Field Dressing Game: Rabbit for Meat & Fur

Description

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Video Transcription

hi there guys it's Mike from mcq bushcraft it and welcome to another video I've been out doing some shooting today

just take the twelve alright and managed to get myself a rabbit got a wood pigeon as well and I've got the rabbit just here with me and I thought I'd just do a quick video showing you how to dress a rabbit in a particular way I'm actually dressing this rabbit not just for meat that are hired as well because I'm going to brain tan the hide it's a later stage so it's really just a bit more of a delicate way of preparing a rabbit where you want to separate the hide avoid getting blood on it and just take your time as I always do when I'm dressing game

the first thing I'm going to do with the rabbit is squeeze some urine out of it it has been hit by a shotgun and see it's got a few broken bones the spread must have hit it it was a fairly heavy load actually it's all I really had so it was just the way it was but to squeeze the urine out you just run your hand down the belly like this and you should see some urine start to come out I've got nothing coming out in my case so perhaps it's vacated its bladder hopefully so alternatively the bladder could be punctured and the urine could be inside it and this is generally wife--who using a shotgun you want to get this thing dressed pretty quickly you can see rigor mortis hasn't set in yet with this it's still warm this should be easy to dress and get the hide off in one piece but first things first just going to lie it down just going to take my knife make a small incision

and I'm going to actually take the hide off before I gut the rabbit so I want to get as little blood on the hide as possible do this part pretty slowly there we go you can see that the skin now has been separated from the actual meat

we can just kind of work that away that you've got yourself a bit of a hole you can see that the skin has actually been separated away from the flesh what I tend to do is actually put my hand up inside here

and start to start to loosen it up basically

and I'm going to slice all the way up here once the hive is fairly loose from the actual flash of the animal and that way I won't puncture the gut cavity there start to leak anything out over the hide which I really want kind of avoid

I should be pretty straightforward once you've separated this up a little bit you can take your knife just start running it up and just work it off a little bit more can feel a little bit of shot there actually

looks like the hit was around this area here which is probably why we've got broken arms at the front see my fingers are right up here now to really separate it quite a lot if the hide I'm not too worried if it's a straight line it's really just the main bulk of the hide but I'm after and once we separated quite a lot of the hide off of the body here we can start to actually bring it out from other areas as well so you can start to tuck the knee just like this at the height and and start to pull the leg out you don't want to be too rough even they rabbit flesh comes off or rabbit skin comes off really easily it's something you still want to take your time with especially if you want to actually have a decent hide at the end of it

you can see I can get my finger right through their night which is a which is pretty good

you can pop better the hide of there sometimes you lose it around the foot I'm not too bothered about that I really just want the main bulk of the leg you can just do the same with the other leg tuck it through the hide like that what shout if there's any broken bones around there because I'll be seriously sharp you don't really want to be doing this if you've got cuts on your hands my hands are pretty good at the moment but I wouldn't do this if I had any real deep cuts or infections I just pop the glove on there we go to pop the hide off there as well

you can actually cut it just at the back here you're going to find that you've got a little bit of tail if you put your thumb around the back of it you can get your thumb just through like that your knife can kind of follow

just like say we might have a bit of bone and stuff in there you can always tidy that up a later date and it should just start to peel off real nice Oh got quite a lot shot there and see these are number fours a really big pallet to be honest for such an animal I expected a lot of trauma and we have up front there it is that blood isn't a problem really when tanning the hide we can actually get that off quite easily through the tanning process even with something as basic as brain tanning and you've got some valuable fat as well there that obviously is put on in the colder months we have some broken bones around here want to be careful really the process is fairly straightforward just take your time

again just putting that elbow through that trying to get your thumb through I just working the skin off men

watching the broken bone there we go can support the leg a little bit if you're worried about that pain it's a bit of a mess up front can I have to get some of this flash off the hide whereas that'll go rancid as you start to free this up it will come away quite easily and we're really just left with the head and you're going to do some brain tanning you're going to want some brains and the brains are in the head so we're really going to need to just take it easy with the hide around the head there and not just start sort of ripping at it you can see some serious little puncture holes around here where the number fours went through I imagine they've gone clean out the other side as well usually use number fours for geese so when you've spent some time working the hide off you normally end up with quite a nice piece of hide obviously the arms and the legs are still like two little cylinders so you might want to choose to actually take your knife and open everything up it's a pretty simple process really you just identify the tail or the head just like the matter I can lose a bit of fur which isn't really a massive issue at this point you will lose a little bit more through the process and you're stretching and working the hide you can see that the legs are like almost like small gloves it's difficult to leave them like that without drying right out and they just become so hard they're really unusable so again a good thing to do is just to take your knife and identify little arm there just open it up and then you've opened the hide up just a little bit more for you to have more skin to actually make something out or the same again with this arm here you can see it just that once you actually start to open them up they become quite large if you have a couple of them you can make quite a lot of stuff out of this hat some of the best things you can make from rabbits hides very soft and they're really warm and because it's not a particularly big hide it doesn't take much to process it but really we'll cover that in another video

