06

  Rabbits, bearded.

• 1:19:14Speaker 04

  A goldfish. Bearded dragons. We did do a goldfish once.

• 1:19:18Speaker 06

  Oh, we.

• 1:19:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was in the article, wasn't it?

• 1:19:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, we did.

• 1:19:21Speaker 04

  I remember that. Once. Hamsters. Oh, yeah, hamsters.

• 1:19:24Speaker 06

  Hamsters, yeah.

• 1:19:24Speaker 04

  Little rats, little baby rats, like, there's, you know, sometimes a kid will have a rat and it'll naturally pass and they'll be like, oh, my God, I love this. And they'll, kid will come in and we're like, yeah, we'll do it. I mean, if that's what you want, I mean.

• 1:19:36Speaker 00

  Hollywood families.

• 1:19:37Speaker 04

  So, keep, keep rattling off. You did a wallaby. Pet wallaby, pet emu, horses, we've done horses, of course.

• 1:19:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:19:45Speaker 04

  Um, but now horses are done traditionally, because it's just, you don't want to freeze drive.

• 1:19:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, there is no, there is no, uh.

• 1:19:52Speaker 04

  And say it was Roy, you guys did Roy Rod, your company did Roy Rogers. Everett, um, he was a taxidermist at the time who did it, he did. Yeah, you guys weren't even born yet. No, he was, he was amazing. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:04Speaker 06

  I think it's still at a museum somewhere, right?

• 1:20:06Speaker 04

  They sold it in auction, it's, I think, somewhere in the Midwest now. Um, I think it's sold for like a quarter of a million, I don't know, something like that. Have you ever done a pet cow? We, we did, yeah, we do that every once in a while. We do.

• 1:20:18Speaker 06

  The, the two-headed calf.

• 1:20:19Speaker 04

  We, yeah, that's a two-headed calf that was natural, that was still born or whatever it was. We did that for somebody as well. A lot of longhorn, you know what I mean? Um, just your natural, like, you know, they'll keep the hide and then we'll just do the head mount. Well, how many pieces are coming out of your studio every year? I don't know.

• 1:20:36Steven Rinella?

  Is there something out the door every day?

• 1:20:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

• 1:20:40Speaker 06

  Pets, definitely.

• 1:20:41Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 1:20:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, pets. And I think we have rentals, too. So we have, so that's another weird thing. Yeah, so somebody will come in and then we have a big showroom with everything you can think of. So we have a bunch of fake stuff. We have a bunch of real stuff. So you can come in and you'll find like a lion paw that's hinged where it'll swipe. So if you're working on a commercial for whatever and you need that, that will just be like, oh, perfect. That's the one I want. Boom, pick it up. We'll ring you up. You'll bring it back. It's a week rental. Drop it back off.

• 1:21:11Speaker 04

  That's all it is. Yeah.

• 1:21:14Steven Rinella?

  How many employees you got now?

• 1:21:16Speaker 04

  It's like six, seven, seven.

• 1:21:17Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:21:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:19Speaker 05

  And then a list of subcontractors.

• 1:21:21Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  That just seems incredible, though.

• 1:21:24Steven Rinella?

  Uh, how, how, explain the subcontractor thing. There's like guys out there to have these particular skill sets. And what are they doing when they're not doing the work for you?

• 1:21:33Speaker 06

  Well, they work for other studios.

• 1:21:35Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:21:35Speaker 06

  So they're like, uh, constantly either, uh, you know, one studio to another, uh.

• 1:21:42Steven Rinella?

  And that doesn't cause problems for you?

• 1:21:44Speaker 06

  Well.

• 1:21:45Steven Rinella?

  No, not necessarily.

• 1:21:45Speaker 06

  Not really. Cause we have, uh, you know, what we, we have a, uh, a list of many. So if one's not available, we go to the next one and eventually things work out.

• 1:21:58Steven Rinella?

  Give me, give me an example of, give me, give me example. Give me example of a guy that's not on pay, not on staff, who you call

• 1:22:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:06Steven Rinella?

  for special assignments. Like, well, I don't understand.

• 1:22:09Speaker 06

  It would be more like sculpting.

• 1:22:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, so like David Grasso, he's a phenomenal sculptor.

• 1:22:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:22:14Speaker 04

  Great. So he, he will, I think he was the one who sculpted, I think, the snakes for

• 1:22:19Speaker 06

  for Landman.

• 1:22:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it was, yeah.

• 1:22:21Steven Rinella?

  For what?

• 1:22:22Speaker 04

  For Landman. So he digitally sculpted, um, the snake, like the whole snake was digitally sculpted. He sent us the file. So he worked from home on that thing.

• 1:22:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:31Speaker 04

  On the computer, he digitally sculpted the whole thing to our measurements, to everything. We went back and forth. And he sent us the file. We 3D printed the file, made a mold out of it. Silicone casted the snakes so they're flexible, put wiring, whatever they wanted to do in them. And he'll float around. So then he'll just, he'll do projects for another studio. But these are effect studios that he mostly works with.

• 1:22:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:22:51Speaker 04

  So it's like Hollywood studios where they'll call him and now he's got to sculpt for The new whatever film that's coming out, you know, so he just floats around. So for us, it's not like, oh, they're taking our sculptor. It's no, I mean, everybody can do what you do, you know?

• 1:23:06Speaker 00

  That's cool. I didn't get to that episode yet in Landman. I just started watching it. So Billy Bob Thornton.

• 1:23:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:15Speaker 07

  I remember those snakes. I watched that one.

• 1:23:18Steven Rinella?

  You guys ever do a Black Mamba?

• 1:23:20Speaker 04

  Black Mamba, cheers.

• 1:23:23Steven Rinella?

  In Kill Bill, there's a Black Mamba in there, but it's alive. But then there's like, obviously, some of your guys' work is not your work, but someone's work is in there.

• 1:23:31Speaker 04

  Might have been Gary at the time.

• 1:23:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:23:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:34Steven Rinella?

  Not sure.

• 1:23:35Speaker 00

  I have to ask you about cloning, which I saw on your website. It says inquire about cloning.

• 1:23:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we don't, obviously, we don't do that in-house.

• 1:23:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:23:48Speaker 06

  But there is, there is a company in Texas. It's called Viagen, right?

• 1:23:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this company in Texas called Viagen, we, we take this. They're amazing. I mean, they do great work. So we take the samples. We're just affiliates with them. We help them out and they help us out. So a client will come in. The most important thing, though, is you can't freeze the pet. So the pet, say, your pet naturally passes away and you wanted to clone them. You can refrigerate them, but you can't freeze, freeze the pet because it'll crystallize the sample and they won't be able to get the DNA.

• 1:24:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:24:17Speaker 04

  So that's, that's one step that sometimes people kind of skip up on and then they won't be able to do the cloning. But we just take five samples. So it'll be generally a couple from the ear, you know what I mean? Small little samples. We put them in little vials and we over and add them to them. But because if we're doing the full preservation, we need to take those from specific hidden spots. So sometimes when the vet does it, they do it from like the top back and then we get, you know, and then they want to preserve their pets.

