The nature of animal hide

[yarrow_dreamer]

I found a little squirrel lady laying by the side of the road the other day and brought her home. I began to skin her and found she had 3 babies in her belly.

After I stopped crying and finished the job, I got to her head and found that her neck and skull had been crushed beyond all recognition and couldn’t salvage any brains. poor thing. :’(

I know we have some expert tanners here. I’ve heard about various steps involved in hide tanning, but I’d really like to understand what hide wants to do. obviously, protect the animal while she lives, and decay afterwards. so what do salt, scraping, stretching, brains, eggs, ash-water, smoke do to the hide to change the direction it goes in? how? why? how do i look at what i’ve got and decide what to do next? what do i do differently to keep the fur on? what happens if the hide just sits there and i don’t do anything?

[system]

yarrow dreamer-
How to tan a hide is actually too much to describe in a post on an internet forum. I could go through basic steps but that would be assuming that you understood the terminology and the descriptions of physical techniques.

I’ll give you some brief answers to your questions though.

“…so what do salt,”
Salt is used for preserving the hide until you can tan it. Cover the flesh side with salt lay it out flat to dry. Repeat the next day. let the hide dry out. This is for keeping fur on. Commonly called “dry salting”. Wet salting is for leather hides (without hair) and is done a little differently.

“…scraping,”
Scraping the meat and fat off is necessary because meat and fat is what will initiate rot. You can’t really tan meat, so it has to go.

“…stretching,”
Hides want to shrink and curl as the glue in them sets up. Stretching keeps them opened up and as big as they can be. Also keeps the fibers separated so that tanning agents can get in easier.

“…brains,”
Brains contain emulsified oils. Oils that mix with water rather than separating, like when you pour cooking oil into a glass of water. These emulsified oils are carried into the hide by water and coat the fibers of the hide, lubricating them and inhibiting the ability of the glue to set up and stiffen the hide, without leaving the hide feeling greasy like straight oil or fat would.

“…eggs,”
Egg yoke also contains emulsified oils similar to brains, they can be used the same way.

“…ash-water,”
Ash water contains the same ingredients as lye. It’s used to de-hair a hide and it also breaks up mucous in the hide that helps the glue bond with the fibers of the hide. By breaking this mucous up, the hide soaks up the brains better and can often be softened easier with fewer brainings and softenings.

“…smoke”
Smoke contains aldehydes which are a preservative and a tanning agent.

"…how do i look at what i’ve got and decide what to do next?
If it is not rotting to the point of coming apart then you can still do something with it. You can either play around with it with the knowlege that you have now or you can put it in a ziplock baggy in the freezer until you get more information.

“…what do i do differently to keep the fur on?”
If you allow the hide to remain wet too long the hair will start to slip. So if you want hair on then make sure it doesn’t get left wet for very long without getting worked on.

“…what happens if the hide just sits there and i don’t do anything?”
It will dry and shrink until it’s a hard little crumpled looking thing. Mice and insects will eventually find it, eat what they can, and use the rest for their nests or something.

For an encyclopedic amount of information on historic tanning methods, check out www.braintan.com and the discussion forum there.

[system]

For leather eventually I’ve have two racoon hides scraped and stored. To scrape them I used a method called ‘fleshing’ which involved the removal of meat, fat, and membranes with a knife stroke against the inner most layer of the skin til I hit the hypodermis (the thin membrane of flesh on the inside of the skin). I scrapped until I felt a difficulty or saw hair coming through the inside of the skin because I didn’t want to cut through to the other side which makes a whole in the hide. To store the hide I hung them up in a dry area with cordage and some airflow. Moreover, when I’ve layed hides out to dry they sweat on the side facing down and this makes them damp on their underneath side which might cause rot. To avoid rot I made sure that when I hung them to dry no folds existed anywhere on the hides because rot enjoys growing in damp folds of the hide; I’ve dried un-scraped hides (hides not ‘fleshed’), but first I made sure they had no folds so that air flow could dry them out completely. Once dried we can store hides anywhere dry for a time like 20 years before we want to move to the next steps of leather making and brain-tanning; as far as my two hides go, I’ve had them stored in a dry place for about 7 months now and nothing out of the ordinary has happened to them. I suggest getting these to practices over with before moving to the next step some us call ‘soaking’, this way the skin won’t rot while we learn further advice about the next steps. For moreness, I definately recommend checking out Thomas J. Elpels field guild called, Primitive Living, Self-sufficiency, and Survival Skills.