coyote skinning
The other thing that you need to do if you are going to try to sell the hide and want to get a decent amount of money out of it, or even if you just want to keep it nice, how we always skinned them was to hang them by their hind legs. Cut a circle around their hind legs about 6 inches up, then make an incission in a straight line from the circles you cut down to their *******. Then you use your skinning knife and just pull and cut the skin away from the meat turning the pelt inside out as you go, when you get to the front legs, skin them down about 6 inches. (you can cut the front legs off if you want to make it easier to get the hyde off. Leave the hyde turned inside out and put it over a board to "stretch it out" and use a spoon to scrape the excess fat off of the back of the hide and let it dry while it "stretches" If you find a trapping supply book, you can find the boards that are specially designed for this, they are pointed at the end so you can put the nose over the tip and "tack" it in place, there is a split down the center of the board so you can stretch out the hyde and lock it in place with a wing nut. If you are keeping it you can "tan" the hyde and that is a whole other thread, but basically you do everything mentioned above and then after drying you soak the hyde in a tanning solution for a period of time. Once it is
tanned the back side of the hyde becomes more like a piece of leather....soft and maleable, if not tanned when they dry it becomes kind of brittle and stiff. Good luck to you!!!!
Here are a few pics of a stretcher I found on line, They sell them pretty cheap. I dont know how many hundred coyotes my brother and I skinned and prepped when I was a kid...my dad ran a trapline in the Blackhills in SouthDakota and we skinned a bunch! The fur buyer would come to town once a month, most of them we just skinned and removed the fat and dryed and sold them that way, that would have been in the 80's and they were selling for $30-$40 ea. then. I have no idea what they would sell for now. I know that durring the winter months when the pelts were thicker they paid more...during the summer we didn't even run the trapline. The other thing the fur buyer liked was the lighter the color the more desirable , the orange-ish ones were worth less. We kept a couple that were damn near albino...very light colored with just a little dark on their backs...those ones we tanned and my step dad still has them hanging on the wall of his log house in Montana...back then he was offered $120 ea for the pelts and turned them down just because they were such nice specimens!
