Taxidermist takes clients nobody else will: grieving pet owners
INVERNESS, FLA. >> Allison Doty has washed her cat, Cakes, twice.
Once, during her life, scrubbing Cakes in the bathtub when she was too dirty to clean herself.
The other time was after her death.
Doty stood in front of the sink of her dimly lit kitchen, pale light streaming in from the window as she lathered Dawn dish soap into the white fur. She moved quietly, and quickly.
Cakes had died about a year and a half ago. She had been waiting in Doty's freezer since then.
“She was a really sweet cat,” Doty said. “My kids have been begging me to mount her.”
Doty, who bills herself as Florida's only professional pet taxidermist, is used to helping others grieve. She's there at all hours when her customers drop off beloved hamsters, Chihuahuas and once, a 6-foot monitor lizard. She cries with them.
She knows it can be controversial, cutting up and stuffing man's best friend. And she knows she cannot bring animals back to life. But what Doty can do is craft a convincing illusion. She can erase that final image of death and swap it out for something happier: pets looking healthy and whole again.
This is the part Doty was excited for. Soon, Cakes would be back home.
Doty, 31, spent most of her life in Florida, fascinated by bugs and animals, but never hunting or fishing. When an old boyfriend mounted a deer that he killed, she wondered, “Why is that on the wall?”
A few years ago, she embarked on a side hustle, crafting jewelry with resin and insects. A barber friend asked her if she'd ever done taxidermy. He wanted a scene: two stuffed rats, one giving the other a haircut, inside a little barbershop modeled after his own. She tried it.
“Anatomically, they were not good,” she said. “But I had a lot of fun.”
Around that time, Doty and her husband had decided to quit their jobs at the bar where they worked together. Raising four kids, Doty wanted the flexibility to pick them up from school. She wanted to leave a legacy for them, something more meaningful than pouring drinks.
Inspired by the barbershop rats, she enrolled in Pensacola's Taxidermy Tech in early 2020. She pushed through queasiness during the first cut into a bobcat, then enrolled in a deer class. Her classmates were mostly older men who hunted.
Doty is a metalhead covered in horror movie tattoos — a grimacing Jack Torrance on her arm, Pennywise peeking out of her armpit. She collects vintage clown decor and stores DVDs inside the coffin in her living room.
She didn't need to fit in with the hunters.
After founding her company, MorgueMade, she turned squirrels from the side of the road into koozies (aka “squoozies,” $40) and added long bangs and circles of eyeliner to feeder rodents to create “emo rats” ($50). On her mantle, she displays a skunk in a handstand, its belly stuffed with an air freshener that spritzes out puffs of apple cinnamon. She takes preorders for $400.
But mounting hunted animals and making creations out of roadkill to sell at oddities conventions, she found, is not as taboo as pet taxidermy. Everyone she met in the industry, from her instructors to her peers, told her not to take on grieving owners as clients.
One Saturday in November, Doty arrived early to Dysfunctional Grace, the Ybor City shop where she teaches monthly classes. She toted a cooler with materials for the day's lesson: eight little ball pythons, dead, on ice.
Her students — five that day, all repeat customers but one — would be skinning, fleshing and completing a mount of their own. They'd each paid $250 for the class. Participants don't need tools, an animal or experience of any kind, Doty said. A strong stomach helps.
On a folding table wedged in the back corner of the shop, each seat had its own butter knife, scalpel and XActo knife. To catch all the nasty bits, Doty blanketed the surface in puppy pee pads.
First she showed students how to snip up the length of the snake, then tug the skin off. She worked fast — time, moisture and heat are her enemies — and set the skin aside to tan, or chemically preserve, later. Red innards poked out of a white tube of muscle and bone. She'd demonstrate how to re-create a body with clay, then wrap the tanned skin around it and sew it shut.
“Is there not a concern with the poison?” one man asked.
“I'm not concerned,” Doty said.