vultureculturecoyote:

Uhhhh i’m really bad at explaining things lmao. What I mean is you don’t open the abdominal cavity or whatever. 

Its not just skin and then organs directly underneath. There is a thick layer of muscle directly under the skin that just looks like raw meat. When skinning something you don’t go through that muscle layer. Or at least you try not to, it can sometimes happen if you are inexperienced. 

Here I tried to illustrate what I mean. 

If you also wanted to butcher the animal for meat you would have to cut through the muscle layer and remove the organs. That’s a normal part of the butchering process. But if you just want the skin for taxidermy you don’t have to. I don’t hunt and most of my animals come from natural death or whatever so I don’t eat the meat, wouldn’t be safe. I just put things I don’t use back out in the woods for the scavengers and get the bones later. 

When you skin an animal, you end up with an intact animal skin on one side and the naked animal body on the other. It looks just like the animal before, except that it’s all muscle, like an anatomy class model. The organs are contained inside a bag in the guts, which has muscle around it. It’s stinky and messy if you cut into the gut bag, so you try not to do that. 

Also, skin isn’t very strongly attached, it’s held on by membranes and can be pretty easily peeled away from most small animals. There’s minimal cutting on, say, a m.ouse, you just have to cut through the skin down the belly and then peel the skin off. For bigger animals like a d.eer, you have to keep cutting membranes as you peel the skin off.