• 1:24:43Steven Rinella?

  And it's got dimples.

• 1:24:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:24:44Speaker 04

  You know what I mean? Now it's like, and then they take huge samples when you only need like tiny little samples because they're not thinking about the preservation. They're just thinking about getting a good sample.

• 1:24:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:53Speaker 04

  So we take them from like the, like, for example, if I was to take from here, I'd go from like the inner hip. You can't see it. It's already tucked. The inside of the ear, really deep in the ear canal where you can't see it, you know, areas like that.

• 1:25:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:25:06Steven Rinella?

  Have you ever done a pig getting suckled by all of its little piglets?

• 1:25:11Speaker 04

  We did do the little piglets.

• 1:25:13Speaker 06

  We did.

• 1:25:14Speaker 04

  Jesse sculpted those little piglets.

• 1:25:15Steven Rinella?

  I'd like that.

• 1:25:17Speaker 00

  Hey, you know, we have a pig.

• 1:25:18Steven Rinella?

  Like a big old pig getting suckled by its piglets.

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  We have two fetuses in the freezer.

• 1:25:22Steven Rinella?

  You should give them to those guys.

• 1:25:24Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 1:25:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:25:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, Steve killed a pregnant sow in Texas a few years ago and then we vac sealed a couple of the, yeah, we still have the fetuses.

• 1:25:34Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:25:36Steven Rinella?

  I'll sell them to you. Do you have people, do you have people come in just to gawk?

• 1:25:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:25:43Speaker 04

  All the time.

• 1:25:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:47Speaker 04

  It's tough because you're in the middle, you know, I mean, of working, but it's, you know, it's nice. It's a compliment because people just wanna, some people go into town and be like, hey, I heard about this place. And they'll just roam around. The thing is, is nothing's roped off at our shop. So you can actually walk up to the polar bears, to the tigers, to the lions and, you know, hang out with them, take a photograph with them, whatever. It's not like a natural history museum where you're roped off with a scene in the background. It's like now you can actually come in and feel what a polar bear feels like.

• 1:26:15Steven Rinella?

  That's cool. I'm surprised you guys can pull this off with only six or seven people. Like, who answers the phone?

• 1:26:22Speaker 06

  It's between me and him.

• 1:26:23Steven Rinella?

  You guys are like, huh?

• 1:26:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, we're working on everything, so.

• 1:26:28Speaker 04

  It's, I mean, we've had, we've had some front desk people, but it's difficult because they go into their spiel so fast sometimes that there's a lot of, there was a lot of relay, you know what I mean, between like everything, especially when they wanted to custom, say for example. And it just takes so long to get somebody trained up to really take on that position of knowing how to, because you've got to be creative on the spot. They're gonna be like, hey, this deer's gotta get hit, but he's gotta have a hinge and his arm's gotta twitch at the end. And we need it like by Friday, so what, what do you got?

• 1:27:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:01Speaker 04

  And then, you know, a front desk is just gonna be like.

• 1:27:03Steven Rinella?

  It's my first day.

• 1:27:07Steven Rinella?

  I'm new here. The front desk is like, let me go get ace. You're on the phone anyways.

• 1:27:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:27:12Steven Rinella?

  It's not like ordering a pizza.

• 1:27:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:16Steven Rinella?

  I can see that.

• 1:27:17Speaker 04

  So because of that, I'm like, you know what, just, I'd rather just pick it up and be like, hey, yep, we'll have it by Friday. It's this much. We'll do it with this whatever servo. We'll make a little clamp thing for it, whatever.

• 1:27:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it's kind of, it's, it's, we need to train someone, but it's gonna, it's gonna take months, you know?

• 1:27:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:35Speaker 04

  We tried.

• 1:27:36Speaker 06

  We tried, I mean, and it's, it's, it's very difficult.

• 1:27:40Steven Rinella?

  Oh my gosh. So at, at this point, if you had to, uh,

• 1:27:45Steven Rinella?

  like, if you had to pursue one path, the film business or the pet business, like, which, which are you more in love with?

• 1:27:54Speaker 06

  Well,

• 1:27:55Speaker 04

  In love?

• 1:27:56Speaker 06

  In love with the studios.

• 1:27:57Speaker 04

  Or consistency of?

• 1:27:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, but.

• 1:27:59Steven Rinella?

  What's consistent?

• 1:28:01Speaker 04

  Well, it used to be the studios, but then the strikes started happening, then COVID started happening, so that, that kind of made the industry go up and down, and then you got CGI, you got AI.

• 1:28:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that shit's coming for you, yeah.

• 1:28:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:28:11Speaker 04

  You know what I mean? So, I think at this point, the smart move would be leaning towards this.

• 1:28:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:28:16Speaker 04

  The, you know, here towards this, here towards the studios, because it's fun, and you're just doing cool projects.

• 1:28:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can see that.

• 1:28:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:28:24Steven Rinella?

  Do you feel that the pet, getting pets stuffed or taxidermied, or what, taxidermy? What do you, what word do you guys use?

• 1:28:30Speaker 06

  We use preserve.

• 1:28:31Steven Rinella?

  Preserve, okay.

• 1:28:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:28:33Steven Rinella?

  Um,

• 1:28:35Steven Rinella?

  like, what is the sort of line, the graph line on pet preservation?

• 1:28:42Speaker 06

  Well, it's,

• 1:28:43Steven Rinella?

  It's not, there's no way it's stable.

• 1:28:45Speaker 06

  No. Well, I mean, it's actually,

• 1:28:47Speaker 04

  It's pretty consistent.

• 1:28:48Speaker 06

  It's pretty consistent, yeah.

• 1:28:49Speaker 04

  It's consistent and ground, I'll tell you that.

• 1:28:51Speaker 06

  And for the last,

• 1:28:52Steven Rinella?

  So it's up, it's a gradual?

• 1:28:53Speaker 06

  It's, it's, last five years, it's been, uh, uh, significantly up.

• 1:28:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:28:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I think people think of the old ways of doing it, because we got, I mean, we have mounts at the shop that were done dogs, I mean, from the thirties and forties. These bad plaster, just,

• 1:29:10Steven Rinella?

  Like newspaper coming out of their ears and stuff, yeah.

• 1:29:13Speaker 04

  You could see the excelsior, just kind of like wire poking out the side and stuff, and I think people think of that. So I think until it gets ingrained in their mind that, like, you actually are going to get your pet to look like your pet. It's gonna take time for people to see, and I think it's slowly starting to come out with social media and everybody being like, oh wait, actually that does look good. Yeah.

• 1:29:32Steven Rinella?

  Well, yeah, and also people now, like more and more and more, not that you get your relatives stuffed, but people now more and more act like pets are are.

• 1:29:42Speaker 06

  Oh, definitely.

• 1:29:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, exactly. You know what I'm saying? It's like a much more of a trend right now to have a dog and pretend it's like a person.

• 1:29:49Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:49Speaker 04

  Hundred percent.

• 1:29:50Steven Rinella?

  But that's, but that does, that falls apart because you don't get people stuffed, preserved.

