His Business Is Stuffed With Critters That Once Were Among the Living

Under the all-too-steady gaze of a bristling black Russian boar, Bob Snow maneuvered through the busy workshop past a morose-looking moose. “Hmmm, smells like burnt horn in here,” he complained, wrinkling his nose.

Opening a filing cabinet, Snow pulled out a tray of eyes for a visitor. “We have all kinds. These are sheep eyes.” The next tray revealed jaws and teeth. Snow playfully snapped a set of plastic bear mandibles and laughed.

Welcome to the world of Bob’s Taxidermy in Fullerton, the largest stuffed-animal outlet and supplies store on the West Coast. Bob’s has even got an 800 telephone number for those toll-free deer head shoppers calling from out of state.

“He’s big time,” said Kathy Moody, general manager of Taxidermy Today, a trade journal based in Chester, S.C. “But don’t you say ‘stuffed’ animals. Say ‘mounted.’ That’s just proper.”

The soft-spoken, amiable, 53-year-old Snow is a straightforward fellow. No affected chatter of art or sculpting here to describe his ancient craft. “Anyone who can work with his hands and has an interest in animals can do this,” Snow said.

Snow, a one-time motorcycle mechanic, acquired his skills the old-fashioned way, through a mail-order course in a magazine. “Probably more people started taxidermy that way than by any other means,” he confided.

Maybe he didn’t go to the Harvard of taxidermy schools, which is in New York City. But Snow will proudly compare his work to the finest in the world--even the most celebrated. Roy Rogers, who raised taxidermy’s public profile in 1965 when he stuffed his dead horse, Trigger, perhaps should have waited for Bob’s to do it right. “I don’t think he was done as good as we do,” Snow said.

For 21 years now, Snow has plied his trade in Fullerton, moving up from a garage to a little storefront to his present cavernous showroom, workshop and warehouse on West Commonwealth Avenue. About 14,000 square feet of warehouse shelters hundreds of polyurethane animal molds and mannequins, stacked in macabre plastic piles from ceiling to floor in the back.

“Watch your face here,” he said, pushing aside a rubber bear paw as he climbed some stairs to point out the skull of a one-horned steer. A client wants the animal stuffed.

“It’s so sad,” Snow said. “This lady showed him at fairs for 16 years as a unicorn. Now it’s dead.”

Snow takes his clients’ dead critters quite seriously. But outlandish poses are out. “Only as long as it’s within what the animal can do in the wild, will we do it,” Snow said.

A pronghorn antelope in his showroom is perched improbably on one hoof, with three legs flung back and its tongue stuck way out to the side. It may look funny, but that’s what the flighty creature does at top speed, Snow said.

“It don’t look like it, but it is,” Snow insisted. “I have pictures of them like that on one leg.”

For a businessman who relies on hunters for most of his work, Snow doesn’t exactly relish the blood-and-guts part of his work.

“I get all wrapped up into it, but it would be nice to me if nobody had to ever kill anything,” Snow said, easing back into an overstuffed chair in his office, where mounted heads of a springbok, wart hog and lechwe hang on the wall overhead, their expressions never changing. “I’m a conservationist.”

Actually, Snow has little to do with the killing, skinning, gutting side of taxidermy. Most of his animals arrive as skins, salted and dried beforehand in the field. He sends the skins to a tanning house, where they are dipped and treated before returning to him about as tidy as a supple pair of leather shoes, Snow said.

On the rare occasion when a real carcass arrives at the store, Snow and his 10 workers do the work. He sells the guts and bones to a rendering plant in Los Angeles to make chicken feed--”just like people who pick up horses when they die,” he said.

The animals aren’t really stuffed. Their tanned skins are soaked overnight, then stretched around plastic mannequins of the animal. A nip and a tuck here, some stitches, rubber teeth, lips, and a fine set of glass eyes complete the picture.

“You want it to look alive, like a real animal,” Snow said. “Of course you can never get that; (you) just try to get as close as possible.”

From giraffes (at $12,500) to an albino gopher (at $150), Snow has mounted them all. But no pets, please.

“To me, it’s gruesome,” Snow said. “And I don’t like to disappoint people. I can make a dog look like a dog. But I can never make that dog look just like your dog.”

People columnist Herbert J. Vida is on vacation.