Hunters Heart Taxidermy founder and CEO Ruan Viljoen is an avid hunter and conservationist with a passion for securing the sustainability of hunting in South Africa. Ruan has been a professional in the industry for many years, hunting his first African Buffalo at the young age of 13, and growing up admiring his father’s impressive collection of over 66 trophies.
It is because of this extensive background in the hunting industry that we appreciate and understand the significance of expressing each client’s memories with our custom craftsmanship, and why we focus so greatly on delivering a superb customer experience.
How many years have you been in the business?
The team has combined experience of 37 years. Hunters Heart Taxidermy is a relative new entity and brand that we are very excited about.
What are your favorite mounts & why?
Custom mounts, as this gives me an opportunity to be creative and to give the client a unique, one-of-a-kind trophy.
What are your specialty areas that you have in the business?
We specialize in custom mounting which gives us a distinct advantage when creating one-of-a-kind trophies for our client. As my artist statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance. We do not rely on standard forms, we resize and sculp each form to fit the animal’s natural anatomy to the size of the skin received. Attention to detail, by a very strict Quality Control Department, on muscle definition, hide texture, eye expression, veins and pose to be anatomically correct. When you need Africa alive, you need a Hunters Heart signature.
Current processes offered:
Pick up & collect trophies: Yes (free, all over South Africa for International clients)
Maximum distance offered to collect trophies: all over South Africa
Own tanning facilities: Yes
Do you buy in forms or sculpt your own or both: Sculpt and Alter own forms
Delivery time (approximate):
Dip and Pack: 3 months after payment was received
European mounts: 3-6 months
Shoulder mounts: 8-11 months
Full mounts: 8-11 months
General Comments
The conservation of our wildlife resources, and of responsible hunting in our region is imperative to sustaining the legacy of our community. As a conservation-centred company, we endeavour to establish a total value chain in the community where the income generated from hunting practices, directly or indirectly, can be traced and measured. We therefore ensure that no part of an animal goes to waste: unutilised meat feeds the community, and skins are transformed into unique bags and other sellable products by local entrepreneurs. Every hunter contributes to this ideology and to the survival of the industry, capturing the Heart of Hunting.
Consider two statements you could hear from your potential outfitter:
Our area has the conditions to produce large kudu; and
Our clients shot three kudu, over 55 inches last year.
The first encourages thoughts on how to find them and the enjoyment of the hunt: the second focuses more on collection than enjoyment and could lead to speculation on whether there are any left when three were taken so recently.
There is so much ‘telling’ in this world. Some of us have had enough. Our governments have told us too much in the last two years and by all accounts, this may not change.
I got into the industry when I was quite young as I had worked for a furrier when I was just a boy. I had always been interested in taxidermied animals, and first started when I used a mail order from the back of a hunting magazine for a booklet on taxidermy. It was quite accurate though I think a little tough to understand for someone not trained in taxidermy. However, the illustrations and the tools they used for tanning were correct.
Just as I was getting ready to go to college, I worked for a famous local taxidermist, Louis Paul Jonas, from the American Museum. He had a studio north of us, about an hour away, and they did very simple work. They didn’t do any advertising, but their archives and what they had there was everything and more than you could ever imagine – like a museum studio.
Jonas died while in his 40s, and his clients were dispersed. Then I got a very famous Austrian gunsmith who dropped off a chamois for me to work on, and this was just as I was starting to work at Jonas’s former commercial studio in Mount Vernon, New York, down in the city. The studio was orinally the Tiffany glass factory before it moved to Long Island, so the place had a lot of history. The Austrian said if I wanted to really learn taxidermy, I needed to work for a place in a museum studio. We didn’t know each other, but he’s still a big friend of mine, hard to believe, 30 years later.
I went down there for a job interview and looked around. There was some archival stuff there, up to the roof – a lot of businesses had been there for 50 years or 60 years. There there old collections of work to be refurbished, and stock. They were overflowing with James Mellon’s trophies, that famous author who wrote African Hunter. There was amazing sculpture work and things from the original museums. The big elephant head that was there was probably one of the first reproductions. It looked like fibreglass, but made of papier maché and it was signed by all three Jonas brothers. It was was just so amazing. I never really realised taxidermy even went to those levels.
The person who interviewed me for the job at Jonas’s studios in New York, formerly Louis Paul’s commercial studio, was Steve Horn. Once I walked in the door, I was 100% sure that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and it’s not too many times in your life you’re that clear about anything. He made me call back there seven times to come get that job. I laughed because he said to me, “Well, what do you think you’re worth?” At the time I was 20, finishing my third year of college. I told him I had worked for a fur buyer when I was a kid. I did piece work for him, so by 12 years’ old l was trained in skinning animals using a beaming knife. I was probably making $10 an hour every day and it was an erratic schedule. I put in a lot of hours, and if necessary had to work on Christmas Day. It was fine, because that was my job, even as a young boy.