• 1:29:55Speaker 04

  Some people do.

• 1:29:56Steven Rinella?

  Is that legal?

• 1:29:57Speaker 04

  I think I've seen it done a couple of times, not in the US now. We get calls for it, I mean.

• 1:30:03Speaker 06

  You know, we don't know if someone's calling, if it's real or they're just messing with us, but they bust, you know?

• 1:30:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:09Steven Rinella?

  What do you say? Just not, not our business.

• 1:30:11Speaker 06

  Not, not.

• 1:30:14Speaker 04

  I think there was a story of a girl who, she called and I think she got it done. She was, she had to get an arm amputated.

• 1:30:20Steven Rinella?

  No, I've seen those.

• 1:30:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. And she wanted to get a skeletal articulation of the arm.

• 1:30:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, people send us those pictures.

• 1:30:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:28Steven Rinella?

  Of, of their arms, skeletons done.

• 1:30:29Speaker 00

  I think there was a guy.

• 1:30:31Steven Rinella?

  Had his finger done.

• 1:30:32Speaker 00

  Had his finger done and it was like the Michigan hello, or it was something else.

• 1:30:36Steven Rinella?

  He just had his finger on a pedestal.

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 1:30:38Steven Rinella?

  He had it stuffed.

• 1:30:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:40Steven Rinella?

  Preserved.

• 1:30:40Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:30:41Steven Rinella?

  But you don't want to do that work.

• 1:30:42Speaker 04

  It's not that way down, it's just, you know, we just haven't, it's just not on our radar yet.

• 1:30:48Speaker 05

  Well, you think it's, you think it's stressful to have someone come in and look at the pet for the first time and be like, you nailed it.

• 1:30:54Steven Rinella?

  Dude, your finger, you know a damn sure that looked like.

• 1:30:57Speaker 05

  Or your uncle.

• 1:31:01Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's true, yeah, if you had your uncle done, and you're like, I want him to look like he did when he was reading.

• 1:31:06Speaker 05

  And you're like, just so you know, we've never done this before.

• 1:31:12Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell you though, uh, I'm blown away by the quality of that dog. I mean, all like, I know we've been like having a couple laughs about stuff, but I mean, just from a, from a, I mean, from a technical, like a technical standpoint, that dog is incredible.

• 1:31:27Speaker 05

  The minute I, the minute I saw it, it changed my entire perspective on the idea of stuffing a pet.

• 1:31:33Speaker 06

  Right, yeah, that's, that's.

• 1:31:35Speaker 05

  Like in an instant.

• 1:31:36Steven Rinella?

  What you don't, I guess what you don't have, and it's, and it's probably, it's, it's a trade off. It's because it's so perfect.

• 1:31:47Steven Rinella?

  Um, you can't get the soft, you can't get the feeling of having stuffed it.

• 1:31:53Speaker 06

  No, yeah.

• 1:31:54Steven Rinella?

  Because then it's not gonna, you know what I mean? It's like, it's either like, is it gonna be soft and squishy? Or is it gonna look like absolutely like, like a dog?

• 1:32:02Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:32:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, sometimes people wanna do like a soft version of their pet. Thing is, we'll do it for television and film, but with a pet, it just won't last. So we get requests for it all the time and I'm just like, you can't get the structure.

• 1:32:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I guess people kinda love the thought of, of, uh, you know, having their, uh, kinda like cuddly pet. Like you said, fluffy, uh, floppy, you know? It sounds good in, in, in theory, but yeah, when it comes down to, uh, the technicals and, and durability and, and, and also looks, it's not gonna look, you know what I'm saying?

• 1:32:38Speaker 04

  Thing is, these hips, like, for example, like, you got this with these hips, that, those tan highs that are sitting in this room right now, you'd have to soak them to get a good stretch, to be able to get full hips, right? To get a soft hand, you can't soak them. So you're never gonna get that stretch.

• 1:32:53Steven Rinella?

  To get a what?

• 1:32:54Speaker 04

  To get a, uh, like, if you have those soft hands, to keep it soft and pliable, you can't get it wet. You know, so now you.

• 1:33:00Steven Rinella?

  See that bobcat back there? I wetted him and stretched him back out. Randall, grab that bobcat.

• 1:33:05Speaker 04

  He's pretty stiff now, or?

• 1:33:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's like, it's, it's a trade-off. Either, you either wanna get him back, like, I put him back on the stretcher board.

• 1:33:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:13Steven Rinella?

  But feel it. You can tell.

• 1:33:15Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:16Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 1:33:17Steven Rinella?

  It's a bummer.

• 1:33:18Speaker 04

  So that's the thing.

• 1:33:18Steven Rinella?

  It's like a trade-off, though.

• 1:33:19Speaker 04

  You see how it looks like a tube, there's no structure?

• 1:33:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:21Speaker 04

  If you just stuff this with cotton batting, you're just like, oh, here's a little soft stuff.

• 1:33:24Speaker 06

  It's gonna look like a sock, you know?

• 1:33:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:28Steven Rinella?

  You got it the wrong way, Randall. Belly out, buddy. I know.

• 1:33:32Speaker 07

  Show them spots.

• 1:33:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the, it looks incredible. I would, I would definitely see that, like, I, I get the point you're saying. If someone knew.

• 1:33:42Steven Rinella?

  That they could have, and I never, I'd never seen him alive. I mean, I look at enough dogs over the years. Yeah. If someone knew that they could have a dog look that good, that they'd be more inclined to do it because they're probably picturing their mind, like when you go into a pawn shop and there's like crazy looking, we did a whole calendar called Fucked Up Old Taxidermy, right? They're like picturing that, I don't want my dog being all bug eyed. Yeah, just looking all weird.

• 1:34:07Speaker 05

  Sydney used to always talk about getting her, our first dog stuffed.

• 1:34:11Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:34:12Steven Rinella?

  Preserved.

• 1:34:13Speaker 00

  We client here, guys.

• 1:34:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, well, he, he's, he's in ashes now, but I always, I would always say to her, you're gonna walk in there and you're gonna look at his lip and it's just gonna be, like, you're never gonna get that dog lip right. And, you know, you spent 12 years like messing with his lips and face and like, you know, it's so intimately, it's gotta look like that or else it's just.

• 1:34:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:34:38Speaker 05

  Alienating.

• 1:34:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, my, my kid got a bear to spring a nice bear. Hmm. Um, and I call him.

• 1:34:49Steven Rinella?

  Why did I call him about this? Oh, I know why. I was out of town, but I was talking to taxidermists. Um, and I'm like, here's the deal. Everybody always gets them growling, like a rug. It's always that he's got his mouth wide open.

• 1:35:04Steven Rinella?

  And I'm like, I've come to a pre, I've done the same thing, but I've come to appreciate the closed mouth rug. Because when you see bears, and I've watched a great many bears, Hmm. They're generally not running around with their mouth fucking.

• 1:35:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:35:18Steven Rinella?

  That's true. And I'm like, so you could have it look like all the teeth and everything, or you could take my recommendation and we could get him with his mouth closed. How do you want it? What do you think he said? He's 15. Open mouth. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

• 1:35:34Speaker 05

  Super snarled aggressive.

