I really like to work on baby animals because for the most part, all the baby animals in
my freezer were either stillborn or they were born and died within a week.
The method to my madness, or what drives me to do what I do, is the desire to give new
life to an animal that never had a chance to live their life fully.
My name is Mickey Alice Kwapis and I'm a professional taxidermist.
It is early morning and we are in Chicago's up and coming Humboldt Park area.
Are you familiar with taxidermy?
Yes.
And when I say that word to you what picture do you conjure up in your head?
Either old man with glasses and a beard working some shop somewhere in the Midwest.
Or someone who works at a museum.
The things I know about taxidermy is stuffed animals.
You scoop out the insides with an ice cream scoop and you shove it with cotton wool.
You sew it up.
Bob's your uncle pheasant
forever and ever.
Amen.
I think.
We're about to go and meet Mickey who's a taxidermist.
She's very passionate about the ethical practices in taxidermy.
Do I know what that is?
No, not really.
But hopefully I will, because I'm going to do a class that involves me, for lack of a
better expression, pimping out a rat.
Hi!
Hi, Mickey.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you, too.
Hello.
How are you?
Thanks for inviting me into your house.
Oh, absolutely.
I travel all over the world to teach taxidermy classes.
And what that typically entails is providing my students with a specimen.
They learn how to skin it and they make a form for the inside.
So today everyone is going to learn how to taxidermy a baby rat.
You want to flip it around so that the butt is facing away from you and yours, see how
it's really flat?
You want to squish it so that it's like this.
And you want to spread the legs out.
I think that in many aspects, taxidermy is very similar to tattooing, where you have
a very male dominated industry with a lot of old school guys who have been perfecting
their trade secrets for generations.
And it's sort of passed down from mentor to mentee.
If any of the legs break or fall off or whatever, don't worry about it.
It's just an effect of the dry ice that they were kept on when they were shipped to me.
And if it's a male, all you do is pull the penis out through the penis sheath backwards
and it'll pop right out.
Everyone kind of has their tips and tricks.
There are lots of things that I'll share with my students to get them acclimated with the
basics.
And then they can go home and they can perfect their techniques and they can teach themselves
their own tricks.
The number one goal for the skinning process is to make sure that you don't hit the intestines
because it gets just really gross and really messy.
One of my earliest memories growing up in Michigan was being dropped off at my grandpa's
house and I would go down into the basement and on the wall of the workshop was this taxidermy
bear.
And for some reason, its tongue was really loose.
And because it was loose, I thought
it was a great idea to take it out and play with it.
This bear, whose name is Fuzzy Wuzzy, was hunted in 1972.
My grandfather had it butchered and that's all that my family ate for a whole winter.
And my dad said that it didn't taste great, but that's fine.
I didn't really receive any formal training.
I didn't go to taxidermy school, but you get a lot of different perspective from different
taxidermists, depending on who's teaching what.
Well, my name is Edward E. Leep, descendant of Edward A. Leep, my father.
And then I have a son full-time into business with me and he's back to an Edward A. Leep.
What were you expecting?
This.
You were?
I see dead animals.
Hello.
Hi, girls.
Are you the owner?
Can I help you?
Hi, happy to meet you.
Michelle.
I'm Mickey.
Hi, happy to meet you.
Mickey's a taxidermist.
Yes.
You need a job?
I got lots of...
Lots of work.
Sure.
I got lots and lots of work.
Honestly, I'm considering it, after seeing all the work that you have out on the floor,
it's absolutely beautiful.
When I work in studio with one of my colleagues, Chuck, I use the same techniques and the same
methods and the same materials that he does, and those methods and techniques and materials
are ones that have been passed on from generation to generation.
Well, this is the flank side.
But that was a 60 pound...
That's a big beaver.
It's a big beaver.
He's...
He's roughing out 'coons here.
Everything has got to get skinned and worked down.
So Chuck learned from our friend Mike Frazier and Mike Frazier learned a lot from Joe Keish
and Joe Keish learned a lot from the Jonas Brothers.
And they're not the same Jonas Brothers that you're thinking of.
And then the Jonas Brothers worked with Carl Akeley and Carl Akeley is known as the father
of the modern taxidermy industry.
So you're a budding taxidermist.