but you can see I just need to open this arm leg up here sorry you can just kind of work it down the knife like that open that right up we'll miss that that's it

we've got a pretty good bit of hide but once we've actually taken this off especially if it's hot whether you just want to roll the hide up almost on itself into a little parcel and keep the moisture because at this point really what I do with this hide as I find the board or make a frame nail it out or strap it out so it's nice and stretched and then get some scraping action on it to get the the membrane layer off and any fat flesh there won't be too much on a rabbit but there will be a membrane layer it's not necessary to get it off completely at this moment because you can use a pumice stone and work in a later stage but just to get it the best it can really be for brain tanning to absorb those oils from the brain is a it's really the condition you want it in and really with brain tanning you're not really tanning anything at all you're just putting oil from the brain of the animal fatty tissue which is essentially what the brain is back into the high to make it quite supple and then through stretching it you really kind of rip up those fibers and loosen them and then you end up with quite a supple hide but we'll put our hide to the side we'll carry on with our rabbits we obviously haven't finished dressing it yet I prefer to joint rather than just Ram my knife through bone so I've just worked away a lot of the meat around this actual neck then I can just take a stone and just hit it and the head will come off and then our brains in our head and there's our tanning package right there we don't need really anything else our from a bit of force to get the highs in a decent condition some of these broken bones will allow us to joint the animal pretty quickly and see we've got another little bit there that should be pretty easy to join if you can't joint things too easily you'll always be able to find stains and things and it'll just free limbs up it will smash the bone up you have to be aware of that it's not as clean as jointing where you find a limb with a joint and you put it through but for me if a bones already busted up I'm not too fussed anyway but at the back here

we do have some bits to get rid of you can see these back legs are usually really tough I mean it's a serious animal in some respects for its size take a stone again just crack that limb take that off you can use the back yo knife as well actually take the spine of your knife and hit it I'm just not doing it because there's a lot of stone hanging around and I'll end up just clacking my knife on stank no reason when there are other tools I can use just break that get that off as well the crabs can have that and the tide comes in and really what we're left with is something they're pretty usable we just need to make an incision just here watching we don't puncture the intestine and then what we do I don't know what sort of damage this has got in it but you can see we just slide knife up there just like say can go past the diaphragm as well and open this right up the ribs are fairly soft that you won't damage it too many knives on there but obviously if you've got a sort of fragile knife t-mike tin you can see all the guts in there we've got a variety of different things

you can see that we've got a liver just here

and that liver doesn't look amazingly healthy I must be honest actually a lot of patching on it and it's good to check the liver and the kidneys and various organs of the animal because it because it tells you the health of the animal but we can eat that but that's really hard it's actually rock hard and it shouldn't be the liver should be very soft so perhaps this animal was of ill health but I'm going to get rid of most of this anyway I'll probably just keep the heart in this case and the kidneys it's not looking um it's not looking massively healthy actually

I'm sure it was all you do really is you can touch them or you don't have to but you just take it all out like that just put it all out as one big sack just like so and I'm sure the sea life will uh will benefit greatly from that sometimes if you've got a decent enough knife in a respect you can just split the pelvis like so and that allows you to clean things up really really easily by just getting all this stuff out here just be careful because it can be sharp but it does give you a decent visual of how you clear and clean everything can be just got to watch these bones either side here as you can cut yourself on it so that's um all right we got some fat or leave that there that's good that's more valuable than meat that's for sure in some respects it's a better form of energy and we can go in here we can pull the heart out get the lungs off parts we've got a little heart there and get all this side what you can do as well if you don't eat these side wings here they're very very flashy I normally don't eat them I usually take them off before I stew the rabbit you can see that the best bit of the rabbit just these back straps here these back straps are absolutely delicious really tender and you've got good back legs as well and a bit of meat on the front so that's really it I saw a package that we've ended up with a hide a brain too tan the hide with and the meat of the rabbit just that so I hope you enjoyed that video guys and I hope you found it useful it's really just a quick video I was out here doing a bit of hunting just after some rabbits really it's that time of year in some respects and there was some wood pigeon around as well got something today and thought I just share it with you as I'm going to be preparing this hide and I wanted to meat from the rabbit as well to actually make a steward losing a bit of light now this time of year it never stays particularly like too long and it kind of limits the filming and what you can do but I thought be nice to share this with you so I hope you found it useful I'll see you very soon for another video thanks again guys take care