• 1:35:35Steven Rinella?

  Of course. Have you ever done a pet in a, in an aggressive posture?

• 1:35:42Speaker 04

  We got a, we got a request and I can't name his name. He's a famous person. You know what I'm talking about? Um, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:35:51Steven Rinella?

  He wanted his dog and its aggressive posture.

• 1:35:53Speaker 04

  He has a cat, but it's somewhat of a wildcat. So I kind of understand it a little bit.

• 1:35:59Speaker 04

  It's a domestic, like it's like a Savannah cat mixed with a Savannah, something else. And he wanted it.

• 1:36:05Steven Rinella?

  Sued up cat.

• 1:36:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. And he wanted it on a branch, but kind of aggressive, almost like it's going to pounce on something.

• 1:36:10Steven Rinella?

  Are you gonna do it?

• 1:36:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

• 1:36:12Steven Rinella?

  Who was it?

• 1:36:15Steven Rinella?

  Well, tell me what, no, no, listen, man. Tell me the, tell me the initials. I'll tell you my initials.

• 1:36:22Steven Rinella?

  SR, one for one.

• 1:36:25Speaker 04

  I mean, some of the charm in pet cats is that they don't like you, right?

• 1:36:28Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:36:29Speaker 04

  Like some of the charm of pet cats is that they come in and swipe you and run away. So I get it.

• 1:36:35Steven Rinella?

  But I, I, I would also picture just from a business standpoint. Um, unless it's cost prohibitive. Like I'm guessing people are going to be people that are emotionally attached to their pet are going to have a looser wallet. Than someone that's getting five or six things a year because they're a big hunter, right? They're gonna, they're gonna look at it differently. But I would picture that if someone wanted like, like I, I like river otters a lot. So I catch an otter. I would, I could picture a world in which I'm like, no, man, I want some bitch like that.

• 1:37:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:07Steven Rinella?

  An otter. Are you doing that kind of stuff too?

• 1:37:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. I think we're doing a, what are we doing? I mean, it's just a pelt, but a seal pelt right now. Remember that seal that we're doing? Seal pelt, we're doing a couple of seal pelts for the mammal care center. So we get calls too from nature centers and.

• 1:37:24Steven Rinella?

  What are you doing to seal pelts?

• 1:37:25Speaker 04

  Um, they just wanted to preserve it as an exhibit, you know?

• 1:37:28Steven Rinella?

  Like a hide?

• 1:37:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, like a hide.

• 1:37:30Steven Rinella?

  Like what's hanging around in here?

• 1:37:31Speaker 06

  Right. But it's gonna be obviously freeze dried. So it's gonna be stiff on a board, you know, like on a nice board.

• 1:37:37Steven Rinella?

  Freeze dried?

• 1:37:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:37:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. A freeze dried hide?

• 1:37:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:37:41Speaker 04

  You know why though? Because we wanted to keep the, uh, the fins beautifully intact. You know, I didn't want to have to like recreate them in a poor manner where it's not keeping the structure and the integrity of it.

• 1:37:52Steven Rinella?

  Understood.

• 1:37:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. So that we kept the fins, the bottom fins, the side fin, you know what I mean? And then we laid it out flat. So now when you go to see it, you get the real anatomy of the actual fin. And it's not just my version of it, having not hung out with seals.

• 1:38:08Steven Rinella?

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• 1:38:52Steven Rinella?

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• 1:39:34Steven Rinella?

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• 1:40:00Speaker 02

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• 1:40:14Steven Rinella?

  Can you hand that cat back over here a minute, Randall? Yep. Sorry. Um, let's say I had a cat and I...

• 1:40:29Steven Rinella?

  Like I have a cat and I just skin it and flash it.

• 1:40:31Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:40:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay, and I send it to you.

• 1:40:35Steven Rinella?

  Um.

• 1:40:37Steven Rinella?

  And I don't want to get it tanned. I just want to get it freeze dried. Is it all the same? Like I just get it back and it's freeze dried? And I can hang it up for the rest of my life on a wall?

• 1:40:45Speaker 04

  Pretty much. Yeah, I mean, you'd have to flush it still, you know what I mean?

• 1:40:48Steven Rinella?

  No, I'm gonna send it to you fleshed and dried.

• 1:40:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, if it's flesh and dried. Yeah, I mean. But you don't want to salt it. Cause it.

• 1:40:54Steven Rinella?

  No, we don't. We don't.

• 1:40:55Speaker 04

  You're not, you're not salt. Okay then.

• 1:40:57Steven Rinella?

  No, everything we do, we flesh it.

• 1:41:00Steven Rinella?

  Goes on a wooden board. Well, easy flip. But no, it's like it's.

• 1:41:03Speaker 04

  Just beam. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:04Steven Rinella?

  It's like flesh and beam and then it goes to the tannery like that.

• 1:41:08Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:41:08Steven Rinella?

  So there's a world in which, like I said, you and I wouldn't have any shrinkage.

• 1:41:12Speaker 04

  No, you wouldn't have shrinkage, but it'd be stiff. It wouldn't be nice and floppy.

• 1:41:15Steven Rinella?

  How stiff? Like this stiff or stiff?

• 1:41:17Speaker 04

  Uh, maybe.

• 1:41:17Steven Rinella?

  Stiff, stiff.

• 1:41:18Speaker 04

  Stiff, stiff.

• 1:41:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh, stiff as a board.

• 1:41:21Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. You'd lose all the, uh, it'd be like these ears.

• 1:41:24Steven Rinella?

  So that's not a good replacement.

• 1:41:25Speaker 04

  No, no, no. You want to do just a commercial tannery and just get it done nicely. Yeah.

• 1:41:31Steven Rinella?

  All right.

• 1:41:31Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:41:32Steven Rinella?

  I was thinking about.

• 1:41:33Speaker 04

  I was getting excited for a minute there.

• 1:41:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. I was thinking about different animals you could get freeze dried. And I thought a big old beaver sitting there.

• 1:41:41Steven Rinella?

  That's what I was thinking. Yeah, the tails. Hayes right now is doing a big fifty pounder.

• 1:41:46Speaker 04

  Hmm. What? Big beaver. He's.

• 1:41:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he's from, from the Boston, with the Boston.

• 1:41:50Speaker 05

  Oh, really?

• 1:41:51Steven Rinella?

  They want that big beaver done in a three point football stance.

• 1:41:54Speaker 04

  That's great.

• 1:41:57Steven Rinella?

  But it's, it's a hefty beaver.

• 1:41:59Speaker 05

  But I'm just trying to picture freeze drying the tail because there's so much fat.

• 1:42:03Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that'd be hard. That is nothing but fat.

• 1:42:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:42:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What would you do for that?

• 1:42:07Speaker 04

  You gotta get rid of all that fat.

• 1:42:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You gotta skin that tail.

• 1:42:09Speaker 04

  You gotta skin that tail out. Get it all out. Take as much as you can. Just leave. Leave the best structure you can while still keeping the, you know, removing all the, making sure the integrity is still there. It's gonna last.