So when Steve Horn said, “Well what do you think you’re worth?” I said, “Well, I don’t know – I’m just sure this is what I want to do.”
He said that someone had just left and there was an opening for the shop. It wasn’t really as an apprentice, but Steve said, “You’ll learn a lot, you can work with these other taxidermists.” I was paid $4.10 an hour. I had to drive an hour and 40 minutes to work every day. So every week I wouldn’t really even take a pay cheque, I would just buy materials because I was doing taxidermy then, so I would buy pastes and have tanning done and things like that. But I worked there for years and I learnt a lot. I met some good, interesting people, and then as I progressed, I searched out other people in the industry, people that were connected to places that were very good in certain facets of taxidermy, like African work or doing cats. I would go work for them for free and then come back and I would retrain my men and change our material. So I did that probably three or four times in my life before I was 30.
At one point we were hired to work on Cabela’s projects and there was a pretty famous taxidermist who was handling those jobs. I had a tremendous amount of inventory that I had purchased over the years, and I kind of stepped into this strange job from this eccentric guy who wanted to build a Cabela’s type store, right in-between the two Cabela’s stores in West Virginia. They were going public, so they were making a big splash. We do all North American taxidermy, but when we got an opportunity to actually work for Cabela’s, they hired me to do exclusively African work.
Of course, African work is always the hardest with the highest level of detail, and I was really fortunate, because that’s when I met Wayne. They had sent their agents to collect skins and they made some deals with some guys in South Africa, game ranchers. They said, “Oh, we need kudus and this and this and this,” and they gave a laundry list. But the problem was, the first two times the skins came back, which is what they handed me, they were average-sized animals. The problem was, they wanted record-book-size horns which could be made as reproductions, but the skins were too small.
So I told him I had the inventory covered: “Why don’t you let me just supply the inventory, supply the grasses, the African birds, all the skins. I’ll do the reproduction horns so we have them from record-book-size animals. I’ll handle this for you, you don’t have any problem.” They agreed.
That helped me. Through those years I was able to do almost all African work for Cabela’s. I did a few other things for that Pennsylvania store, but they didn’t want to have one person handling everything. Africa was my thing. And then it also helped me to go to Africa and collect animals and spend a month over there with Wayne. He liked what we were getting, mostly skins, and I got the experience of hunting and vacation, and kept my own horns and skulls, and we used reproduction record-book ones on the animals in the bigger mounts in the stores. And then after that we did a lot of regular client African work, as well as North American work. On one occasion I was at Safari Club and had a big glass case with African birds in it, all the stuff that you see in a bird scene. I had maybe 15 birds in a case and a man walkedup to the case and said “Wow! I need those for my museum. Are those for sale?” I said, sure.
“How many do you have?”
“Oh, about 250.”
“I’ll take them all,” he said, shook my hand and said, “I’m Johnny Morris.” And that was the beginning of our relationship and he hired us for the African exhibits for him, and I think we did just short of 300 life-size animals for that museum. There were a lot of different parts of it that would take some expertise – not just doing it, but having the right brokers to bring these trophies in from outside that had been sitting in Africa for a long time. But we were able to get all that stuff done, as well as do some reproduction animals for him that were impossible to find, and do some restoration work on some things that were very complicated. Anyway, so it’s the African work and it’s what we do mostly.
Favorite animal? Almost everybody says cats because they’re complicated, and we absolutely have done lots of them. For me personally, my honest answer is, I don’t really have anything I would say is a favorite, but I like high detail and I like craftsmanship and natural positions on things, so I could say cats. But I don’t, because they’re probably the focal point in taxidermy. We’re not really doing any elephants or any lions, so that would have to mean leopards.
I think even though we’ve been fortunate enough to work on Cabela’s African displays and Johnny Morris’s African museum, and people with world-famous sheep and mountain scapes, we still do lots of normal work for people as far as African safaris and small safaris are concerned. We enjoy working with people when they’re new and when they start their trophy rooms and they start that journey of hunting of a lifetime. You start somewhere and start small.
And then we end up re-doing their trophy rooms, and we usually work for these people for most of their lives – and that’s true.
With the sun setting slowing on this year’s African season which, by all accounts, has been just what we needed, attention moves to the trophies.
How is the processing and mounting getting along? Then, it’s getting them shipped back home. Though some hunters will be fortunate to have their trophies already back home, the majority are “in the system” and should be ready to be shipped within 12 months or so of the hunt.
At AHG Trophy Shipping, our operation has one objective: To save YOU money. The reason – so you can hunt more! Shipping is a grudge purchase, and if you can save just $500, well that is another animal to hunt.
The African bushbuck is divided into twospecies, the kewel (Tragelaphus scriptus) and the imbabala (Tragelaphus sylvaticus) The kewel’s distribution includes Senegal Ethiopia,Eritrea, and south to Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The imbabala, which is larger than the kewel, is found from the Cape in SouthAfricato Angola and Zambia in the west, and up East Africa to Ethiopia and Somalia.
