Taxidermist is deer to hunters
Staff writer
When Cory Foth was let go from his job in 1996, he recalls watching a video about how best to find one’s dream career.
The video recommended listing one’s interests and seeing whether they could be combined into a profession.
Foth’s interests were “hunting, fishing, and outdoor stuff, basically.” Listing them out gave him an idea.
While he never had trained as a taxidermist, he’d created antler mounts for his friends and family.
His father taught him how to bow hunt as a child, and he’d had experience hunting and skinning Kansas’ famous whitetail deer.
He took a job at a factory in Newton, but the video stuck with him. In his spare time, he decided to teach himself taxidermy.
“My oldest daughter was just born, and I was on my kitchen table in a small house in Peabody, trying to get going,” Foth recalls. “My wife came home and saw what I was doing on the kitchen table, and I got banished to my mom and dad’s basement for three years.”
In his parents’ basement, Foth practiced mounting fish and deer. He officially turned the space into a small business in 1996, naming the shop Doyle Creek Taxidermy after the creek south of Peabody that the town was built around in 1870.
“There’s still people that hunt and fish it,” Foth said. “Some of these bucks come right off of Doyle Creek.”
After Foth and his family moved to a different house in Peabody, he converted his basement to a more comprehensive shop, which he still inhabits today.
When the factory he worked at went under in December, 2022, Foth began working taxidermy full time.
Foth is a talkative man with gray-blond hair, which he wears short in front and long in the back like a mane. When speaking about taxidermy, he is precise, explaining each aspect of his craft in great detail.
Foth first receives a call from a customer when “they’ve killed something that they feel worthy of hanging forever.” This is typically a large fish or a whitetail.
He skins the animal and sends the skin to Wildlife Gallery Tannery in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. The tannery turns the back of the hide into leather.
“No different than the leather on your shoes or the leather on a coat,” Foth said.
The tannery is busy enough, and the work precise enough, that it can take more than half a year for Foth to get the skins back.
In Foth’s shop stands a deer mannequin, which he uses to model whitetail mounts.
“It’s a method of learning the correct anatomy of an animal, so you can recreate it,” he said.
After the tannery returns a whitetail pelt, Foth shapes the skin and antlers around a urethane foam mold. He then affixes skin to foam, adding detail with epoxy. Overall, Foth estimates, it takes him 10 hours of “hands-on” work to complete a mount.
This includes adding quite a bit of detail to make the animal appear lifelike. Foth points out dozens of tiny bumps on each whitetail’s nose, which he reconstructs by hand.
“They should look wet, because they’re constantly licking them in the wild,” he says.
Foth also is quite good at making each animal appear unique. One of his whitetail heads might look pensive, one fierce, one elegant.
“You can tell a small story with them,” he said.
He notes one head on the side wall of his shop, greeting viewers with a mysterious expression and a clouded right eye. The deer was half blind; in death, Foth recreated its blind eye.
For his efforts, Foth has been a best of show winner at the Kansas Association of Taxidermy six separate times. He’s also won national prizes, such as the National Taxidermists Association Competitor’s Choice with a stuffed carp this year.
Foth met his wife in college at Fort Hays State University, before moving back to Peabody because of a lack of job opportunities.
“I’ve always liked small-town living as opposed to larger towns,” he said.
He is pals with many of his customers — referring to them as “fabulous” — as well as other county taxidermists, whom he recommends for taxidermy jobs like bear mounts, which are too big for his shop.
Rifle season will begin after Thanksgiving in Kansas. Bow hunting has already started.
Hundreds will flock to Kansas to hunt whitetail deer and fish for catfish and carp.
Foth is preparing for a busy few months.
“Between now and the end of the year is when I take in about 90% of my workload,” he said.
Foth thinks taxidermy is an excellent way to honor an animal, and takes a lot of pride in his work.
“When you kill an old monarch of the woods, that’s lived maybe four, five, six, seven years,” he said, “to honor him for the rest of your life hanging on the wall, it really does do the animal justice.”