A Guy Who Enjoys Taking His Job and Stuffing It

Warning: If you love animals, hate hunting and think that none of God’s creatures should ever be stuffed and hung on a wall, do not read this article.

Still with us? OK, we warned you.

The smallest animal Torrance taxidermist Chuck Hayes ever stuffed was a two-inch-tall monkey.

As Hayes tells the story, some people on the Palos Verdes Peninsula had a mated pair of eight-inch-tall South American monkeys that had a couple of babies, and one of the babies died. Unable to part with the little simian for all eternity, they called Hayes.

“I don’t usually do pets,” says the bearded, 47-year-old Hayes. “The problem is the pet owners. They get so emotional, and they never think the pet looks like it did when it was alive. I’ve had people call me up crying and begging me to mount their little Pekinese or whatever, but it’s just more trouble than it’s worth for everybody.

“But this monkey was kind of a challenge. It looked just like a regular monkey, had hair all over it and everything, except it was only two inches tall. I mounted it in a terrarium, swinging on a little vine.”

There have been other unusual assignments. Every now and then, someone will come in with a road-kill raccoon or possum they want stuffed. Then there was the guy whose beloved German shorthair pointer was recently stung to death by bees.

“I’m not mounting the dog for him,” Hayes explains, his hands bloody at the moment from scraping the flesh off a deer hide. “I’m just skinning it out and sending the hide to the tannery. He says he’s going to throw the hide on the bed where the dog used to sleep.”

Larry Blomquist, publisher of a Louisiana-based taxidermy magazine called Breakthrough, estimates that there are 10,000 full-time taxidermists in the United States, but only about 400 in California. What’s more, the number is slowly declining, in part because a lot of people think the profession is, well, disgusting.

“Taxidermists in California are in a difficult situation because of all the anti-hunting and animal rights people out there,” Blomquist says. “The profession is more difficult to pursue there than in any other state.”

The Los Angeles area Yellow Pages list fewer than a dozen taxidermy shops, including Chuck’s Taxidermy, where Hayes has been at it for 15 years.

A lifelong hunter and outdoorsman, he was in his early 20s when some hunting buddies decided that someone in their group should learn how to mount the animals they took. So Hayes, at the time working in the aerospace industry, got a book on taxidermy.

“The first thing I ever mounted was a mallard duck,” he says. “I thought it looked great, but everybody else just laughed at it.”

Inexperience was not his only obstacle. It turned that he was allergic to animal hair--a significant problem for a guy whose workplace is piled high with animal furs of every description. “When I first started, I just thought I had a constant cold,” he says. “But I just suffer through it.”

He worked for a while as an assistant to a professional taxidermist in Gardena, now retired, before going into the trade full time.

“Torrance had never had a taxidermist before. When I went to City Hall to get a business license, they didn’t know what category to put me in. They finally settled on ‘miscellaneous.’ ”

Most of his work is the traditional fare of taxidermy: deer heads, moose heads, an occasional wild boar, the odd buffalo or two, mountain goats, bears, ducks, geese, quail, African antelopes--almost anything hunters hunt.

He will mount about 150 birds this year, about 100 deer heads, about 10 black bears and assorted other species.

“He does a beautiful job on quail,” says Sam Bass, a customer who has a collection of Hayes-mounted quail at his home in Lomita. “He does excellent deer, too.”

Of course, not everyone is a fan.

“It’s not too often, but sometimes I’ll get calls from people who say: ‘You’re a sick person,’ or ‘How can you do that to animals?’ ” Hayes says. “And sometimes people walk by the shop and say: ‘Ugh, that’s gross,’ or they hold their noses. It doesn’t bother me.”

Fortunately for him, a lot of people do not even recognize the word taxidermy. In fact, most of Hayes’ crank calls result from simple misunderstandings.

“I’m listed next to taxicabs in the phone book, so I get a lot of calls from people who want me to pick them up at the corner of Carson and Normandie,” Hayes says. “One year they listed me under tanning, and I got calls from people who thought I was a tanning salon and wanted themselves tanned. They were always pretty surprised when I explained to them what I do.”

What he does in mounting an animal--taxidermists eschew the word stuffing --is a complicated process that involves skinning the carcass, scraping flesh off the hide, salting it to kill bacteria, shipping the hide to a tannery, then placing the finished hide on a foam frame. Teeth and glass eyes are then added.

It is not a fast process. Just getting the hide back from the tannery takes at least three months.

It’s not cheap, either. A stuffed moose head will sell for between $800 and $1,500 at Chuck’s shop. Getting a whole deer mounted in a lifelike position will run you $800 or more, about $275 for just the head. Quail cost about $75 a piece, other game birds a little more or less. If you are interested in a stuffed peacock--he mounts about 10 a year--it will cost you $300.

“I really just love the work,” he says. “You get to meet a lot of really nice, interesting people. Animals, too. And you never know what’s going to come in through the door next.”

Like, for example, a two-inch-tall monkey.