One thing I've learned about shipping

[Pablo]

If you just do dip and pack, most of the taxidermists in RSA have a 90ish day turnaround. You would need to make a decision pretty quickly for a couple of reasons. They shut down for The Holidays in December, so you would need to make sure that your stuff gets on the plane before then. If not, you gotta wait until after January 1st. This also puts you in direct competition with hunters getting their whitetails mounted. Another thing my taxidermist mentioned, have them cut the skull off the horn cap if you do a shoulder mount. This would save weight and space in the crate. Just an FYI for the collective.

 

[buck wild]

90 day turn around on getting stuff shipped out is fairly rare. Even though they might be LEGALLY able to export at 90 days, there will be hold ups with various phases of getting it actually done. What I have learned after 20 yrs of dealing with African shipments is that if you don't have your stuff picked up by the Exporter by mid July, you aren't getting stuff until Feb or later the next year.

My understanding of shipping is that the costs is associated with the metric volume (crate size) and not weight so you might be able to save space on bigger animals such as buffalo, eland. kudu etc, it's not going to make much difference on the smaller things. As a taxidermist I actually appreciate getting the whole skull as it gives me lots of info on how much the form is going to need to be altered and most likely every African animal has some type of form alteration involved.

 

[Pablo]

Good info. Thanks for clarifying.