Skinning a squirrel for a usable hide

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

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okay guys went out this morning and we shot a couple squirrels got a nice big red they're a small gray got a fire going on over here to make some hot chocolate and we're going to talk about skinning the squirrel out today we're going to take this red squirrel I've had quite a few questions about skinning a squirrel if I want to keep the hide so I thought maybe instead of just ripping the pants and shirt off of him and cooking the meat up today we'd actually skin this squirrel out so some of our younger viewers that want to do that can see how it's done one of the things that I was asked on yesterday's video was about this titanium pot that I showed in the video yesterday and how it would nest with the Pathfinder bottle and that's pretty good there's a little bit of space in there but probably only an eighth of an inch all the way around so it nests in there really well actually now you're not going to go nest of stove on the bottom of that because it's bigger or rent well you could nest it partially but you're not going to be able nesting all the way up on there it's just not big enough around for that because it's made for the Pathfinder Cup but what I do is my Pathfinder Cup has got the handles taken off of it and I just use a bail in there at fish mount spreader for a bail and it does actually fit inside of that pot nice and snug and then I can dust the Pathfinder bottle on that and that's the stove on top of that flat cap and then put the lid on the bottom and that makes a pretty nice nested cooks up for me that's got a stove a lid a bottle and two different cooking containers so that works pretty good for me but if you wanted to you could just dust the bottle in there easy enough put the stove on the top put the lid on the topper in the bottom of your carrier for your bottle and you'd be good to go and you accomplished the same thing - the one container like I said I took the handles off in this one a long time ago I wouldn't expect you to ripping the handles

your pathfinder cup but if your handles are not on your pathfinder cup it does nest in there just right just like that so that answers that question i'm going to use this titanium pot again today make some hot chocolate then while I'm doing the skinning of this squirrel so I thought I'd get that set up real quick on the squirrel cooker over the fire get that going while we wait what I would do first with a squirrel is I would just pull out the sharpest knife I've got which in my case probably would be just a quick little pocketknife you don't want something too big you want something fairly small for this job and I would come in here and open him up and get my money cut done first you've got a little bigger rigor mortis setting in there okay so let's just get a sharp knife and make our money cut in other words we're going to cut from the heel straight down all the way to the vent we're going to do it on both sides once we've accomplished that cut on both sides

we're going to wring the legs real quick right here just like this we'll just come up here and we'll ring it over on both sides just like that and we'll do the other leg the same way just like that we just have to walk around there and make sure that we've got our cut all the way through so we can strip that down off the meat just like any other four-legged critter just like this once we can shuck that meat off all right skin I should say off the leg like that then we'll just go around with this let's separate everything in our hands then we'll do the same thing on the other leg okay now once you've got that stripped off both legs just come in here connect that cut right there to separate the belly far from the rest and pull that loose just like that now what you've got is you've got a separation here trying to do this in my lap probably the best thing a little bit that's okay

all right now we can start to pull this back here on both sides off of the haunches there and if you get a little bit of meat on there you can pull this up or you can separate it easy enough with your hands and then get back behind here and separate that skin or the tails that right there just like that now you've got everything separated and you can make a tail slit right there and start getting that tail to come off and lay that thing on the hard object face up like this and just slice it with your knife straight down separate it as you go

