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Monday 17 December 2012

Game Council NSW: Caping, Tanning and Taxidermy workshop

A hunting mate of mine and I headed out west on Saturday to participate in Game Council NSW's "Bathurst Taxidermy Workshop" held at Bowman's Taxidermy


The workshop was led by Kev Daley in the studio he runs in the Kelso industrial area and facilitated by Dave "Bluey" Smith, Central West Game Manager for Game Council NSW. The Caping, Tanning and Taxidermy workshop is one of over a dozen hunter education short courses being run by Game Council NSW as part of its OutREACH Hunter Education initiative. We also met Mike Spray, a new addition to the Game Council NSW team; Mike has been recruited as Research and Education Officer.



As the flyer stated, the aim of the workshop was to educate hunters in the basic techniques of successful game trophy preservation in the field to ensure your taxidermist received your trophy in the best condition possible for tanning and mounting. 

Topics covered on the day included:
  • Field caping 
  • Skinning out the face
  • Salting
  • Fleshing 
  • Pickling and tanning basics
  • Cleaning horns, antlers and tusks 
  • European mounts
  • Shoulder mounting overview

Having caped close to 200 game animals for shoulder and full body mounts and skinned and butchered countless others, I know my way around a trophy animal and what I lack in speed I make up for in attention to detail. Given this experience, what I loved about Kev's workshop was his very practical explanation and the very simple steps he showed us. 

The really great thing was that Bluey had very neatly shot a feral goat a couple of hours before the workshop so that Kev had a perfect specimen to work on. Meanwhile Leanne, Kev's partner, had an old and tusky boar that a client had delivered the night before. No small task for Leanne, the boar was received frozen, a half-body cut very roughly through the mid-section, with a 10" cut at the top of the brisket that stopped underneath the jaw and a multitude of cuts around the ears where the pig had been lugged by the dogs. Like I said, quite a task!


As Kev worked on the goat, he went through what he was doing in great detail, gave participants plenty of time to ask questions and even afforded us the opportunity to get our hands dirty with some knife work on the cape.

More detail next time with some of the key points I picked up at the workshop, but for now, if you're keen on hanging few game heads at home, keep an eye out for the next workshop at Bowman's Taxidermy.

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like a great event, wish we had something like that over here in Norway.

    Atb. Jonathan

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  2. Hey Jonothan - our Game Council is a fairly young organisation and they are being very proactive about creating a positive image for hunters in this state. While there are quite a few hunters here, mainstream Australians don't see hunting as a relevant part of our modern lives, so any positive impact by way of education, training, events and good publicity can only help our sport. I has become a very political issue over the past 15 years. In Norway I suspect that hunting is an accepted part of life?

    ReplyDelete