Stuffed Animals

Just a peek inside Steve Kulash’s shop would be enough to send even the most casual PETA member screaming for backup. Everywhere you look – and I mean, everywhere – your gaze is met by lifeless glass eyes, fur and antlers.

Full-sized lions butt up against longhorn sheep; panthers clamber over a giant moose; and the heads of various big-game animals keep vigil over the menagerie from the wall.

For 37 years, Steve Kulash Taxidermy Ltd. has occupied the same spot at 3977 Kingsway. By the looks of it, so have some of the animals. A scraggly pheasant looks a little worse for wear, and the mounted fish sport a layer of dust. But what the shop lacks in decor it makes up for in character.

Besides, there are a few movie stars here: a pair of lions recently starred in the 2006 Ben Stiller vehicle Night at the Museum, and the soft-mount cougars regularly report to film sets, where they act as stunt-doubles for hunting or trapping scenes. “I think it’s an art form,” says Kulash of his craft. Seventy years old, but appearing a decade younger, with a comforting salt-of-the-earth manner, he explains that he originally wanted to be a vet. “It seemed too long for me to go to school and learn.

And the money wasn’t all there to back my wishes,” he says. He sent away, instead, for a correspondence course in taxidermy – “Yale by mail,” he calls it. Living on an Alberta farm at the time, he had plenty of opportunities for practice. “The very first one was an owl. It was a disaster, but it was a start,” he recalls with a chuckle. “And with each specimen, it improved.”

Now he’s the go-to guy for museums, filmmakers and hunters, both locally and beyond. The cost of his services vary with size: mounting a black bear from “the raw state” will cost about $2,000; a deer head, $750. He’s also got work for sale – the lion sports a tag of $13,000, while the moose costs $18,000 – which moviemakers rent for 15 per cent of their value per week. Amongst his biggest pieces to date was a walrus for a museum in Japan – as well as an elephant head for a local customer: “Believe it or not, we did it here, but it had detachable ears because it was eight feet across.”

Perhaps his most challenging taxidermy job, however, was a small specimen for a nature museum in Richmond – a skunk. “They’re quite a smelly process, that,” he says, shaking his head. “Oooh, I tell you, it was terrible.