Thread: Getting back to living off the land.....

I split pig skins down the spine sometimes myself. A whole skin can really be quite stiff and hard to manipulate, especially further toward the shield area. I haven't hung carcasses by the head for skinning. I should try it. My carcasses generally don't have a head on them when I bring them home however. I try to lighten the load.

My current procedure is to remove the hocks and hang carcasses (with their skin on) from the pelvic bone (aitch bone) using a big stainless 'S' hook. This enables me to loosely wrap a sheet around it to keep the flies off. I close the sheet up with clothes pegs and hold it up from the rear end with a peg that grabs the sheet against the shaft of the S-hook. I'll often hang the carcass under my shed lean-to roof as long as I dare in the hope that the meat will be tender.

I'm not inclined to give the dogs in my life a head or even a bone. Our current 'grand-dog' which we look after sometimes likes a bone or a bit of skin, but he'll chew it for a while and then get the urge to bury it. And often the first spot isn't right. So he'll dig another hole in the garden and move it... and so on. Plus he is an entitled 'inside' dog, so the mud can come indoors. Sometimes he'll even bury things under the sofa cushions.

We used to give our previous Huntaway/Lab nearly empty pottles of sour cream etc to clean out. She'd pick them up and take them outside to work on. After she passed away, I was digging a hole in the vegetable patch and found a sour cream pottle she'd saved for later.