We've got work here.
We could have you jump on and skin a squirrel or...
Sure.
Yeah.
In the tumbler, or we can have you put one together.
When you create a memory, you have a story that goes along with it.
And so when you look at something that holds a memory for you, you remember the story that
goes along with it.
And so with taxidermy, everyone, you know, everyone remembers their first time.
I've been to Mexico a couple of times, and one of the things I was after was
a Cinnamon Teal.
I can't tell you so much about my first night on my honeymoon.
But I can tell you everything...
Everything that I would feel about that duck.
I can tell you exactly who I was hunting with.
I can tell you how the day started.
Then I can tell you that we went to this lake and we stood in this rickety blind and that
particular year was so cold.
Now, with that said, with that said, it's the same thing with these guys, with these
trophies.
I was working in undergrad and one of my coworkers asked me one night if I would like to help
her with a class project, and I wound up at her house with a dead squirrel and a bottle
of wine on her kitchen table.
And that's kind of where it all began.
We used her old biology textbook and she taught me how to skin this roadkill squirrel.
I just became extremely interested in the idea that you could take something completely
dead and lifeless with, like, blood coming out of its face and remove everything inside
of it and just be left with the shell of this animal and make it look alive again.
And it's kind of magical.
It's the closest thing to performing magic that I think I'll ever come in my life.
I did a recreation of the creation of man from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with
raccoons.
And we've also done the Rodin statue of The Thinker with the 'coons.
What's one of the funniest ones that stick out in your mind?
Probably those raccoon's right over there.
Oh.
In the act of mating.
Yeah.
Certainly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
It's one of the neat things about taxidermy is that it doesn't have to just be the trophy
deer on the wall.
This can be something that reflects you and reflects your values and the ways that you
interact with the natural world.
My name is Steve Sullivan.
I'm the curator of urban ecology for the Chicago Academy of Sciences and it's Peggy Notebaert
Nature Museum.
Taxidermy combines craft skills, artistic skills, science skills.
Most important to me about taxidermy are the scientific specimens that we create.
So here we have part of our ornithology collection.
And they're stored in kind of tight little cabinets to keep the bugs away.
But here you can see a series of beautiful skimmers.
These specimens are empirical pieces of data that record the present, and they contain
information that we don't even understand today that people of the future will discover.
We're very grateful for the taxidermist who in this case in 1896, preserved this individual
because by 1914,
not a single one of these animals existed on the face of the earth ever again.
We also teach taxidermy classes here at the Nature Museum.
The students that take my class spend literally every kind of conceivable lifestyle and aesthetic
themselves.
And that's one of the real joys about teaching these classes, is we'll start off with a dozen
pigeons in the middle of the room and when we leave, we will have such a diversity of
ideas and poses reflected in these pigeons.
I would say that the demographics of my class are approximately ninety-five percent women,
which is very interesting to me because traditionally the taxidermy industry has totally been a
boys club.
And it's very inspiring to see women of all ages taking my classes and learning these
processes.
And they're really into it and they want to further their career as taxidermists.
That's how I feel.
I'm the H.R. manager for a fashion company and I think it's important to always have
a hobby.
I've always been really into science and natural history and stuff.
Taxidermy just seemed like something I wanted to try next.
So the last question is, what are you going to do with your mouse?
Drop it in the mud.
So I just completed my first and last taxidermy class.
I came up with this little guy.
I haven't given him a name yet, but I think you'll appreciate the chest hair, the goatee,
and the 'fro.
Which came from my head, just in case you were wondering.
This is clearly seen in fashion again and I suppose that's the appeal, is to not only
have some taxidermy in your house, but to have said I made that.
Because it's so cute.
Is this it?
Yeah.
I love her so much.
Someone tells me that what I do is gross or disgusting or that I quote, murder kittens.
Not true.
So, yes, I have dead kittens in my freezer because I took in a pregnant cat and she had
been infected with a very deadly virus while she was waiting in the shelter for someone
to come and rescue her.
So, yeah, it's sad that I have these kittens that passed away and I fed them once an hour
for 10 days and I held every single one of them as they died in my hands.
And it's really hard to deal with.
And I get really emotional about it, but without understanding the context behind something,
you just...
You don't get it.