goreygluestick

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A skunk I found recently

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ngl im mildly obsessed with this coloring

all the green came off in a quick rinse, and half the red did with a small finger rub, if i had a spare toothbrush I probably could've gotten most of it off that wasn't actually inside the bone itself. :O

half tempted to repurpose an old whi.te t.ail to try and wash these colors in (with paint) on a clean skull honestly, it's very striking.

[reminder: the red is NOT BLOOD or meat or whatever from the animal. it's bacteria/algae. this guy had been dead and mummified for *years* before I got him and started cleaning him up, thank you]

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Some of the final steps in the tanning process. First pic is everything in the tanning solution. I usually put stuff in before bed and take them out after work the next day, agitating/stirring them before leaving for work to make sure all the skin is being exposed to the solution.

After removing from the tanning solution, I’ll wash the fur thoroughly to remove any grime left over from the pickle. I have a washing machine with a relatively gentle rinse/spin cycle so I use that now, but I used to hand wash everything in my bath tub with Dawn soap.

After the spin cycle most of the water is removed, so I take some time to blow dry the fur. It’ll help everything dry faster in the long run. I have a high velocity blow dryer for pets and it makes the process go quickly.

After that I’ll flip the skin inside, dab dry the skin with a towel, and oil everything with a softening oil. If you’re not using a washing machine you’ll probably want to hang the skins to drain. They’ll need to be wet but not dripping water.

After oiling, they get rolled up skin to skin for a few hours to let the oil soak in. Then, I hang them up in front of a fan to start the drying process. This is the worst part tbh, because you need to check on them periodically to break the skin as it dries. If you hang them and let them dry fully you won’t be able to break them and get a soft, pliable skin. If this does happen, you can dab the areas with water to rehydrate and break again.

Last two pics show some of the dried portions of the leather on a grey fox and coyote. They’re not done drying yet, so I folded them back up until I get back from work and can continue babysitting them.

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a wee black backed jackal pup lost too soon, who i have the honor to preserve 🖤

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Modern Christians are so weak. Earlier this afternoon I mentioned to my mom that I was wanting a skull tattoo and she said "oh that's disgusting and satanic. Christians don't associate with skulls."

Ok besides the fact that half of Christians wear metal depictions of a man being executed, Christians historically have always been strange and macabre. It's sort of what comes out of a religion that claims to eat the flesh and drink the blood of a God who was dead for three days.

Look at this church. Normal, right?

No. This is a church literally decorated entirely with human bones. Here's the chandelier:

It's called the Sedlec Ossuary, located in Kutna Hora, Czechia and is adorned with the bones of an estimated 40,000-70,000 people. (They weren't killed for this purpose, but were dug up from their Graves.)

Imagine taking the Eucharist here, eating Christ's body and drinking Christ's blood, while staring eye-to-empty-eye-socket at a real human skull. Horrifying.

That cross on the wall has 17 skulls. Seventeen human heads. That's metal as fuck.

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My buddy made me create a dogsona for myself

#original character #hivri #vulture culture #art #sketchbook #character art #cw: drawn gore

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Life After Giants.

I wanted a cute way to explore the notion of a body slowly becoming part of the landscape it decays in. The current residents don't bat an eye anymore than if it were a log or a den.

Signed prints are available, due to an increase in postage costs they are now 30 each, and ship anywhere on earth that can receive American mail included in that base price. PM me if interested.

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When I die, If yall don't display and adorn my skeleton like this

I'm gonna fucking haunt you

Pictured: body of St Pancratius of Rome

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“Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas Last weekend my family hit a hare on the road when it got dark, the poor thing went straight through the headlight and got stuck.

I took it home with me and cleaned it up a bit. I envisioned an umbilical cord attached to nature’s womb.

#vulture culture #dead animal #hare #dandelion #roadkill #animal funeral #ritual

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"California doesn't have seasons"

January 2021/March 2022/June 2022

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I just saw a post on Facebook of a local taxidermist restoring a mount from the Field Museum. In the description of this mount, she said “Although I do not know its origin, based on how it was mounted originally id say its safe to say this animal died of natural causes.” And that got me thinking, because it’s a leopard. It absolutely did not die of natural causes. The Field Museum, like literally every other big natural history museum, commissioned all kinds of hunts in the 1900s-1930s where animals from across the globe were hunted en-masse. That’s how we got scientific specimens. It’s barbaric by today’s standards, but it was a different era back then and we didn’t have the same standards. This isn’t an excuse, but it is an explanation.

And there’s no way in hell she doesn’t know this, because she used to be a scientific illustrator at the museum. The Field makes it very clear where these animals came from. They have public signage about it, and it’s even more clear down in collections.

It kinda got me thinking again about my feelings re: ethics in the natural history and vulture culture community. We seem to really like it when we can justify the death of an animal as “ethical.” “It was roadkill.” “It died of natural causes.” “Ethically collected.” “Ethically sourced.” Ethics has become SUCH a buzzword, and it’s… I dunno. It kinda feels like there’s a part of the community that doesn’t want taxidermy to be as conflicting as it is, like they want it to be a feel-good hobby that doesn’t center around the fact that something did have to die to make the art you’re collecting.

To me, that’s kind of the beauty of it, looking at death and repurposing what’s left over.

What does ethical taxidermy mean? Does it mean the animal didn’t experience pain? If that’s the case, then you can’t call roadkill ethical. Does it mean the animal’s death was inevitable, and that it would have died anyways and you’re just scavenging the parts? Does it mean that the animal suffered minimally throughout its life? Does it mean simply that taxidermy wasn’t the end goal of the animal’s death and that its death, whether that was at human hands or natural causes, had a different purpose in mind?

There’s a sister train of thought to this as well. Natural history museums- I’m talking the old ones established in the 1800s-1900s- were colonialist endeavours. In many ways they existed to show off the natural resources of a nation’s colonies and territories. There was a lot of resource extraction for these museums- white scientists would go places, shoot as much wildlife as they could, harvest as many native plants as they could, and then come home to exhibit the stuff. It wasn’t so outwardly egregious as museums that were essentially designed as colonial treasure houses (like the British Museum), but it presented a very… strange way of looking at environments, because a lot of these natural history museums ignored the people who were there. And that meant creating this idealized (primarily African) landscape that was just big game as far as the eye could see, a playground for rich white hunters. When people were involved, they were… basically treated like a different sort of animal, something to be gawked at rather than understood. It was wildly dehumanizing, and it’s a legacy that natural history museums are still grappling with today.

To say that a leopard- one of the African “Big 5” game animals- in a vintage museum collection died a natural death is disingenuous at best and intentionally misleading at worst. I really wonder what she was thinking when she made multiple posts (that nobody has commented on) about how she assumes this animal died naturally.

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01.28.22

#she really is me #vulture culture #animal skulls

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At an antique mall and see this: ah yes definitely a DEER skull and not a dog skull at all lol

(At least I think it’s a dog skull and not coyote cause of the bulging brow and shorter muzzle?)

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here is an extremely niche meme