Flaying

Charpter 1: HAND FLAYING Charpter 2: MACHINE FLAYING In some cases skins are part of the food chain, and people actually eat hides or skins. In Indonesia people eat pre-processed hides as krupuk. In Ghana people eat dried camel hides and in Mexico fried pork skin is a local delicacy. In general however they are recovered from the slaughtered animal for purposes other than food. After the animal is killed the first operation is to remove the hide or skin. This is called hot flaying, because the carcass is still warm. This has both practical and hygienic reasons, even if in the USA many carcasses are left unskinned when they have to travel over large distances in refrigerated railway wagons to places where the value of the meat is higher than in other places. Removal of the hide in this case is called cold flaying. Cold flaying requires more force and normally damages the hide or skin, or at best interferes with the fibre structure of the hides. Flaying should be done as well as possible. Holes or deep cuts from flaying knifes reduce the value of a hide or skin, hence in order to obtain the highest possible value for a hide or a skin, the flaying should be done with care. HAND FLAYING Before mechanisation all flaying was done by hand. The removal of the hide or skin is an operation that is ruled in many areas by tradition. In many countries small skins are pulled by hand from a hanging carcass, resulting in a skin that presents itself as a sort of tube, which you can compare to a coverall. Pulling a skin by hand produces a rather good quality flay. With large animals or small animals (calf) whose skin is particularly firmly attached to the meat this sort of flaying is not possible, and one has to resort to flaying with the assistance of a knife. The knife is both a useful and a dangerous tool. If a flayer gives little attention to what he is doing, he can easily cause damage to the hide or skin by making cuts or even holes. Each bad cut and each hole reduce the value of a hide. Hides and skins with more than 10 deep cuts and/or holes fetch such a low price, if there is a demand at all, that it becomes economically unfeasible to collect such material, and it becomes then a total loss.