I have a tanned elephant tail. He did not have enough hair left to make a bracelet. What should I do with it? I'm thinking some sort of wall hanging like a beaded fly wisk or something. To do it myself, how do I hydarate it to wrap it around a dowel or something. Any taxidermist out there want to do something unique?

Elephant tails can be horrible to work with. I have done a few wall hangings and even though they were tanned here by a very good tannery, getting them soft enough to rehydrate was a problem. As it turned out, I soaked it in salt water for around 30 minutes then put it in a plastic bag to "sweat" over night. This usually makes them pliable. In this case, it was still rock hard so I let it sit another day. Still hard. So I put it in the freezer and let it freeze for a couple days and then thawed it out and it did start to soften up. I ended up freezing/thawing it 4 times before it was soft enough to get a needle through it. The I bent some wire in a "U" shape and wrapped it with batting to fill out the area where the meat and bone were. Finally stitched it up, ran a piece of rawhide(hidden) out the back to affix it to a board and then covered the seam with apoxie scupt or apoxie clay and painted it.

This is how I did mine, I like it.

www.thewildlifegallery.com

Thanks Hugh.

Anton, that looks great!

I have seen very nice presentations by simply having the tail put into a frame with mat.

Why don't you get the taxiermist to stuff it with a brass cap on the end,then put it in a picture frame with photo's of the elephant/hunt around it. thats what i would like to do