I recently paid $175 for a wooden crate to ship a pronghorn head from the taxidermist from Gillette, Wyoming to my home north of Dallas, Texas. The crate was constructed of about 8 4' x 1"x4" boards and 10 2' x 1"x4" boards. The wood looked like yellow pine. The boards were secured to each other with some sort of staples from a staple gun. The alignment of things was not perfect, suggesting the crate was rapidly put together, but adequate to the purpose. The crate was enclosed with cardboard, cardboard from a clothes dryer. If I were to make one of these -- and I'm not a carpenter or particularly skilled with tools -- I'm guessing the wood might cost about $20 and that I could assemble the crate in about 15 minutes. Particularly, I think with the experience of building about 20 of these crates per year for several years, I would get pretty quick at assembling these crates. The shipping costs were separate from the $175 and cost $50, not a surprise considering both the weight and the volume of the crate loaded with the head.

The question is . . . was $175 too much to be asked to pay for this crate? What do you all pay for similar crates to have heads shipped to you? I am a novice consumer of the taxidermist's art. Going forwards I may have additional heads mounted, and in the future I would like to be a more informed and knowledgable consumer before having my next head mounted.

I posted this querry in the "Taxidermy" topic, but the responses were not helpful. I get the feeling most of the folks in that topic are taxidermists. A typical reply was "if you negotiated this point up front, and you agreed to this price up front, what is the problem?" Well, that doesn't address my question. Given the crate I received, there is some price at which I would have overpaid -- be it $175, be it $500, be it $10,000 for a crate. I would like to get some idea of what price I ought to pay in the future for the packaging of a head mount.