(no subject)
Apr. 5th, 2013 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickMore progress on the beaver disassembly project. There are pictures this time because I saw some interesting things that were worth getting the camera slightly gunked up with beaver ick.
For today's beaver playdate, I started with four beaver legs (not attached to beaver trunk) and a beaver head (attached to beaver trunk) because I'd gotten cold last time and didn't manage to separate head from trunk before succumbing to stiff, numb phalanges. (That's a science word meaning fingers/toes. Beavers, as we will see, also have phalanges.) There was also still some recalcitrant meat to clean off the carcass and the feet all had fur on them. I have here a picture of what things looked like before I started on the previous beaver playdate because I could do that without getting ick on the camera. Here's what I had before I started last time...
Note that most of the meaty hunks that are easy to remove are gone. Here, legs and head are still attached. (Last time I took off the legs before I was done, but there is no picture illustrating that step. Just use your imagination.)
I should note at this juncture that I hate flickr with a passion and I cannot find an image hosting site that does not suck as much or more than them in more ways than a variable speed vacuum cleaner. I do not want to "share albums or events". I want to illustrate blog posts, damn it. I want to do MY OWN DAMN RESIZING. I want to DIRECT FUCKING LINK TO MY OWN DAMNED IMAGES without "linking back to your stupid site". I want an ftp-like uploading utility. MY GOD, WHY IS THIS SO DIFFICULT TO FIND?
Anyway. Most recent beaver playdate was much warmer, about 55 degrees F as opposed to the 32 F that I suffered through during the previous beaver playdate. (If I were really being science-y we would refer to either Celcius or Kelvin. I am honestly only faking the science-y content.) So I got a lot more fiddly and time consuming stuff done today.
Item the first was to skin the fur and... foot pads off of the beaver feet. The real skinner only takes the pelt from the main part of the beaver and does not skin out the feet. You can see this on the above image. The lower parts of the legs were still fur and skin covered when I got the beaver carcass back from the skinner. Since skin and fur is pretty tough stuff and I figured it might impede the meat removal process at the "eaten by bugs" part, I figured I would skin out the feet in the warmer weather today.
Item the second was to finish removing the skull from the spine because I didn't get that done last time and felt my failure defined me as a person. No damn aquatic rodent is going to defeat me with its anatomy.
And Item the third was more removal of meat from the skeleton. I'd mentioned that the 'big easy' pieces had been removed by the skinner. I took out the guts in the first beaver playdate and then last time I jointed the legs and took off more meat. The meat pieces are getting smaller and harder to remove so returns are diminishing. On the other hand, I'm getting better at removing the meat pieces as things go onward.
How'd I make out? Well, I got two feet mostly-skinned, a front and a back. It's kind of a fiddly and tedious process, when you're a n00b and the beaver foot kind of moves around on you. I learned that beaver front feet are not obviously webbed and they're quite a bit daintier than beaver back feet. (Cats and dogs have relatively similar-sized front and back feet but rabbits and squirrels have different-sized front and back feet.) Here's a foot-comparison picture because it was easy to stage a 'compare the foot sizes' shot once the legs were not attached to the beaver anymore.
Beaver back feet are quite obviously and seriously webbed, to the point where they almost make a circle if the toes are splayed out. I took a picture -- not kidding about the webbing. The sole of the beaver foot is also kind of leathery/rubbery and thick. It is not real easy to skin out. And the "arch" of the foot is a mess of tendony/ligamenty bits.
In skinning (and recall, I had never actually skinned anything prior to this project), the general idea is to cut the fascia (kind of clear/white connective tissue stuff) that exists between the muscle bundles and the skin, so that the skin, which is very tough and hard to cut, peels back away from the muscle bundles and stuff. Trying to "cut the skin off the meat" is not really how it's done at all. You're sort of cutting "between the skin and the meat" so that both skin and meat come off in relatively clean and unbloodied pieces. (The fascia does not have blood vessels in it. If you do a good job skinning, it's not terribly bloody or messy.)
The feet of a beaver are kind of tricky and hard, but I did the best I could. Here's what I was left with on the back foot...
Despite looking like a badly-proportioned human hand, and thus kind of creepy, this is not bloody or overly gross or meaty. Note that the structure is still pretty intact/clean and not looking all dog-chewed. I'd like to see if I could do a nice job taking this foot apart the rest of the way so that more structure fun stuff will be illustrated going forward. If you go in there just hacking shit up, you can't see how any of it works and it's (a) messier and (b) a hell of a lot less interesting. I can kind of see the appeal of dissection, here...
When you pay attention to the divisions of a thing, you can do a much nicer job. Here, for example, is the inside of the ribcage of the beaver -- note how cleanly and nicely the innards (lungs, heart, guts, etc.) came out, leaving kind of a cathedral of protective space for one's soft bits. The ribcage of a beaver is highly mobile, flexes and moves accordian-like on either side. I do not have any experience with live beavers, but the dead ones are pretty flexible. The cathedral-like sprung space of the beaver chest cavity is absolutely fascinating.
