JOHN YOUNGAITIS: You know, me and my father used
to talk about ‘What if you could do a person? Would you do it? Like would you wanna handle
a dead person?’
JOHN YOUNGAITIS: Maybe just a head? Or a hand.
I mean animals are one thing, I dig animals. But people? I don’t know.
JOHN YOUNGAITIS: Welcome to Cypress Hills Taxidermy Studio.
COMM: This is John - the last taxidermist in New York.
JOHN YOUNGAITIS: I’m the only taxidermist
in the five burrows. When I was a kid, there was one in every burrow. When my father was
a kid, there was like four or five in Brooklyn alone. Over the years taxidermy is just not
as big as it used to be.
INTERVIEWER: So, how does it make you feel?
JOHN YOUNGAITIS: To be the last one, I mean it’s cool, because I have the monopoly on
it. But at the same time, I hate to see the declining of taxidermy because even here,
I don’t get to work my father got.
COMM: His collection of stuffed animals is worth over $38,000.
JOHN YOUNGAITIS: Black bear would tend to
stay away from you, this guy would have you for lunch. It’s an aggressive kind of bear.
So you don’t want to meet him. You have to go to the Alaska to find him.
JOHN YOUNGAITIS: This is a Rhesus monkey.
That’s for a guy in the City. He had that and he wanted me to mount it, so it’s now
just a monkey’s head. And this goat is over 100 years old. My father bought this off
a museum that went out of business in the 60s. Water or fire would destroy taxidermy,
otherwise it goes on and on and on.
JOHN YOUNGAITIS: Taxidermy is basically a
service. A hunter catches an animal, brings it to the butcher, gets it back, brings it
to me. The process is called mounting. The animal is taken apart, all the meat is taken
out, the skin is tanned and it’s re-built. Then we got my lion. Everybody takes pictures
with this lion. He is like the biggest attraction. I would sell him for 12,000. Because you can’t
even get him. They don’t want them imported into the United States, so, it’s becoming
harder to get them. That’s snake skin. That’s a reticulated python. That thing is 19 feet
long. That’s a tanned skin. I never mounted it. I just wanted the open skin, just to show
like that because it’s cool. He is as wide as the shop is wide.
JOHN YOUNGAITIS: And now we come into the
back. This is, as everybody says, where the magic happens. This is where I do all my work.
This is a deer head I did, when you first build them, they have to dry. So, you cut
out the ears. Actually close pins work very good to hold the ear in shape. And after he
dries, up I'll finish him up.
COMM: He could charge from $400 for a deer
to $2,000 for a full bear, which could take him up to a year to finish.
JEAN DELAFUENTE: He is the best in the world
as far as I’ve seen, yeah. Yeah, I would bring my work to him all the time.
JOHN YOUNGAITIS: Thanks man. JEAN DELAFUENTE: No one else.
JOHN YOUNGAITIS: Taxidermy is the memory of
the hunt. You can go in somebody’s house and look on the wall and say, ‘Oh, that’s
a nice deer head’. He will tell you the day, the weather, the time. It brings back
the whole memory of the hunt.
JOHN YOUNGAITIS: There’s cruelty. Everything
in nature has to be harvested and you got the deer, you get the 60 pounds of meat out
of a deer. So nothing is wasted, so the trophy is the end result. I realise now it is art
because you’ve taken a dead animal and making it look as close to lifelike as you can. So
when you’re done, you look at it sometimes, you just feel like you nailed it. This animal
is just like he should in nature, so that’s the satisfaction of it.
COMM: But it’s not just animals that John
has had taxidermy requests about.
JOHN YOUNGAITIS: I get calls from people,
who want to mount their relatives. Some are pranks and some are real. Some people think
it is legitimate to do. I had this lady call, and she’s crying hysterically, so I said,
‘It it had to be a pet.’ So she’s saying her shih tzu, which I thought was shih tzu
the dog , she goes, “No, my sister.” I’m like, ‘What?’ She goes, ‘’ I want
my sister preserved!’ I’m like, “Lady, I can’t do it.” “Please, I’ll pay
anything.” I say, ‘First of all, you can’t go to the morgue, they are not gonna give
me your sister’s body. It’s illegal.’
COMM: John may be the last taxidermist in
New York, but he doesn’t plan on giving up that title any time soon.
JOHN YOUNGAITIS: My father worked right up
till he died - 79 years old. So, yeah, I think if I can keep doing it, I’ll do it to the end.