• 1:42:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, no, I don't want a pry. But.

• 1:42:23Speaker 04

  But I'm gonna.

• 1:42:24Steven Rinella?

  Help me out here.

• 1:42:25Speaker 05

  But I'm done. Not like other than pry.

• 1:42:27Steven Rinella?

  I mean, what? I want a pry, but I don't want to. I just like, I'm sensitive of getting into a like, you know, getting into a big, you know, like someone saying to me like, so what do you, how much do you sell a book for? Yeah, it's like, I don't know, man, dude, it's a complicated question.

• 1:42:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:39Steven Rinella?

  I don't feel like telling you. Um. Help me understand what I'm looking at here with this dog.

• 1:42:45Speaker 06

  Probably around the range of three grand.

• 1:42:49Steven Rinella?

  That's it?

• 1:42:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, yeah, it's not.

• 1:42:52Steven Rinella?

  Dude, you could have told me eight and I'd have been like, eh, makes sense.

• 1:42:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, I thought my mind went to ten.

• 1:42:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:58Steven Rinella?

  Three grand?

• 1:42:59Speaker 04

  No, so it's we.

• 1:43:01Steven Rinella?

  That's a lot of work.

• 1:43:03Speaker 04

  It is, but we move quickly and we kind of know.

• 1:43:06Speaker 00

  I'm saying they can up their prices.

• 1:43:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I don't know, because I didn't call around. Like, you got, do you have competitors?

• 1:43:14Speaker 04

  Not necessarily. I mean, there's a guy on the East Coast who's great. He's a friend of ours.

• 1:43:18Steven Rinella?

  You send business his way?

• 1:43:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, we've worked together. He's freeze dried some stuff for us as well.

• 1:43:22Speaker 06

  Before, yeah.

• 1:43:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, before, you know, years ago, he used to freeze dry stuff for us as well. He's the only other guy that really, I think is really in the, in the business.

• 1:43:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:31Speaker 04

  But he's way out east. So it's, I mean, there's, there's a lot of people everywhere. There's business for everybody.

• 1:43:36Steven Rinella?

  That, that's what, that's kind of what I was getting at with why I thought the price be more is because I thought the price be more because it's, um, there's a little bit of a scarcity.

• 1:43:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:46Steven Rinella?

  Or a special circumstance or whatever, you know?

• 1:43:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, definitely. I think, uh, well, yeah, most people.

• 1:43:54Steven Rinella?

  That's a very reasonable, that's a very economical, economical dog.

• 1:43:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's why, I think that's why we have a high volume of pets because it's, it's pretty reasonable, you know?

• 1:44:04Steven Rinella?

  You're not gouging, you're not gouging. What about a hamster?

• 1:44:08Speaker 04

  What are we looking at?

• 1:44:09Speaker 06

  Probably, what, twelve hundred, twelve or nine hundred, twelve hundred bucks, something like that.

• 1:44:13Speaker 05

  Way more value than the dog.

• 1:44:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:44:16Speaker 04

  I mean, the hamster's just, it's more so just because you gotta be, they slip easy.

• 1:44:21Steven Rinella?

  The hair on a hamster slips easy?

• 1:44:23Speaker 04

  Well, because they thaw out so quickly, you know what I mean? So if you, you know, you got your son or whoever that was mourning this little hamster or whatever it is, he's gonna, he's gonna be crying for a while. You're gonna be consoling him. And then by the time you bring the hamster in, if you didn't freeze right away, then we gotta do the skin and we gotta do everything. And sometimes there's, you know, you gotta be careful with slippers. You gotta do it fast.

• 1:44:42Steven Rinella?

  Now, some part of you, some part of you, when a parent comes in with a hamster, and they're like, little Jimmy's so upset about his hamster, some part of you has to be thinking, uh, little Jimmy's just gonna have to get over it. But that's bad for business. So you're just like, sure, bring it in.

• 1:45:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:01Speaker 05

  You don't have to say anything. It's fine.

• 1:45:05Speaker 04

  No, but it's, you know.

• 1:45:06Speaker 06

  No, we get it. We get the attachment part of, you know. I have a dog. I'm attached to my.

• 1:45:12Steven Rinella?

  Are you gonna do your own dog?

• 1:45:14Speaker 06

  Uh, probably something, you know, I'm not sure what, but I will definitely do some, you know, create some memorial for him.

• 1:45:21Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:45:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:45:22Steven Rinella?

  How about you? You got pets?

• 1:45:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I had a cat. He was 18 years old when he passed away. He passed away Memorial Day.

• 1:45:27Steven Rinella?

  Just now?

• 1:45:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, um.

• 1:45:30Steven Rinella?

  Did you freeze it?

• 1:45:32Speaker 04

  Well, when he passed, yeah. It's, you know, and we have the acclimation machine. Thing is, he was already 18. He lost a lot of weight. He wasn't in his prime. So it's not like even if I wanted to preserve him, like, you know, and I will advise people of that as well. Like, if you come in and you got an old boy who's, you know, not in the best shape, I'll tell you now, maybe that preservation might not be the best thing for you.

• 1:45:52Steven Rinella?

  And hunting, we'll say, that would have been a nice buck next year.

• 1:45:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:45:56Steven Rinella?

  That would have been a nice cat last year.

• 1:46:00Speaker 04

  That would have been a nice mount seven years ago.

• 1:46:01Speaker 05

  Yeah. Do you ever have people who want to fix things on their dog? Like, when, when, I've got labs, so by the time they're eight or 10, they're covered in lumps and you can usually see them. Do people come in and they're like, could you just smooth out that big fatty bulge on the side of his ribs?

• 1:46:18Speaker 04

  There's tumors.

• 1:46:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:20Speaker 04

  You know, these are pets, so there's a lot of that. There's a lot of hair loss sometimes. You know, the hardest thing is actually, um, because we makes a studio set with the Fauxfer stuff.

• 1:46:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29Speaker 04

  They, you know, the IV marks from the vet clinics, because when they do surgeries and stuff, they shave.

• 1:46:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:35Speaker 04

  So we got to do a lot of the hair transfer work, the flocking work that we do for the studio fake stuff. And we bring that over to the preservation set.

• 1:46:42Steven Rinella?

  You can make it, if a dog had a shaved surgery, you could try to get it back to where it looked right?

• 1:46:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, so we'll recreate the fur to.

• 1:46:50Steven Rinella?

  How in the hell would you do that?

• 1:46:51Speaker 00

  You guys need to charge more for that.

• 1:46:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we.

• 1:46:56Steven Rinella?

  How do you, how do you dye the fur? Like, if you gotta take some hair and get it the right color.

• 1:47:01Speaker 04

  I mean, we have an array of, like, a lot of fur. And if it's short hair, we do this flocking method with longer fibers, like, like this dog, for example, say the ear was slippage, there was some slippage. We'd use long fibers.

• 1:47:13Speaker 06

  We just flock it.

• 1:47:14Speaker 04

  Flock it.

• 1:47:14Speaker 06

  It's kind of electromagnetic.

