Preserving loved pets

ROMANCE — Up on a hill along Arkansas 5 sits a small, unpretentious structure that houses a business, attracting customers from California to New York who aren’t quite ready to let go of their beloved pets.

Xtreme Taxidermy and its owner, Daniel Ross, have also gotten the attention of TV channel Animal Planet.

American Stuffers is a new reality show on Animal Planet that features Ross’ business and his family. And Xtreme Taxidermy is not an ordinary taxidermy shop. Although the staff does traditional taxidermy, what makes the business different is that it also does pet preservation.

Ross said there is a big difference in traditional taxidermy and pet preservation.

Dixie Grammer of Heber Springs sat at a table stitching the belly of a pet baby pig as she explained that some of the internal organs are removed from pets; then they are placed in a freeze-dryer. The pre-veterinary student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock began volunteering at Xtreme Taxidermy as an intern through school.

“You really get to see the anatomy of the animal that you don’t normally get to see,” she said about working at a taxidermy shop.

In traditional taxidermy, the animals aren’t freeze-dried, but the skin is removed and chemically preserved.

Hunter Ross, 14, stretches the hide of a deer head over a fiberglass form. Hunter said he began working in his dad’s shop when he was about 8 or 9.

“I can pretty much do it all now,” he said as he meticulously placed what he called critter clay underneath the skin to give it proper form.

“You try to get it as natural as possible.”

Daniel Ross has always been an avid hunter and fisherman, and he said he realized how much money he was spending on taxidermy. So about nine years ago, he said he decided to learn how to do taxidermy himself. It started out as a hobby, something he would do for his and his friends’ kills.

“Once I learned the process, I thought, ‘I can do this as a hobby and save some money,’” Ross said. “It wasn’t long until people wanted so much stuff done, and I had four or five freezers full of deer hide.”

Working as an auto-body painter at the time, Ross said he would paint cars all day and try to mount someone’s deer head at night. He opened up his taxidermy shop in his front yard a little more than six years ago. He said he would get occasional phone calls from pet owners asking if he preserved pets, but because the process is different than mounting someone’s deer hide or big fish, he said he turned down those customers.

“Once you start working on someone’s pet, it’s not a trophy; it’s their loved one,” Ross said. “There’s emotional attachment, and drama.”

Ross said he attended school in Michigan to learn how to freeze-dry animals.

“If you don’t have the training, you’re just messing with somebody’s loved one,” he said. “I had someone drive 2,000 miles one way to bring me a pet.”

He said the customer arrived at 11:30 p.m. and stayed until 2 a.m.

Ross said the pets are preserved with all the meat, bones and tissue, but he removes the intestines.

“I don’t think this is strange; I don’t think they are crazy,” Ross said about his customers who bring in their pets. “A pet becomes more than a pet; it becomes family.”

That trust that customers grant Ross and his team is one of the things that caught the eye of Animal Planet.

American Stuffers

Three years ago, Ross said he and his wife, LaDawn, received an email from a production company that said the company wanted to produce a show about a family-owned taxidermy business.

“I thought the email was a joke,” he said with a laugh.

Not taking the email too seriously, he said he told LaDawn to reply, “Sure, why not?”

To the family’s surprise, a Los Angeles production company began a screening process. Ross said what sent the production company, Collins Avenue, to Romance was Xtreme Taxidermy’s pet preservation. Ross said that to his knowledge, he is the only taxidermist in Arkansas who preserves pets, and he is one of only a handful in the nation who does so.

“We were in the mix with a lot of people,” Ross said. “They loved my family, and that my job was in my front yard. It was a family atmosphere, and we do pets.”

In April, the Rosses produced an eight-minute video of a “pet customer” transaction.

“Later that evening, the owner of the production company called us and talked for 45 minutes, and he said he wanted to move forward with us,” Ross said. “I didn’t know anything about the TV industry. It’s a lot of hard work.”

Ross said he has preserved some interesting pets, such as a pair of screech owls that once belonged to Bill Clinton. The team has also preserved scorpions, snakes, chickens, possums and a 5-foot lizard.

One other animal the team “stuffed” is a 13-foot alligator that was captured in Hope and holds the state record for size. In one of the show’s episodes, the Xtreme team is taking the gator back to the shop for some minor repairs when the van breaks down about a mile from the shop.

“Well, we can’t leave the alligator in the van, so we carried it back to the shop,” Ross said with a smile.

He said passersby asked if they needed help, and he had to explain that there was a film crew there and they were OK.

Ross said the family got used to the camera crew following them around for six months, although he said that at first, it was a little awkward walking around town with cameras and a microphone on a big boom dangling in front of him.

“I expect the show is going to do well and my business is going to blow up,” he said. “There has never been a show like it. It’s not produced or set up, and no one is cast.”

Ross said it takes about 80 hours of film to make a one hour episode.

American Stuffers airs on Animal Planet at 9 p.m. Thursdays.

Staff writer Jeanni Brosius can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or jbrosius@arkansasonline.com.

Three Rivers, Pages 115 on 01/15/2012

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