Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Aldeer General Forum Finished taxidermy and velvet

Anyone know what is considered finished taxidermy when dealing with velvet?

Has to be completely hard. Freeze drying is the best option.

I had lots of experience dealing with velvet when I was outfitting in the Arctic. We would kill about 35 caribou each August and 90% of the clients wanted their velvet on the antlers.

We would poke holes in the tip of each tine. Then we'd inject de-natured alcohol or formaldehyde into the veins at the base of the antlers. Once the blood stopped coming out of the holes on each tine tip and it turned to clear liquid we'd quit.

We had about a 75% success rate on keeping the velvet in tack. I've got two velvet critters mounted and we used this process on each of them. One was a whitetail from 2007 and the other is a caribou from 2011. The velvet on both are still in good shape.

I talked to a taxidermist in Tennessee that said that he was going to try to freeze dry if he was brought any last year from the velvet hunt. I saw some videos on the formaldehyde solution that looked interesting but not sure if any local taxidermist in Tennessee are familiar with it. I haven’t called any meat processing places yet but last year most were not set up for taking deer in August. As mentioned, either freeze drying or chemical preservation should work but I would like to have more information on it also.

Feel free to give me a call. I’ll be happy to share what we did.

It can be soaked in denatured alcohol also, but the freeze dry is your best bet. Must be a finished product to cross into alabama

Been talking to my taxidermist today

What BGG said is probably the best route. Sounds easy enough.

I did this one for a friend of mine last year. It was a breeder buck that died from ehd. I poked the tips and injected formaldehyde into the vein channels.

I’ve got about a half gallon of antler in velvet tan if you want it, it’s something you inject into the veins under the velvet like bgh was mentioning. I used half on my elk and i don’t plan on killing any more velvet critters. I’m not really into velvet antlers but i couldn’t pass up the opportunity to probably be the only guy in the state with a free range, wild, legal, velvet elk in his living room. Freeze drying is really the best option though, the bulbs on the tops of tines won’t shrivel if you have it freeze dried but it’s a fairly expensive process and takes quite a while

It doesn't matter how you get it preserved. What I'm trying to get across is you can't bring it back into alabama until it's completely cured. (Part of a finished taxidermy product)

This is true. No matter what you do, the antlers are gonna take at least somewhere around 3 weeks to dry before they can be brought into Alabama.

I'm not 100% into the "cured" part of it. If heat nor freezing or anything else will kill a prion then what good is scraping and then drying a skull for a couple of weeks going to do.

Look great

I don't agree either, but its another one of those crazy laws.

I think their way of thinking is if it’s a finished product then it will remain in your house on display and not end up in the ecosystem. You could bring home a velvet rack, not knowing how to deal with it and it get the best of you so you chunk it out in the woods or strip the velvet off and that ends up outdoors. Kind of like why the meat has to be deboned, so the bones won’t end up in the ecosystem.