I've been talking a bit about fascia, here, today. Near as I can tell, the point of the stuff is to keep things in their appropriate area -- keeps the guts to the guts, keeps each muscle bundle by itself, divides the muscles from the skin, etc. Each muscle, each teeny little bundle of muscle, is enclosed in its own fascia casing. Unfortunately, this is not real easy to see once someone starts hacking away at the beaver. A shitty dissection job kind of obliterates a lot of the observable details. I am just that sort of shitty dissector, too. However, I did manage to take a nicely-illustrative picture of muscle-in-fascia sheath thing. You can see where the surface of this particular muscle was accidentally punctured by an unskilled hack, but mostly the thing is intact and illustrative. You can also see, kinda, that muscles are indeed made up of fibers bundled together.
I managed to remove the head of the beaver from its body. Turns out I just needed some more time to poke around and cleanly divide the stuff between vertebrae. That was pretty much a non-drama effort today.
I also made some good headway on meat removal. One of the remaining 'needs to be worked on' meat areas of the beaver is along the spine of the beaver, particularly on the back half of him. The spinal processes (sticky-outy bits on the vertebrae) form hollows, sorta, where long ropy bits of muscle lurk. These are not the "pork loin" or "filet mignon" muscles -- they're much closer to the bone. The loins are pretty easy to remove and (if you have a reasonably-lean friend handy to help you with this) can be palpated readily on either side of a human spine, between the hip girdle and the ribcage. The beaver skinner guy took the beaver loins off before I ever got the beaver carcass. At any rate, these long ropy bits of muscle are absolutely loaded with tendons. Like, metric tons of tendons, especially as you work your way back to where the tail of the beaver attaches to the rest of the beaver. When I was removing pieces of beaver meat, this was particularly obvious and so I took a picture.
And finally, last time I mentioned that beavers had absolutely massive cheek/jaw muscles. I took a picture from the ventral side of the beaver (that'd be from "underneath his chinny-chin-chin" for the non-science crowd). My thumb is kind of on the beaver's throat. His teeth are out to the right, and his bulgingly-huge cheek muscle is right above my yellow-gloved thumb. I realize you cannot really see that the head is not attached to torso any longer, but it truly is not. I promise. :)
For today's beaver playdate, I started with four beaver legs (not attached to beaver trunk) and a beaver head (attached to beaver trunk) because I'd gotten cold last time and didn't manage to separate head from trunk before succumbing to stiff, numb phalanges. (That's a science word meaning fingers/toes. Beavers, as we will see, also have phalanges.) There was also still some recalcitrant meat to clean off the carcass and the feet all had fur on them. I have here a picture of what things looked like before I started on the previous beaver playdate because I could do that without getting ick on the camera. Here's what I had before I started last time...
Note that most of the meaty hunks that are easy to remove are gone. Here, legs and head are still attached. (Last time I took off the legs before I was done, but there is no picture illustrating that step. Just use your imagination.)
I should note at this juncture that I hate flickr with a passion and I cannot find an image hosting site that does not suck as much or more than them in more ways than a variable speed vacuum cleaner. I do not want to "share albums or events". I want to illustrate blog posts, damn it. I want to do MY OWN DAMN RESIZING. I want to DIRECT FUCKING LINK TO MY OWN DAMNED IMAGES without "linking back to your stupid site". I want an ftp-like uploading utility. MY GOD, WHY IS THIS SO DIFFICULT TO FIND?
Anyway. Most recent beaver playdate was much warmer, about 55 degrees F as opposed to the 32 F that I suffered through during the previous beaver playdate. (If I were really being science-y we would refer to either Celcius or Kelvin. I am honestly only faking the science-y content.) So I got a lot more fiddly and time consuming stuff done today.
Item the first was to skin the fur and... foot pads off of the beaver feet. The real skinner only takes the pelt from the main part of the beaver and does not skin out the feet. You can see this on the above image. The lower parts of the legs were still fur and skin covered when I got the beaver carcass back from the skinner. Since skin and fur is pretty tough stuff and I figured it might impede the meat removal process at the "eaten by bugs" part, I figured I would skin out the feet in the warmer weather today.
Item the second was to finish removing the skull from the spine because I didn't get that done last time and felt my failure defined me as a person. No damn aquatic rodent is going to defeat me with its anatomy.
And Item the third was more removal of meat from the skeleton. I'd mentioned that the 'big easy' pieces had been removed by the skinner. I took out the guts in the first beaver playdate and then last time I jointed the legs and took off more meat. The meat pieces are getting smaller and harder to remove so returns are diminishing. On the other hand, I'm getting better at removing the meat pieces as things go onward.
