Stuffed animals can look so real that only a deep look into the glass eyes creates clarity. Visiting a taxidermist and her works – including the bitch Twiggy.
Doris Gottschalk digs a marten out of a plastic bag. Or rather what is left of him: a tanned skin with a skullless head, tail and all fours. A man picked the animal off the street and brought it to her to breathe new life into it. Today she will stuff his body with wood wool, tinker a spine out of wire and cast a skull out of construction foam. Gottschalk spreads the empty shell in front of him. Let's go. She affectionately calls a road victim like the marten a "flat friend".
Visiting a taxidermist
The taxidermist lives in the middle of the forest, at the end of the bus line, an hour from the train station in a small town in Lower Saxony. From now on the view is only tangled in trees, the air smells of damp earth. Last stop, that fits, Doris Gottschalk only gets dead animals from her customers. She is a cozy woman in her mid-40s, in practical clothes and crocs with a sunflower motif – friendly, but a little nervous, after all, she never knows whether strangers are friendly to her. Your job polarizes. Outside, around the large cauldrons in which she cooks deer heads softly, she preferred to build a privacy screen. It has happened before that young people threw bottles over the fence and shouted "animal killer".
Doris Gottschalk couldn't prepare her own animals – too many emotions in the game
To get warm first leads Gottschalk through her real small animal zoo, behind her the bee is wobbling. She has built stables for rabbits and chickens next to the house, and a tomcat is sunbathing by the pond. She rescued most of her animals from poor husbandry conditions: "Working with dead animals is my job, but I also like to have the living around me." When she opens the door to a shed, however, you are quickly back to the dead: There are three freezers full of carcasses here. She gets many of them from hunters, others are commissioned work by the Nature Museum on Lake Constance, which supplies her with around 60 creatures a year.
She talks about her work with enthusiasm. For example a black mourning swan that attacked people and animals in a spa park. When she cut open the hunted bird, she knew why: "He had a huge ulcer under his beak. He was aggressive because he was in pain." Or about the art of preparing woodcock that have skins as thin as parchment paper.
"Separating skin and fat layer from one another is sporty. It took a few years, now I can!"
And then there was the husky, who lay in the sun to dry in front of the workshop and looked so alive that the postman threw him a treat. In the meantime, however, Ms. Gottschalk generally rejects inquiries from pet owners, because Customers often did not come to collect the preparations because they were over the loss or because they had bought a new animal.
Animals have always been her thing. Gottschalk spent her early childhood in a wildlife park with deer behind the house; her father, a forester and hunter, took her everywhere with him. As an adult, she trained as a zoo keeper. When she could no longer do the job for health reasons, she became an assistant at a taxidermist.
As a woman you are an exception in the industry.
During his apprenticeship, Gottschalk had to put up with stupid sayings from her male colleagues: "As a first task, they maliciously put a fat house cat on the table for me, which I had to peel off. I was disgusted, but nothing showed. " Today she knows the anatomy of many species by heart. The exciting thing about the job is that you get close to animals that others only hear rustling in the bushes. Except that by then they are already dead. She has now been self-employed for 16 years – and doing well in business.
Somewhere in Gottschalk's small workshop lies Twiggy's original skull, whose prepared body crouches 300 kilometers away in a living room near Gießen. The cute herding dog mix with the soft black eyes looks with a fixed gaze out of the basket towards the couchwhere mistress Franziska Schmock watches TV in the evening next to her partner and with a baby on her lap.
Schmock found the dog injured on a Cuban beach 15 years ago and brought her to Germany. "She never heard, was still nice. She was a free spirit, popular everywhere." For her, Twiggy was a very special dog, so special that she didn't like any kind of funeral. So she looked online for a taxidermist and found Doris Gottschalk.
"It is important that the eyes are positioned correctly. Nobody should squint!"
The taxidermist, who actually only accepts wild animals, made an exception for Twiggy: "Ms. Schmock was very convincing on the phone." Now the bitch has a styrofoam body that was actually intended for a jackal. Gottschalk still had that left. Using pictures and videos, she tried to reconstruct Twiggy's face as true to the original as possible – after all, owners know exactly whether their animal always had its tongue hanging out on the left or right. "It looks almost like it always does," says Schmock.
As an old lady, Twiggy was blind, had a hip, and had a walking defect. "It was a walking construction site," says Schmock. The bitch was given acupuncture for the pain and had to regularly go to physiotherapy, aqua aerobics and kidney rinsing. Because Twiggy could no longer walk well, she had special shoes: some for outside and some for inside. Towards the end of her life she dozed at home under a heat lamp until the family finally put her to sleep. With the money that was wasted on the vet in this dog's life, you could have bought a small car.
On top of that: 1000 euros for immortality.
The stiff Twiggy, who will never bark or wag her tail again, does not appear scary to Ms. Schmock, on the contrary: "For me there is something light and positive about the sight." But she would rather not present the dead dog to the neighbors, "I'll put her away, depending on who comes to visit". Franziska Schmock is in her late 30s, works as a flight attendant for a large airline, looks open, funny – and not as crazy as one might assume from someone who has the dead pet stuffed. Well, maybe a little bit crazy: "For Christmas I might put a Santa Claus hat on her," she says.
In the workshop, Doris Gottschalk continues to work on the marten. Behind her on a table are already the badger and the fox, furs hanging from a hook and antlers on the walls. The smell of construction foam sticks in the nose, otherwise it smells neutral. Everything is neatly sorted: tools, nails, chemicals, paints and glass eyes – plain black for martens, orange for owls … Usually she listens to Santiano or Unheilig while she is working, the CDs are piled up right here under the shelf with the animal skulls.
"When I'm alone, I turn it up full."
If she cannot sleep at night, she uses bright moonlit nights to ambush wild boars in her own forest area. That has to be done, she explains, because the pigs multiply rapidly and cause great damage in the area. Gottschalk often has to justify his job and hobby, hunting. She feeds animals, but also kills and prepares them. "For many this is a contradiction, I see it differently: death is part of life." Former partners didn't get along with their job. Not so her new friend. "He's the first to find my job fascinating."
Doris Gottschalk is now drilling eye sockets in the artificial marten skull and says: "I'm not Frankenstein." It is important to her that animals are depicted in a natural way. And indeed: the marten, which at the end of the day stands on the same root with all fours, looks like it has only made a short excursion into the realm of the dead.
Jana Felgenhauer would never have her two cats groomed. At least she says now.