So here you have good taxidermy. Smooth coat, muscle details beneath the hair, realistic positioning...i look at him too long and I start holding my breath and waiting for an ear to flick.
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That level of taxidermy around here costs about $500. I am extremely happy with it. Here's what cheap ($300) but pretty good taxidermy looks like in my experience:
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Rough hair, particularly around the ears and mouth. Not as much detail under the skin. Mainly because $300 doesn't buy you the same quality form, eyes, and tanning method. This taxidermist self-tanned, and a self-tan in my experience doesn't hold a candle to one done in a commercial tannery. But all-in-all, not bad.
Now for what cheap, bad tqxidermy looks like:
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Let's just leave it at it looks like you made a sock puppet out of a raw deer hide and stored it in the barn for a decade. The nose is smooth. There's foam around the mouth. The eyes have no pupil or white. Just demonic blackness. This is a flattering, non-close-up image, and out of the 3 deer we gave to the guy that year it is the most attractive.
I don't have the money to spend $500 every time I shoot a buck. I like good taxidermy too much to settle for bad stuff anymore. I euro mount a lot of deer. If you can't afford a GOOD taxidermist, go euro.
What indicates a good taxidermist? A good, well-lit showroom first and foremost, and relatively high prices. The showroom is there to justify why he costs more than Bubba John's down the road. You want to be blown away by the showroom, because that is (or should be) some of their best work. The best taxidermist I've used had a small but packed showroom full of mounts with ribbons on them. He also requested to see the birds he was mounting, sat down, looked them over, and had a conversation about how the drake took a pretty solid hit and had some damaged scapula feathers that he could make look OK, but recommended a pose that would de-emphasize that area. This guy does all his work out of a very small house on a rather crappy neighborhood, and has no signage indicating he's a business. But you walk into his basement and there are African big game animals dropped off by the local dentists and lawyers. You won't just drop something off and leave, because he wants to see what and who he's working with before he takes the deposit and starts work.
Basically, he gives a sh!t.