How'd I make out? Well, I got two feet mostly-skinned, a front and a back. It's kind of a fiddly and tedious process, when you're a n00b and the beaver foot kind of moves around on you. I learned that beaver front feet are not obviously webbed and they're quite a bit daintier than beaver back feet. (Cats and dogs have relatively similar-sized front and back feet but rabbits and squirrels have different-sized front and back feet.) Here's a foot-comparison picture because it was easy to stage a 'compare the foot sizes' shot once the legs were not attached to the beaver anymore.
Beaver back feet are quite obviously and seriously webbed, to the point where they almost make a circle if the toes are splayed out. I took a picture -- not kidding about the webbing. The sole of the beaver foot is also kind of leathery/rubbery and thick. It is not real easy to skin out. And the "arch" of the foot is a mess of tendony/ligamenty bits.
In skinning (and recall, I had never actually skinned anything prior to this project), the general idea is to cut the fascia (kind of clear/white connective tissue stuff) that exists between the muscle bundles and the skin, so that the skin, which is very tough and hard to cut, peels back away from the muscle bundles and stuff. Trying to "cut the skin off the meat" is not really how it's done at all. You're sort of cutting "between the skin and the meat" so that both skin and meat come off in relatively clean and unbloodied pieces. (The fascia does not have blood vessels in it. If you do a good job skinning, it's not terribly bloody or messy.)
The feet of a beaver are kind of tricky and hard, but I did the best I could. Here's what I was left with on the back foot...
Despite looking like a badly-proportioned human hand, and thus kind of creepy, this is not bloody or overly gross or meaty. Note that the structure is still pretty intact/clean and not looking all dog-chewed. I'd like to see if I could do a nice job taking this foot apart the rest of the way so that more structure fun stuff will be illustrated going forward. If you go in there just hacking shit up, you can't see how any of it works and it's (a) messier and (b) a hell of a lot less interesting. I can kind of see the appeal of dissection, here...
When you pay attention to the divisions of a thing, you can do a much nicer job. Here, for example, is the inside of the ribcage of the beaver -- note how cleanly and nicely the innards (lungs, heart, guts, etc.) came out, leaving kind of a cathedral of protective space for one's soft bits. The ribcage of a beaver is highly mobile, flexes and moves accordian-like on either side. I do not have any experience with live beavers, but the dead ones are pretty flexible. The cathedral-like sprung space of the beaver chest cavity is absolutely fascinating.
I've been talking a bit about fascia, here, today. Near as I can tell, the point of the stuff is to keep things in their appropriate area -- keeps the guts to the guts, keeps each muscle bundle by itself, divides the muscles from the skin, etc. Each muscle, each teeny little bundle of muscle, is enclosed in its own fascia casing. Unfortunately, this is not real easy to see once someone starts hacking away at the beaver. A shitty dissection job kind of obliterates a lot of the observable details. I am just that sort of shitty dissector, too. However, I did manage to take a nicely-illustrative picture of muscle-in-fascia sheath thing. You can see where the surface of this particular muscle was accidentally punctured by an unskilled hack, but mostly the thing is intact and illustrative. You can also see, kinda, that muscles are indeed made up of fibers bundled together.
I managed to remove the head of the beaver from its body. Turns out I just needed some more time to poke around and cleanly divide the stuff between vertebrae. That was pretty much a non-drama effort today.
I also made some good headway on meat removal. One of the remaining 'needs to be worked on' meat areas of the beaver is along the spine of the beaver, particularly on the back half of him. The spinal processes (sticky-outy bits on the vertebrae) form hollows, sorta, where long ropy bits of muscle lurk. These are not the "pork loin" or "filet mignon" muscles -- they're much closer to the bone. The loins are pretty easy to remove and (if you have a reasonably-lean friend handy to help you with this) can be palpated readily on either side of a human spine, between the hip girdle and the ribcage. The beaver skinner guy took the beaver loins off before I ever got the beaver carcass. At any rate, these long ropy bits of muscle are absolutely loaded with tendons. Like, metric tons of tendons, especially as you work your way back to where the tail of the beaver attaches to the rest of the beaver. When I was removing pieces of beaver meat, this was particularly obvious and so I took a picture.
And finally, last time I mentioned that beavers had absolutely massive cheek/jaw muscles. I took a picture from the ventral side of the beaver (that'd be from "underneath his chinny-chin-chin" for the non-science crowd). My thumb is kind of on the beaver's throat. His teeth are out to the right, and his bulgingly-huge cheek muscle is right above my yellow-gloved thumb. I realize you cannot really see that the head is not attached to torso any longer, but it truly is not. I promise. :)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-04-07 02:15 am (UTC)But, said videos are informative. And careful. Done by people who know what they're doing, with happy and educational commentary, should you have some desire to learn about the way things are put together. (here's (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVcl2Lq0NQI) an example of what I'm talking about.) Man, I should have watched some of these first. They're kind of neat. If you are squicked by red-n-bloody critter parts, you might be a lot more comfortable watching someone working with preserved lab-sample critters. They're nowhere near as red as what I've got.
(To be fair, the colors inside a real unpreserved critter are kind of pretty if you don't mind a reddish/purplish color scheme.)