it’s getting stuffy in here

A man shouts up the staircase, “David, the guy picking up the buffalo head is here.” The intrepid customer shakes his head as he carefully places the buffalo head in the back of his Jeep. “It’s huge!”

David Bateman, manager of Bateman Bros and Co. taxidermy shop on Hollywood Boulevard, had kept the head an extra day, unhappy over one final detail. “I had to make the lips juicy,” Bateman explains. (He did, with clear lacquer spray.) “It’s like getting a nose job. The doctor does the best for his patient.”

Trained by his friend’s uncle, a taxidermist for the shah of Iran, Bateman, 34, has practiced taxidermy make-up for nine years. Armadillos, leopards, swordfish and peacocks line the shelves and adorn the walls. Cobra skins and deer hides hang in the upstairs workshop. His Hollywood location promises that he caters to the occasional strange studio whim--creating a shark with a deer head, for instance--and can bring to life a deceased domestic pet, mainly cats and dogs, as a way to return their essence to a grieving owner’s home.

When Puppy Wuppy, the hyper shorthaired pointer featured on Comedy Central’s “Turn Ben Stein On,” was hit by a car and killed shortly after the talk show premiered, Stein brought her to Bateman in a state of grief. “I’m not sure why I did it,” says Stein. “I just couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing her again.”

“Once you get attached to your pet, you’re finished,” Bateman sympathizes, lowering his brown eyes. “You can’t ever leave him.”

Puppy Wuppy’s skin sits in a chemical solution as it slowly softens. She is nearing the end of the three-month process. The delicate surgery of removing her fur is complete, and all she needs now is a foam body, glass eyes and some facial personality. Finding that personality, Bateman says, is the toughest part of the procedure. He examines pictures of Puppy Wuppy lying on the ground and peering up curiously at the camera in happier days. “With a wild animal, whatever I give you, you accept,” he says. “With a pet, the personality lives with you. It is very difficult.”