• 1:47:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:47:18Steven Rinella?

  Man, I gotta shame. Feel like there's gotta be so much information in your guys' heads.

• 1:47:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:23Steven Rinella?

  That if all the people that work there died, no one's gonna walk back in there and fire this business back up. Do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:47:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's kinda like.

• 1:47:33Steven Rinella?

  You follow what I'm saying? Like a garage, like if you're a mechanic, everybody could die.

• 1:47:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:36Steven Rinella?

  You're gonna find, you know, other guys who come in and, right?

• 1:47:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:40Steven Rinella?

  But on this, I feel like the institutional knowledge.

• 1:47:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. Unreal. It's just the years.

• 1:47:45Steven Rinella?

  Would be like just all that junk.

• 1:47:46Speaker 04

  And that's what's difficult too, even for us to find the right hands when we wanna bring somebody else on is, you know, cause sometimes like I don't wanna, you know, we don't wanna be doing everything all the time, you know what I mean?

• 1:47:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:57Speaker 04

  But there's times where I'm like, but it's got, but it needs to look a certain way. So until I could find that hand that can do, and we have some great hands, but until I could find all the pieces to make sure like, that the quality, quality controls everything.

• 1:48:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:48:10Speaker 04

  It's gotta go out looking perfect every time, you know, so that's, you know, so yeah, there's a fear of like, we step away, who's gonna jump in?

• 1:48:18Steven Rinella?

  If you did right now have to, I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 1:48:20Speaker 06

  So that's another, uh, kinda like a problem for expansion, cause we wanna expand, you know, we, we are expanding. We'll get whether we want or not, but the problem is sometimes we're so overwhelmed with so much, you know, work that it's kinda, we try to find, you know, like he says, the hands. But it's very difficult, you know, to, to, to find the, that person that's gonna, you know, get it or, or it's. And then stay. And stay, you know, and like it, obviously, cause you kinda have to like, you know, what you're doing.

• 1:48:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:54Speaker 05

  And you can't, you can't, uh, just tell them to go watch a couple of YouTube videos to learn.

• 1:48:59Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:49:00Speaker 05

  Some technique.

• 1:49:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it, it helps if they watch a video, but.

• 1:49:04Speaker 05

  But it's all.

• 1:49:04Speaker 06

  It's all hands on.

• 1:49:05Speaker 05

  Very specialized, yeah.

• 1:49:06Steven Rinella?

  Where, where, where do you look? Like, I bet you'll get, from coming on here, you'll get resumes from people.

• 1:49:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:49:13Steven Rinella?

  But you probably get resumes all the time and, and, but, but where, if you had to go look, like if you had to find a hire, I mean, I, I just would assume you're gonna look in the traditional taxidermy pathway, right?

• 1:49:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, Joe, I think, yeah, I mean, Joseph was a great hire. He just came in, he was moving from Arkansas to California. He walked in one day with a photograph of all his mounts.

• 1:49:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:49:36Speaker 04

  Good guy, straight up stand up dude, and he just, he's like, look, check it out, just moving out here, I'm gonna be out here soon. I think he was studying, he wanted to be a pastor, now he's in, uh, Idaho, he's a pastor in Idaho. Um, so he was there, he's telling me, I'm gonna be here for four years, if it's okay with you, here, here are my mounts. He was phenomenal.

• 1:49:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, he was great.

• 1:49:52Speaker 04

  So talented, great.

• 1:49:53Steven Rinella?

  He came and worked for four years.

• 1:49:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:54Steven Rinella?

  Out of Arkansas.

• 1:49:55Speaker 04

  Out of Arkansas, stayed in Los Angeles, went to the master seminary, whatever it was, and then, um, put in great work, and then we kinda taught him the studio side of it. Cause he was, he was more from the traditional taxidermy side of it.

• 1:50:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:07Speaker 04

  So it was like, we gotta rush this, you know what I mean? Like, these are all, you know, we do little tricks to kinda skip a lot of, you know, because sometimes you gotta cut corners to make things happen for film, that you wouldn't do with like a hunting mount.

• 1:50:18Steven Rinella?

  Cause of the deadlines.

• 1:50:19Speaker 04

  Cause of the deadlines, yeah. So, but he was great, you know, but it's difficult to come across people like that.

• 1:50:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:50:24Speaker 04

  Who have that talent, natural skill, integrity, ingenuity, just, you don't even have to, you just turn over and he's already doing the right thing.

• 1:50:30Speaker 05

  And there probably aren't that many people coming from taxidermy school that are like Hollywood. Right. That's where I'm.

• 1:50:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's the other thing is, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of, at least in our world, a lot of guys that are into taxidermy, you know, are, wanna, wanna live in rural areas, cause they like to hunt, and frankly, that's where a lot of their clients are, because they're doing hunting mounts, you know, like, like their bread and butter is white-tailed deer shoulder mounts.

• 1:50:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, we'll, we'll get our mounts, but, uh, we, we get a lot out of state, you know, people still bring stuff in, a lot of Colorado, New Mexico, but, you know, just, you know, all around, California, we'll get some, it was a bit decent last year, just cause, uh, there was good rainfall. So it was a little bit better, but it's just little for keys for the most part, you're not gonna.

• 1:51:17Steven Rinella?

  But you'll do, you'll do those too?

• 1:51:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I generally do, yeah, yeah, yeah, so we'll, we'll do those as well, yeah.

• 1:51:22Steven Rinella?

  Huh. How many hours you work a week?

• 1:51:25Speaker 04

  Depends.

• 1:51:26Speaker 06

  Well, we, surprisingly, it's pretty, pretty normal schedule, you know, it's, it's, well, it'd be, only when we have a certain project that is due, and it's, it's, it's gonna require, you know, weekend or maybe long days, nights, uh, it happens, but, uh, we try to keep it as normal as we can.

• 1:51:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, our hours are pretty much nine to four, Monday to Friday, which are short hours. But, um, if there's a big project that comes in.

• 1:51:54Speaker 04

  If it's worth it to stay, it's worth it to stay.

• 1:51:58Speaker 04

  And it's really never nine to four, you know, we say four, but.

• 1:52:02Steven Rinella?

  You're still there afterward.

• 1:52:04Speaker 04

  Be there at five thirty, you know. Yeah.

• 1:52:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:07Steven Rinella?

  But you're still able to keep some normal.

• 1:52:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:10Steven Rinella?

  With all that movie work, you're still able to keep a normal life.

• 1:52:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, we try, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:52:16Steven Rinella?

  All right, man. What am I forgetting to ask you about that you wish I would have asked you about?

• 1:52:21Speaker 04

  Trying to think.

• 1:52:25Speaker 04

  Freeze-drawn fish now, we don't really freeze-draw fish. No, no fish, uh. I think you pretty much got it all down. We cover a lot of.

• 1:52:32Steven Rinella?

  You know what, is it Hayes that won't touch fish either? I don't, I don't know. Yeah, Hayes don't do fish. Hayes is stuck up.

• 1:52:40Speaker 04

  You know, they just, you know what it is?

• 1:52:42Steven Rinella?

