Homestead Hunters

Tonight, Scotty shot a couple of squirrels, so I decided to talk about how we clean them. It was fun to do some squirrel cleaning now that we have processed our last deer for the season. It’s much easier and significantly less time-consuming! Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy processing deer, but that involves hours of work compared to the minutes it takes to process a squirrel.

We started chopping off the paws. Then with a sharp small blade, you start at one of the hind legs and carefully puncture the skin. If you get nick the meat its ok but try to stay just under the skin, carefully we make our way up the inside of the leg and to the center of the body and repeat this process on all four limbs.

Then we carefully cut a straight line from the bottom of the squirrel up to it’s neck. Using your hands, you work the skin off of the body of the squirrel, careful to not remove the meat of the squirrel with the skin. You might have to use you knife to help separate the skins membrane.

When you get to the neck, it’s time to cut the head off. After the head is cut, it becomes much easier to deglove the skin from the entire back and down the tail. We were not using the hide, so we only degloved the base of the tail and cut it off. If you plan on keeping the tail—something I would like to blog about at another time—you would need to continue the degloving process to ensure that the tailbone is not left in.

After skinning the squirrel, it should look like this!

As you can see, our work here is not done! It looks great, except we have a multitude of organs inside that we do not want. We remove them and clean the cavity. In order to remove them, we start by carefully cutting a straight line down the Linea Alba. This is the fancy technical term for the strong fibrous midline structure of the anterior abdominal wall. We start from the Xiphoid (bottom of the sternum) and go straight down to the center of the pelvis.

In this picture, I had Scotty chop up through the sternum as well so I could show the anatomy better. You can do this as well if you like, but it’s technically an unnecessary step due to the fact that you can remove the organs just fine without cutting up through. At this point you can use your fingers and gently scoop out the insides and discard them.

But wait! There’s more!

We aren’t quite done yet. If you notice in the picture above, there is some genital anatomy. Now is when we cut down through that area to make sure we get all of that out. The reason we don’t just chop through that area at the same time is because then you run the risk of opening it up inside the cavity. What I mean is if you chop through while everything is still inside then the risk is higher that you are going to make a mess of the gut and feces that is in there. Taking your time is the way to go, especially if this is your first time or don’t clean many squirrels.

Once everything is removed and washed out, it’s either time to quarter or leave whole. We left them whole because I plan on making a crockpot meal with these. Because it’s not happening this week, we vacuum sealed them up and put them in our game freezer.

Let me know what you think! Feel free to ask any questions!