jsmcgregor
I am sorry that a taxidermist let that go out of their shop.
I am new to this site so don't everyone beat me up too fast.
I did do a introduction but just a quick shout out. I spent 23 years in the Army and retired and for the last six been doing taxidermy full time between hunting.
I went through the pictures as best I could.
Picture 1 - That was caused by them shaving it to close and knocking the follicles out.
picture 2. Slippage / This a lot of times is because the prep work was not done correctly. If that hide or that spot stayed warm to mong and was not salted it will do that. Only thing a taxidermist can do is either cut that small part away and resew with a hidden stitch on that or mount it and paint the animal, when it is painted though you cannot paint one area you have to paint the entire animal and blend it.
Picture 3. There were three things in that one 1. Skinning hole very easily fixed before mounting. Slippage - could have done earbutts a little different and fixed most of that. 3. Bed sewjob on that cut.
4. That looks like it could have been shaved to close, but the hair is broken? It could have been dragged or mishandled prior to the taxidermist.
5. Way to blurry to tell
6. Slippage again it looks like, but there are some funky colors of paints hard to tell
7. I think you are referring to the sew job? I would agree could have been a lot better.
8 & 9 are slippage. Poor field care. If that was taken care of asap that would not have happened.
What you can do, like a lot of people said on here is to get new capes and do a remount. A lot of times when remounting it all has to be replaced, capes/forms/eyes. Depending on how they did it and what they used.
Sometimes it can be rehydrated and taken off and the cape saved, the only issue with that is you do not know how it is going to turn out. Sometimes you can save the cape and it rehydrates fine, other times it will fall apart on you.
I wish you the best in whatever avenue you go down, just wanted to explain a couple of things so when you talk to him about those you can give him some ideas.
Joe