  He's got what he, you know what he does? He's got what he does that he likes doing, and I think he was telling us, I think he was saying, he's not a fish man.

• 1:52:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:52:49Steven Rinella?

  Um, and fish taxidermy is weird now because there's no part of the fish.

• 1:52:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:52:54Steven Rinella?

  It's just like, like, you could, there's, there's no part of the fish.

• 1:52:57Speaker 04

  Right. Now, we have a, this guy Robert, he, he was Robert's fish mounts for years, I think he retired now. But, uh, we bought his whole mold collection, so we have like, almost a thousand molds. I mean, you're talking.

• 1:53:10Steven Rinella?

  Where you keeping all this stuff?

• 1:53:12Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, we have a little warehouse up north, I mean, outside of the super expensive area, you know, way up north out of Los Angeles. Um, and there's a sixteen foot whale mold we got, like. Shark molds, you know? Shark molds, I mean, leatherback turtle, like. Yeah.

• 1:53:28Steven Rinella?

  Does he just walk into your warehouse now and then and just dig around looking for something you swear must be in there?

• 1:53:33Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, we have them all marked, so everything's lined up. Everything's kind of. A twelve is gonna be silicone, whatever the salmon, you know, section, you know, so it's, you know, it's all marked up.

• 1:53:44Speaker 05

  One question I had earlier was, uh.

• 1:53:48Speaker 04

  What does your store look like? Is it in like in an industrial park? Is it on a a street that people walk up and down like where's the? I'm just trying to picture in Hollywood, the taxidermy shop. Like, do you get foot traffic?

• 1:54:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we're it's kind of it's kind of.

• 1:54:05Speaker 04

  What businesses are next to you?

• 1:54:06Speaker 06

  It's kind of mostly industrial area, but then we have a a a pathway for bikes and and people walk there to right in front of a of the shop. So.

• 1:54:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:18Speaker 06

  Uh, uh, some people, sometimes we have the, you know, the roll up door open. They could see from across the street and they just look and and come in like it's part of their, you know, their attention, you know? So they like just walk in and check it out.

• 1:54:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:32Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we do get some foot foot traffic. Uh, people don't really walk out on the on the sidewalk, right? There is really nobody walking on the sidewalk, but they they have that pathway to to walk. So that's where they uh, yes, and there's uh, we're next to a city yard, a LA city yard. You know, one of those big yards where they keep the trucks and maintenance and and then uh, some other studios, right?

• 1:54:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a lot of studios kind of around there. It is kind of like an artsy, somewhat artsy area, but it's not in the business. It's not like in Hollywood, it's in North Hollywood. So you have a little bit more open, you know, more industrial space. And then um, and my buddy's next door.

• 1:55:09Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, the gym.

• 1:55:10Speaker 04

  Matta Door Gym, so he does like, it's like an MMA gym, which is easy, because then I can go from here and then I can go work out there.

• 1:55:16Steven Rinella?

  Work out over there.

• 1:55:17Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:55:18Steven Rinella?

  Dude, I get over there every couple of years. I'm gonna come in and say hi, man.

• 1:55:20Speaker 06

  Oh, absolutely, yeah.

• 1:55:22Steven Rinella?

  I would love to come check it out. We should have done this there.

• 1:55:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:55:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:26Steven Rinella?

  We thought, you know, we kicked around trying to come to your place, but just like scheduling was kind of hard.

• 1:55:31Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 1:55:31Steven Rinella?

  Just a lot, a lot of, we said a lot of travel this summer and stuff going on, but our original intention was to record in your place.

• 1:55:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:55:39Speaker 00

  Well, next time we're there, we'll just, we'll tack it on to a schedule and we'll do another episode.

• 1:55:45Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:55:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, we'll do a flop.

• 1:55:47Steven Rinella?

  Exactly.

• 1:55:47Speaker 04

  That'd be great, we'll come out there and do a thirty minute flopper.

• 1:55:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:50Steven Rinella?

  Man, I tell you though, um, I can't bring it up enough, that dog is unbelievable, man.

• 1:55:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's wild.

• 1:55:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:55:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's cool. It's a really nice, I mean, like I said, you guys are good sports about having some, you know, about having a couple laughs, but holy shit, man, the dog speaks for itself. That's why it's an, it's incredible looking.

• 1:56:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:12Speaker 05

  We've had a lot of strange objects and things pass through the studio and this is like, there's like a power to that.

• 1:56:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:20Speaker 05

  Dog.

• 1:56:20Steven Rinella?

  I wish you could leave that dog here, but I probably not a good idea.

• 1:56:25Speaker 06

  We could work something out.

• 1:56:28Speaker 00

  Rental fee.

• 1:56:29Steven Rinella?

  Oh, do you guys have, uh, do you guys have, um, cats and dogs in your rental area?

• 1:56:35Speaker 06

  Oh, definitely. Yeah.

• 1:56:36Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yeah, sometimes they'll donate a hide or whatever it is if they just wanted to do.

• 1:56:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, the neighbors, you know, I got a, a neighbor's cat that, you know, died and he said, you know, take it, you know, maybe I'll see it in a movie some, some way, you know, sometime like, oh, perfect. Let's do it.

• 1:56:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:55Steven Rinella?

  Do you guys ever grab stuff from the side of the road that looks interesting?

• 1:56:57Speaker 06

  Uh, no.

• 1:56:59Speaker 04

  Nah, not necessarily.

• 1:57:00Steven Rinella?

  Those guys doesn't work.

• 1:57:01Speaker 06

  Usually it's, it's really, uh, beat up, you know, it's like run over and it's blood, guts everywhere. So it's not.

• 1:57:08Speaker 05

  Yeah. You just go to those for inspiration?

• 1:57:11Speaker 04

  For your movie work. Exactly. You photograph and you're like, yeah, guts need to be this way.

• 1:57:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:57:17Speaker 04

  And it's actually, I think it's illegal in California to pick up roadkill.

• 1:57:20Steven Rinella?

  Well, I don't know, cause a lot of states have been making it that you can, there's been an odd trend. There's, there's two trends that sort of surprised me in cultural hunting cult, hunting culture trends. That's not the right word. Hunting legal trends. One trend is to let kids hunt younger and younger and younger.

• 1:57:40Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 1:57:41Steven Rinella?

  Right? That, that seems, that seems like counter than what would actually happen. You could picture that they would make it, that they had to be older and older and older, like make it more strict.

• 1:57:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:57:51Steven Rinella?

  But there's a tendency to let kids, to let it be a family decision. There's also a surprising tendency to loosen, um, roadkill salvage laws rather than make them more strict.

• 1:58:05Speaker 06

  Hmm. Interesting.

• 1:58:06Steven Rinella?

  You know what I'm saying? Like if you, if you said to someone who didn't follow this, like, do you imagine over the years, it became more strict or less strict to pick up roadkill? They would go absolutely more strict because everything's more strict.

• 1:58:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:58:19Speaker 04

  Always about, yeah.

• 1:58:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so they like, like our state where we're at right now. You, it used, I, I mean, I would do it anyways. My friends would do it anyways as civil, like civil disobedience. I don't want to bring up like Rosa Parks.