that will help it to pull off the tail easier when the time comes to strip the tail you see how that's coming straight out of their bone pull that straight out and now we've got the tail off and we can start to shuck him a little bit now this is where the gambrel is going to come in and there's a few pieces shot in this guy but they're right at the surface of his skin for the most part they're not okay so I just tied his legs with 2 Slipknot's one over the top of a log above me crossbeam here and just put a larks head in that and that's going to hold it in place and now I can't work the hide like I would any other hide to pull it down you can see we've got it pretty well down already before we even put it up here but this is going to help you be able to put pressure on it to pull it down now if you rope skin this thing and you put a rope on here that would work just fine too but you're going to find probably that when you do that it's going to pull pretty hard and you don't want that but you do want a good sharp knife for this you get down to those shoulders and then you're going to be able to pull it out a lot easier okay one thing that we didn't talk about real quick once you get down to these shoulders if you've cut the feet off it's going to come out a whole lot easier if you didn't cut the feet off because you're trying to save the feet for some reason it's not going to come out of there near as easy but you can work your fingers right into those sockets right there and then just pull that straight off once you get to those shoulders you should be able to do the same thing on the other side when you get down to it as well you can see he's been hitting that shoulder yeah he's going to broken leg right there probably where he fell out of a tree or where he was hit one of the two but will be able to get it out of there just going to be a little bit more work than the other one wasn't so okay so once you get that other leg pulled then you can just yank it straight out as well you can see the a hole in the hide right here I'm not sure if when I there's another hole right here where there was a pellet hit him in the head when I pulled this and stretched this hole a little bit so saving his head may not be a very easy task at this point because he's got a couple of holes in his head but we'll continue on for the sake of purpose anyway so let's get underneath here and pull this down looks like his whole head is going to come off of here so it's going to happen so we may not be able to save this head and that's fine we'll just turn it inside out and we'll cut the head off because we got a bad spot right there anyway in the head but we still got all of the fur and the tail both legs we're just not going to have the head because of those holes where he was shot okay so I took this guy over to a stump and just cut that head off let's turn this fur we'll have to split this tail let's turn this fur inside right side out again for a minute here you'll see what we've got we've got just a tube basically now for me if I were trying to do something with this hide talking to younger viewers here and I wasn't going to make a pouch or something where I needed that tube I would go ahead and split this high because it's going to make it a whole lot easier in the preserving process anyway to go ahead and do that see where's other legs out here

okay there's a leg right there okay so there's his legs and his cake and there's basically the two that we've gotten and then his tail we'll split that tail out a little bit but you can see there's not a whole lot to a squirrel hide so it's going to take several of those to make anything unless you're just trying to make a pouch now if you've got some blood on the fur and things like that you want to take this down right away and wash it maybe that's not as important for a high you're not going to sell but for more expensive highs like a fox or a coon or something like that you're trying to sell you'd want to wash the blood off of that hide right away in this case we shouldn't be too worried about that we're going to go ahead and split this thing up the middle and flush it out won't take anything to flush this guy out and then they'll be ready to start preserving well that's all pretty easy stuff right there guys uh I know I still got blood on my hands but that kind of stuff doesn't bother me stir up a hot chocolate here get warmed up a little bit and then we'll go over here the flushing beam real quick and we'll split that hide open and flush it out okay guys you know I don't have my smock on or anything here there's not a whole lot to a squirrel because there's not a whole lot of flush and you've got to do it if you don't have a flushing knife you could very easily just use the split open cannon bone of a deer if you wanted to but all you're really trying to do is just scrape the fat off any excess meat that you have like I said squirrel hides pretty tough it's pretty resilient so it's kind of hard to tear it unless you've already put a hole in it like my bullet or something like that then it's going to be a little easier to get it to tear but if you don't have any bullet holes in it you've got a nice smooth flushing beam you'll get the stuff off pretty quick and it won't be a major deal at all now let's split this tail what we're going to do is just lay that tail down facing down and stick our knife blade in there and put a straight slit straight up in that dude and again you're going to want a good sharp knife for this in regular animals you're going to have to do some blessing in the tail in a squirrel there's probably not going to be enough in there that you're going to have to worry about it as far as the as far as the Flushing goes there probably won't be enough meat in there to have to worry about it but you do want to strip it down and strip it open so they can dry properly okay so once we've done all of that and we've got stripped out ready to go now we just want to dry it out basically which means we want to stretch it somewhere and dry it so for this type of hide I wash it real quick if that's what you're going to do if you're worried about the blood stains and then I would get this thing tacked down to something where it can't get walked off with and get it up a little bit off the ground and let the hide start to dry now if you're going to process it right away and try to brain tannin or tan or something like that you can go ahead with that process before drying it but if you're going to put this hide up for a little while because maybe you're trying to make some Moxon's you want to wait till you get eight or ten of these hives to do that then you can put it up and dry it okay guys what I wanted to do today real quick was just get through skinning that animal as if we were going to try to preserve the hide in a rawhide State we're just going to let it dry there's a multitude of ways you could tan a hide like this from buying solutions to natural alternatives I've done videos about different types of tanning on my channel already but I want to show for my younger viewers how to skin a squirrel out to preserve the hide to make something out of it I appreciate your support

I appreciate your views I appreciate everything you do for me for my school for my family I'll be back another video soon as I can thanks guys

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