This is straight out of my life long Hide Taxidermy & Hide Tanning Notebook. Suffice it to say, the flesh is stripped off quickly and easily and the ranch dogs love it… It’s like a nutritious rawhide bone feast for them (I love that because I’m utilizing more of the animal).

I simply lay the hide on a picnic table and use spring clamps to hold it down while I spray/strip. (I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures here, its a seriously messy job and no one in the family wants to be standing around taking pictures due to the crazy overspray, maybe next time). It allows me to flesh a large animal hide in about an hour and the finished product is uniform and without gouges. I learned that a pressure washer that puts out at least 3,000psi with an oscillating tip would strip the flesh off of the skin and leave only the bluish skin behind. One of the hardest parts is de-fleshing the hide which usually entails lots and lots of scrapping at the skin side to get all of the non-usable flesh off so that the tanning solution will penetrate. Deer hides are thin and easy to deal with but Elk are huge, very long hair and lots of thick flesh on the skin side. When I was about 18, I had hundreds of rabbit, deer, raccoon, squirrel and other hides that were all tanned, trimmed and beautiful.Īs I got older and could hunt myself, I started tanning the BIG game hides (ELK) and that was an eye opener in how hard and how much work went into it. We raised rabbits for food so I never let a hide go to waste, they all got tanned. I learned to tan hides with the hair on and hair off. When my parents went deer hunting and would bring home a deer, I would help my dad skin the animal and while mom and dad were butchering it for the freezer, I was salting and prepping the hides. I learned to mount birds, rabbits, squirrels and just about anything I could get my hands on… usually road kill! I saved and bought all of the tools and chemicals and “stuff” that I would need to go through the course. So, when I was about 10 years old, I had become very intrigued with tanning and while reading magazines that my parents subscribed to, I learned that if I learned taxidermy, I’d learn how to tan hides, so I saved my money and bought a “Mail Order” Taxidermy course (our Internet in those days was Life Magazine!!). It always intrigued me on how they did it. In the fall when it was time to butcher the steers, he’d send the hides to the tannery and beautiful leather would come back. Saddles, chaps, bridles, shirts, pants, whips and ropes. My grandfather was a leather worker (called a tanner) and could make anything, yes I said anything out of leather. We all lived around my grandfathers ranch, so all of us kids were junior cowboys as well. Growing, up my grandfather, father and uncles were all cowboys and my grandfather and father were Mounted Sheriff’s as well. A lot of people ask me how I tan hides so I decided to post an article on what, and how I do it.

Tanning rabbit hides with sulfuric acid