Tan Your Hide

Many of us grew up with it, the threat of "I ought to tan your hide" when we did something unspeakable.  I am beginning to think that this threat was never actually uttered by anyone who really had tanned a hide because, frankly, given even the worst infraction by a kid possible, "tanning" is simply a lot of work and likely more of a punishment for the person doing the tanning.

We have established a strange pattern  on our small livestock farm.  When some beloved, fur bearing, food animal either dies unexpectedly or is sent to market, we have taken to tanning their hide.  Now, granted, we are at a sum total of two at the moment, but once bitten by the tanning bug, it becomes something that you consider every time you run your hands over a soft furry, or woolly back.

The first time this thought even crossed our mind was the day that our beloved sheep, Lambie, died suddenly of heart failure.  It is a terrible conundrum, really to happen upon an animal that you loved as both a pet and a potential farm contributor who has quite suddenly died from an apparent heart attack.  What's to be done?  Bury her and loose all the good meat and wool, or butcher this poor hapless family member that also just happens to be a sheep?  While we deliberated this ethical and moral situation, it was deemed best that we at least start the butchering process because there really is only a small window of opportunity for that process to take place.  Grieving would have to take place while wielding the sharp knives and bone saw.  The skin, of course, is one of the first things to be removed and Lambie had such a fine coat of wool that I was sad to see it, too, go to waste.  Around here, one thing leads to another and, thanks to a few quick references, the initial scraping of the hide was underway.

Salting the hide

There is a strange sort of alchemy that happens when butchering an animal.  Chickens can quickly be turned from feathered friends into rubber chicken-like models, and then into an incredible bowl of chicken noodle soup with a mere flick of a knife, and some really hot water.  Sheep convert from a large, belligerent, somewhat spastic animal into a fleece and a significant amount of red meat very quickly.  I am not suggesting that there is not true affection for these animals, or that we are blood thirsty individuals - quite the opposite really.  Killing an animal, for whatever reason, but especially if we are going to be eating them, is a very thought provoking process in which there is a lot of introspection and palpable gratitude expressed to the animal.  The day Lambie died, Keith and I really did not talk much to one another, both lost in our own thoughts, grappling with our emotions surrounding this farm life altering event, but understanding the time sensitive nature of the material required us to put it all on hold for the time being.  In Lambie's case, we were spared the necessity of trying to decide when, or how we would ever send her to market.  She did it for us, bless her little weak heart.  And just to be clear, before I get a lot of worried responses to the effect of "that meat may not be safe to eat!"….yes, yes it was.  Being the vet that I am, I sent off multiple tissues samples to try to determine the cause of the sudden demise of our entire herd of one.  Turns out it was White Snake Root poisoning - a type of plant that was in our hay that we didn't even know about…. but that is another post for a different time, I digress….

 Lambie was a hand off from our neighbor who had a set of triplets.  She was the one triplet that wasn't doing well because she didn't get any milk.  Our neighbor, also being the school bus driver, knew that we had a lot of kids and a mom who was a vet.  It hasn't taken long for the neighbors to realize that we are a good place to drop the rejects - we are like the island of misfit farm animals.  Lambie, when she first came to us, was not even able to suck from a  bottle so had to be tube fed for three weeks until she learned to eat the new spring grass that was finally growing.  Because of the cold weather, she lived in the house with us for that time, often to be found sleeping behind the door of the mudroom curled into a small ball of warm, black wool.

So it was this now white, fleecy pelt that we skinned off, scraped cleaned and then salted.  These unplanned events never happen at an ideal time, but in Lambie's case, she picked a good day.  Cool temperatures and I was home from work.  What a way to have to spend the day off.  We tracked down a few references for what we were doing and set to work.  The basics are the same for any skin or pelt.

1. Scrape clean of any muscle tissue and fascia (and hair or wool if you don't want it)
2. Salt the skin well to help dry and preserve it
3. Pickle it in an acidic salt brine
4. Tan it
5. Oil it 
6. Break down the fibrous connective tissue in the skin as it dries out to provide with a soft, workable leather. 