Roland Wards Records of Big Gamelisteight different species of African bushbuck as doesSafariClub International. For descriptive purposes andhuntinginformation, only the above two will be mentioned. The kewel is more related to the nyala, while the imbabala shares traits with the bongo and the sitatunga.
Bushbuck ram (Tragelaphus sylvaticus ornatus) with world record horns, Zimbabwe
Bushbuck ram (Tragelaphus sylvaticus sylvaticus), Addo Elephant National Park
Bushbuck (Tragelaphus sylvaticus roualeyni), Kruger National Park
The bull bushbuck stands about three feet at the shoulder and weighs between 100 pounds and 130 pounds. Ewes are considerably smaller at sixty to eighty pounds. The ram is the only sex to have horns. Horns continue to grow throughout the bushbuck’s life. A large set of horns will measure 16-17 inches. Coloration of males and females run from reddish brown to almost black brown with the male being darker than the female. Its legs and flank are white. These colors work well to camouflage the bushbuck. When in danger, the African bushbuck will lie down and not move, making it very hard to spot. Its warning call sounds like the bark of a small dog.
An impressive, not yet fully mature Masai bushbuck ram in excellent condition in Arusha National Park, Tanzania, where the living is relatively easy due to the lack of large predators. McCallum Safaris (Photo Courtesy of Karen Seginak)Menelik’s bushbuck
African bushbuck prefer living in thick bush along river banks where they can stay well hidden. Cover and fresh water are the main requirements of the bushbuck. They are browsers, but will consume most any other vegetation they can reach. Bushbuck are active around the clock, except when they are near human settlements where they become nocturnal. The ewe will give birth to a single lamb between October and January. For the first sixteen to eighteen weeks of life, the lamb is hidden by its mother until it’s strong enough to survive.
African bushbuck are solitary by nature, the adult males work at staying away from each other. Sometimes a buck and a ewe are seen together during breeding season. There have been sightings of small family groups consisting of a female with a young faun and an immature male, although this isn’t very common. African bushbuck live within an area of about 60,000 square yards and it is very uncommon for them to move out of that area.
Bushbuck (Tragelaphus sylvaticus roualeyni,) Kruger National Park
Bushbuck (Tragelaphus sylvaticus ornatus), Chobe
Mature African bushbucks are prey to lion, leopard, caracal, wild dogs, and hyena. The young are hunted by pythons. The greatest danger to bushbucks is snaring and hunting with dogs. Habitat destruction also contributes to their decline. African bushbuck come out of their bushy daytime layup during the cooler hours of the morning, and browse along the edges. However, the slightest noise, or movement, will send them back into the shrubbery barking furiously while disappearing from sight.
Hunting the African bushbuck can be a real challenge as it is such a solitary, evasive antelope. The traits necessary to hunt deer in the United States will work well when hunting the African bushbuck. When tracks are found one way to hunt would be to set up a blind along the trail. A hunt can happen quite rapidly as the bushbuck can seem to just appear and disappear, so the hunter must be ready and react instantly.
Sometimes the African bushbuck can be found out in an open spot in the morning trying to shake off the cold night by basking in the warmth of the sun. Hunt along a river bank during early evening while there’s still good shooting light, or in the morning’s first light, and if you are quiet, careful and lucky – very lucky – you might get a shot. The evening is the best time as the African bushbuck is very active at that time.
The most common, and most successful method of African bushbuck hunting is by the stalk. For this, a very good pair of binoculars is a necessity. Binoculars by Zeiss, Leica, Nikon, Swarovski, Doctor and others, in 8X42 or similar are usually the best. Stronger powers, like 10x, reduces the field of vision and are harder to stabilize.
Pick a hill with a good field of view, and check feeding spots. Again, early morning or late afternoon are the best times. Shots will tend to be long, so an accurate rifle in a flat-shooting caliber is best. The .30 magnums like the 300 Weatherby, 300 Winchester Magnum, 300RemingtonUltra Magnum, or any of many similar calibers can reach out 300 yards if the hunter does his part.
One caveat about African bushbuck hunting. This little antelope can be extremely dangerous. Wound him and he will become quite aggressive, with a charge possible. Those foot and a half long horns are very sharp at the pointed end, and more than one careless hunter has had the dubious pleasure of meeting a pair at a high rate of speed. When you shoot, aim for the chest cavity. If he runs, give him a fair amount of time to stiffen up before doing a follow up.
Seven Bushbuck Facts
Scientific name:Tragelaphus sylvaticus
Male weight: 100-130 pounds
Male shoulder height: three feet
Male horn size: 11-17 inches
Gestation: 180 days
Hunting: April – October
Territory: 60,000 square yards
Spear Safaris – Decent harnessed bushbuck from Burkino Faso
Spear Safaris – A pending SCI no 5, harnessed bushbuck from Burkino Faso
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