• 1:58:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:32Steven Rinella?

  But like civil disobedience to like pick up deer and eat them.

• 1:58:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:36Steven Rinella?

  Cause you'd be like guilty as charged.

• 1:58:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:39Steven Rinella?

  Like I ate a dead deer that the guy in front of me hit, you know?

• 1:58:42Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, what's the problem with that?

• 1:58:44Steven Rinella?

  So anyways, now you can, right?

• 1:58:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:46Steven Rinella?

  Um, this, where I said, but remember that whole area, I don't know what it was a couple of years ago. It was like state after state, Oregon, I think maybe. State after state after state said, okay. If someone hits it and you want to put it to use, you just got to call and. Yep. Which makes total sense.

• 1:59:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, it makes sense. No, I agree. Does anybody, you think anybody tries to purposely truck it?

• 1:59:05Steven Rinella?

  That's what, you know what they thought of here because here you have. Here you have. Um, we have a lot of, like a lot of somewhat rare, large mammals. Um, and so there's some that are exempt. Meaning like, take like a bighorn sheep.

• 1:59:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:59:23Steven Rinella?

  A bighorn sheep, like a big mature bighorn sheep ram is going to have a lot of value, would have a lot of black market value. And so they're, they're, they're not part of the roadkill.

• 1:59:35Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:59:35Steven Rinella?

  Rule. It's just the more common stuff. Deer, deer elk moose.

• 1:59:40Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:59:41Steven Rinella?

  Um, like, you know, more sort of like a, so you know, common animals, high food value.

• 1:59:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:59:47Steven Rinella?

  But they've pulled out some of the stuff that they don't want to give people a reason to act like they got it in their truck. Meaning like, oh, I road killed a mountain goat. They'd be like, you road killed a mountain goat.

• 2:00:01Steven Rinella?

  So you can't, there's no excuse to have certain animals. I think, I'm guessing, but it's like.

• 2:00:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:06Steven Rinella?

  They don't want to create a pathway for you to have certain rare animals in your possession by claiming that whatever happened to them. There's probably some part of the thinking on it.

• 2:00:14Speaker 04

  Right, that makes sense.

• 2:00:15Steven Rinella?

  Uh, the other part of it, which is interesting here, um, I'm not sure if this is true in other states, you take the whole thing. You can't pick and choose. So our buddy Yanni, he had a roadkill moose.

• 2:00:27Steven Rinella?

  Big critter. You can't gut it on the side of the road. Like when you take it, you take it. So you have that whole son of a bitch has to be loaded onto a trailer. You can't just go get the parts you want. You can't just get like the good meat and leave it laying there. They're like, nope, hold on moose. Which de-incentivizes some, you know, you gotta go get a flatbed trailer.

• 2:00:48Speaker 06

  And a lot of help, you know, to get it out there.

• 2:00:50Steven Rinella?

  That's what they make it a little bit hard. But picture if not, you just jump out of your truck and pull the gourmet cuts and then you got like a half butchered moose on the side of the road.

• 2:01:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that'd make for an interesting drive, you know, if you're like watching dudes on the side of the road.

• 2:01:11Steven Rinella?

  Watching dudes on the side of the road do that.

• 2:01:13Speaker 04

  Road chefs.

• 2:01:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, man, I'm glad you guys came, man. It's a lot of fun. I got a lot of respect for all that. It's such a cool business. So unique.

• 2:01:21Speaker 06

  We appreciate it.

• 2:01:22Steven Rinella?

  How often do TV shows call you guys wanting to do like a reality show about your shop?

• 2:01:26Speaker 04

  All the time.

• 2:01:27Steven Rinella?

  What do you always say? No?

• 2:01:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, at this point, no.

• 2:01:32Speaker 05

  They just finish each other's thought there.

• 2:01:35Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. Good job. There was no, you finished each other's thought.

• 2:01:39Speaker 04

  She was right.

• 2:01:40Steven Rinella?

  So you get calls and they're like, hey, we want to do a reality show and blah, blah, blah. People crying about their pets.

• 2:01:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, just about the shop and the whole thing. And it's just the reality world is a, is a wild world where they just infiltrate on your personal life so much. And I like to keep my personal life personal.

• 2:01:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, and also I think it'll inhibit a lot of our, you know, everyday.

• 2:02:05Steven Rinella?

  You think?

• 2:02:07Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 2:02:08Speaker 06

  It would, it would kind of slow down our, you know, production or process, everything. So.

• 2:02:14Speaker 04

  And then trade secrets.

• 2:02:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, and trade secrets as well.

• 2:02:17Speaker 04

  And now like it's been, the shop's been around since nineteen twenty-two. There's a lot of stuff that stays within those walls. So it'd be, I don't want to be the guy that exposes everything after over a hundred years of a company. But hey, guys, I want to make a little bit of money and show my face off so that.

• 2:02:32Steven Rinella?

  You know, and ruin the whole business. Yeah. It's bigger than us.

• 2:02:35Speaker 05

  Also, on the pet side of things, it's so sensitive. It is. It's like if you had a funeral home and somebody approached you about.

• 2:02:45Speaker 05

  The other funeral home would probably get started getting a lot more clients.

• 2:02:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You gotta like get waivers from everybody. Yeah. You know, your, uh, your uncle's part of a reality TV show. Can you shine here?

• 2:02:56Speaker 05

  Camera crew just sitting there waiting for the paper. It's just, yeah.

• 2:03:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I could totally picture it. I'm not at all shocked that you guys get, that's gotta be half your phone calls is people wanting to pitch you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming in again, man. I love it. We're gonna come visit your shop. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, appreciate it. Anytime. Thank you, Krim. Yeah, we appreciate you.

• 2:03:17Speaker 00

  No, it wasn't.

• 2:03:18Steven Rinella?

  I mean, Krim books all the guests, but this one, this one was, uh, this was good.

• 2:03:21Speaker 00

  Oh, it wasn't my idea. I didn't see that article first. That was Bergman, but this is, I'm really glad it, it happened.

• 2:03:28Speaker 05

  Trophy guests.

• 2:03:29Steven Rinella?

  That's good way to put it, trophy guests, yeah. And should you ever wind up with a cat or dog that doesn't have a home, we would be happy to take it off your hands. Absolutely. We'll send you something.

• 2:03:43Steven Rinella?

  And I think maybe, are you gonna send your dog down when it passes?

• 2:03:48Speaker 05

  I mean, I, I would be cool, but I don't know.

• 2:03:52Steven Rinella?

  You got a couple of years to figure it out.

• 2:03:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, I got a couple of years figured out, hopefully.

• 2:03:57Steven Rinella?

  All right, man. Uh, if you get a box from Seth, keep it cold.

• 2:04:04Steven Rinella?

  All right, thanks, Steve.

• 2:04:04Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:04:05Steven Rinella?

  Appreciate it. Thank you.

• 2:04:41Steven Rinella?

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• 2:05:24Steven Rinella?

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• 2:06:06Steven Rinella?

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• 2:06:29Speaker 00

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