This all sounds straight forward, but it can be very cumbersome working with a hide.  They are incredibly heavy and unwieldy, not to mention smelly and somewhat gross to begin with.  Lambie's hide went well up until the point of breaking down the connective tissue in the skin while it dries.  We set the hide out thinking that it would take several days to dry, but it dried too quickly and left us with a stiffer leather than we wanted. 

Undaunted by the less than perfect tanning of the Lambie hide, she now covers one of the chairs in our computer room and is fantastically comfortable and warm. And when I threw my back out some time back, she pillowed the hard floor I slept on and made it far more tolerable .  Somehow the hide has still retained the name "Lambie" so, rather than saying, "hey, go grab the sheep skin rug to lay on", it is simply still, "Go get Lambie" as though the soul and spirit of the animal is somehow infused into their skin.  I am not actually sure what to make of this connection and can't decide if this relationship to a formerly living creature is healthy or not.  While I have been pondering this a bit longer, we have started on Harold's hide.

Harold was another castoff creature.  A poor doing calf from the farm down the road.  He was apparently three weeks old at the time we got him but he didn't weigh more than 25 pounds.  Probably premature or lacking in some important genetic component that stunted his development significantly, Harold spent the first three months of his life just learning how to eat.  Bottle feedings were hopeless, he never did figure out a bucket, and it would take him an hour to eat a small amount of grain.  Green grass saved us once again and slowly he figured out his natural food and took to it with relish. That's not to say he ever really grew much.  By five months old, when most of his contemporaries were several hundreds of pounds, he topped out at 124 pounds.  By his first year, when he should have been about the size of our two year old dairy cow, he was half her size.

Cute and fuzzy, but not entirely all there, his small stature would sometimes make him look as though his internal organs were going to pop out of his small skeletal frame.  By eighteen months, when it became apparent that he was no longer growing any bigger, only wider, the decision had to be made.

Pasture is always at a premium around here, as is hay in the winter.  The options were to send him to market before winter hit, or in the spring…..given the hay situation, the answer was made for us.

Market day is always a sad day around here, and this year was no different except it was also my birthday.  We had decided just that morning to go ahead and get the hide back so we could tan it, and it only dawned on me later that this meant I was likely going to spend some part of my birthday scraping muscle and connective tissue off a newly skinned hide from an animal that I had loved and reared. Some people go out to party…..others flesh hides.

Repairing small holes

Acid bath soak

I could describe the entire process, but I would do a poor job of it at best because the actual process is long, involved, and usually split between Keith and I, with Keith doing the lion's share of the heavy work.  There are many good references available and websites from which to get the tanning chemicals needed, such as Van Dykes.  Having re-read these instructions myself just now, I chuckled reading the last section about the breaking stage on cattle and buffalo hides where it says, "Good Luck! This will be a difficult process."….they aren't kidding.

One thing is abundantly clear when working a hide, Native American women were incredibly strong! Much of the scraping, tanning, and breaking of hides was up to them and this is a process that takes days of hard, back breaking labor….and they were working with buffalo hides to boot! As someone who has spent several hours in the last two weeks working a hide in one fashion or another, I will attest that there are muscles in my arms, shoulders and back that I didn't know were even there, and I have blisters in places on my fingers that I didn't even know could blister.

Stretching the hide

However, as taxing as this job can be, it is also very methodical and mesmerizing.  I will be out in the shop listening to the radio while slowly scraping or breaking the hide and the whole circle of Harold's life will play itself out in my head and there is a quiet sort of thankfulness that emerges when I think of how we will have a part of him around to use and enjoy.  It's difficult to put in words really, without coming across as a total freak, but the hide speaks to a person when you take the time to listen, just like the earth does when you are busy growing food, or the trees do when you walk among them.  There is just a simple expression of wonder and infinite mystery that surrounds anything in nature, whether it is animal, vegetable, or mineral and when it is held in respect and deference for its small part of the whole,  it transforms an odious, back breaking task into a transcendent celebration of all of life.

My guess is that our cow hide will continue to be known as "Harold" regardless of where he ends up residing in my house…. and I am completely all right with that.