Wow. I wonder if the urge to connect with an animal’s body for survival and fulfillment is the same urge that motivates dissection in science. I remember doing a dissection class in 6th grade and I was not queasy, it could have been some ancestral memories poking through my subconscious.
Good pictures of a young man skinning a racoon.
<<Maybe if you treat butchering as learning/play time the queesyness can be overcome? Good luck finding what works for you.>>
Hey, that’s not a bad idea. I’ve been trying to acquaint myself with anatomy and physiology lately, that’s a helpful way to look at it.
"I’ve been trying to acquaint myself with anatomy and physiology lately, that’s a helpful way to look at it. "
Everything I know about anatomy and physiology I learned from cutting up dead animals.
I used to skin bears for the game wardens when they killed bears that came to town. I had to turn in the gall bladder in order to prove that I didn’t sell it for Chinese medicine.
This was a major bummer because there was no other reason for me to gut them just to get the skin off. Consequently I got pretty good at knowing just where to make a small cut so I could remove the gall bladder without having to completely gut the bear.
I saved the meat from the fresh ones but often the bear had been in the back of the game wardens truck all afternoon by the time it got to my house.
After one season of doing that I quit. It was too wierd. I had to skin a lot of bears and they are too much like people when you get the skin off. I’ve eaten them and rendered lots of the fat. I’ve tanned the skins and made rawhide for drums, but I have never killed one. I had a license twice and even had them in my sights but couldn’t pull the trigger on one.
I’m trying to explain that to this one that keeps visiting my place lately. I’ve had three visits today! It drags out salted deer hides and licks all the salt off. So given enough time it drags out a lot of hides. I have a bunch that are just in plastic barrels so they are a piece of cake for a bear to get into.
If it was fall and the bear was fat I might reconsider my position on killing bears.
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whoa. that made me shiver.
how so?
When you skin a bear, you can see that the front legs bend the same way our arms do and the lower legs look like a very muscular man’s forearm. The front paws look very much like human hands.
The back legs bend like our legs and the back feet look like a human foot.
It’s very eery to look at.
I’m trying to figure out my bear situation here right now. This is really the first time I have had a bear that persistently keeps coming back and getting into my stuff. I have a big brown one that comes through here every spring but only stays about a week and moves on. I’ve learned to put up with that because it doesn’t last long and really doesn’t do much damage.
This is a smaller black one and it seems to have set up house here.
I came to the conclusion today that there is a message here for me and when I get it, the bear and I will be able to move past this annoying relationship that we have now. Up until now it’s just been a mild inconvenience but it took a very nice large hide this morning that I had already done quite a bit of work on, so it seems to be demanding some kind of acknowlegment from me.
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Wow. heyvictor, hearing your bear (and other) stories really helps fill a gap in my personal experiences, living in the city right now and having precious little interaction with wild animals. thank you for sharing them. 
As I become more and more familiar with human anatomy (as a bodyworker and just as a human who moves), I have gotten very curious about comparing animal’s experiences in their bodies to ours–like how it feels to move their limbs, how their particular strengths (shorter/longer/stronger/differently shaped bones & muscles) help them do what they need to do. We mammals all have more or less the same equipment, just expressed differently for our place in the world.
I had a really interesting conversation recently about seals and their hip bones and flipper-legs and fantastic fur, compared to how we swim and keep ourselves warm (I recently learned that seals have WAY more blood volume than we do, as part of their amazing warm-blooded-in-arctic-waters magic).
I’ve slowly continued to read a book, The Gift of the Whale by Bill Hess, in which some northern native folks who have traditionally lived very close to the whales (bowhead and beluga) related their stories of shamanic journeying under the water with the whales, to understand the whales’ lives and needs. Part of the journey involved “putting on the whale parka”, or crawling into their skin.
Bears and humans have such an overlap of their “place in the world”, I don’t feel too surprised to hear what you say about our bodies under “the bear parka” and our skins.
What if we could “put on the bear parka” for a while and see how it feels. . .
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Just a side note about bars.
My wife and I saw three grizzlies yesterday! Appeared to be a mother and two pretty mature cubs. We were on our way to our daughters house and they crossed the road in front of us.
[quote=“yarrow dreamer, post:27, topic:778”]Bears and humans have such an overlap of their “place in the world”, I don’t feel too surprised to hear what you say about our bodies under “the bear parka” and our skins.
What if we could “put on the bear parka” for a while and see how it feels. . .[/quote]
Ha, that reminds me of one of my favorite novels, “The Hotel New Hampshire” by John Irving. One of the characters wears a bear suit made from a real bear. When she’s in the suit (which is most of the time), she moves and acts like a bear.