MONTREAL – Tired of explaining what he actually does for a living, exasperated taxidermist Steve Fleischer says fine, he’ll have a look at your tax returns.
“I give up,” sighs the 42 year-old. “At this point, it takes less energy for me to just do people’s taxes than it does for me to keep trying to explain taxidermy to them.”
While Fleischer admits he doesn’t have much experience crunching numbers, he’s pretty confident it can’t be much harder than cabbing people around the city, or checking their skin for moles, both of which he’s also asked to do on a regular basis.
“It’s like everything else,” he shrugs. “You figure it out eventually. Sometimes you make a wrong turn, or miss what turns out to be a pretty aggressive melanoma, but it all comes out in the wash. I’m sure it’ll be the same with this.”
Fleischer adds that it’s just as well, noting that even when people finally understand that he stuffs and mounts dead animals for a living, it only leads to more questions.
“You know, stuff like, ‘Ew, why would anyone ever do that?’, ‘How is that even a real job?’, or ‘I’m going to walk away now.’ I guess that last one’s not technically a question, but you get the idea.”
