Quality Of Hides

[Tucker6591]

I'm still pretty new to rawhide braiding and looking for as much information as I can before I really dive head first. So here's my question.

How would you rank the quality of hides of different animals, and why?

[oltoot]

Well, it depends. You can consider absolutes like fat is bad and the best rawhide comes from a cow that starved to death, but most of us are faced with the question to take a hide or not with little time grade the opportunity.

Now then, whenever an animal with its hide intact makes itself available?? Now then, all animal hides are made up of layers, outside in, splitting weakens the hide so if you have access to a calf skin or goat skin and most of the animal's entire hide will yield the thickness of string you desire, that will be better than a grown animal split down to that thin.

In terms of tough strong, bears and dogs win the top but are not commonly available, Then comes horses, actually horse's bellys. To get the best rawhide, the horse should be skinned from the top down so that the belly leather is in one piece instead of two and cow rawhide ends up what most of us are offered.

Well then you say most rawhide that is used is marginal, at best and raising the bar significantly involves cultural norms and all sorts of tough nuts to crack and you would be right but we labor on at the very tail end of the supply chain and do the best we can which can be pretty good, thank goodness even poor rawhide is pretty good stuff when matched with a compatible use.

[bucksnort]

Oltoot, I'm almost scared to ask how you know that dog makes good rawhide. Come to think of it my neighbor has a few I wouldn't mind skinning. Tucker6591, I only work with cow hide & oltoot covered that nicely. I have had a couple of really nice hides from 500-600 lb. animals. I don't use much calf hide as I seldom go down to less than 1/16 thick, but it is excellent for thinner strings. Goat, horse & roo are all popular. I have tried deer & found it to be too stretchy. Try any thing you can get your hands on, your far enough from me that I won't have to worry about my dogs. Buck

[oltoot]

The bear hide is personal experience, the dog somebody gave me at first and tales from Alaska. I must confess that I had a little brush with the heebie jeebies when I learned the hide was a whole dog hide and not a piece of another bear but the results of the hoops I put it through can not be ignored, BTW, I learned that there is a very small black market in 'somebody else's' dog hide to make jesses and a few other items for falconers. It reminded me a little of us kids getting super cute kids to raise and when the time came to butcher them a frantic musical chairs kind of thing emerged where you 'sold' your little pal to some one else and in turn bought somebody elses to butcher. A man with a family pet pig tried to initiate a similar mechanism but too much money or value was involved and he was faced with having to hire someone to leave with a pig and return with packages.

Edited August 13, 2014 by oltoot