Bits and Pieces

I spent a full day in my studio working on some different projects, one of which was the very special canine.  While I had skinned the dog a couple weeks ago, I didn't have a chance to thoroughly get down to it so I had to stash the skin in the freezer for a bit.  Yesterday I thawed it out and got down to degreasing.  I was reminded of my racoon experience, with the amount of fat I had to scrape off.  I don't want to get too graphic because this dog was loved by people so deeply, but after working on the pelt for almost five hours I feel like I may have developed a Popeye forearm from the repetitive and forceful motion the degreasing process requires.



Alas, it is done and now the future work of art is resting in a tanning solution.



After that was finished I moved onto a small rabbit I'd skinned a while ago.  Sometimes I'll do a crude skinning of a specimen and then freeze the pelt just to free up some room in the icebox. This basically involves just getting the carcass out.  Later on I'll go back and scrape the fat, split the ears, nose and lips, etc.  Splitting ears on small mammals takes finesse and patience.  See how delicate this is?  That dark thing is my tool inside the ear.







The goal is to separate the front and back tissues of the ear.  After the skin is treated, a firm material is placed in side the ear to keep its shape.



 



I skinned two squirrels to fill an order for a client and froze the pelts.  I salted the meat in the fridge over night and this morning threw it all in the crock pot for some slow cooking.  Were this for me, I would've marinated it for a couple days however the dish I was creating would be for my cats.  I've been playing around with making my own cat food for some time now; usually I'll just feed them scraps of whatever we have, but I've never actually made a whole mixture.  I read a rant in one of the local weeklies. years ago, about how keeping cats as pets is one for the least environmentally friendly things one could do. The author came off as a bit unhinged but the idea always stuck with me; that I was using can after can after can and feeding my little guys fish and chicken raised and processed who knows where/how.  I have a friend who made his own food after his cat was diagnosed with cancer and she lived well past the vat's predicted expiration date.  I've been reading The Natural Cat and followed the basic recipe's amount for protein, veggies and starches.  I mixed the squirrel with some quinoa and pureed garbanzo beans, and will add vitamins later as well as some pureed carrots.  Here is the almost finished product, though, and I let the boys sample it already.  They both seemed very, very happy.