I’ve said it before…Trapping is more than just setting traps and collecting the money.  After the trapping season ends, there is usually a ton of things that needs to be done to make sure the traps, equipment and shed are in working order for next year.  This year I told Bob I would take care of the stretchers and clean them up a bit.  You see the hooks at the bottom of the stretchers get clogged up with parts from the animals and after a few years it gets really hard to get the teeth to bite into the hides.  This year he cussed a ton about the stretchers.  So, since he handles the traps, I took on the stretchers.

I started by pulling all the stretchers out of the skinning shed and laying them out by the BBQ cooker…my heat source.

We have over 200 stretchers and I needed to clean each and every one of them.  Each is in its own way needing a cleaning.  I like to use my BBQ because it’s convenient and the propane bottle is nearly full.  I pull out the grills and the covers over the flame tubes and place an old grill from another BBQ I had years ago that spans two of the three burners and give my big pan a place to rest while it heats up.

I filled my big pan to about 3/4ths full and started it to heating.  In the meantime I counted out 25 stretchers and placed them into the pan of heating water.  If I would have thought about it a bit, I think I would have added some liquid dish soap to the water, but I didn’t and it really didn’t make that much of a difference.  You might want to add some however.

It’s been my experience that the stretchers need to boil about 15 minutes in order for the “gunk” to come off.  Especially if you have stretchers that have never been cleaned before…and we had some of those this time.

What do you need to clean the stretchers?  A heat source, a large pan deep enough to cover about 1/3 rd the the length of the stretchers, water, a wire brush and perhaps a rag.  The objective is to get the hooks on the stretchers clean, which will allow them to grab onto the flesh of the raw hide and stretch it.

So, in the first picture you saw the yucky stuff I needed to clean off of the stretchers, here it is again:

YUK!

So into the pot they go for about 15 minutes:

They boil away and make a really nasty smelling soup.  I suppose if you were really hungry you could eat it, but not me…I’d rather die.

When adequately cooked, the yucky stuff looks sort of like this:  It’s soft and pliable and will come off easily with the wire brush.

A little elbow grease and a wire brush and it doesn’t take long for them to be nice and clean:

That is all there is to it.  It takes time to do, but next year when we are in the shed putting up furs, we will say…Sure is nice to have sharp fur hooks to stretch these here furs.

I cleaned them all and put them on the hangers in groups of 25.  One of the hangers only has 20 on it as we have 295 stretchers.  Just right for our small time operation.

Keep them babies clean and they will give you years and years of service!

Bears Butt

March 31, 2014

When an old guy like me is looking at the big picture, it is sure nice to see there are some young folks still liking to hang around and do things like I did in my younger days.  Here my 8 year old grandson Cody is learning how to skin a muskrat.  I think during the entire season he skinned about 5 and he did very well considering his mother didn’t like the idea of him playing with a sharp knife.  Well, mom, he could have cut himself, but he was very careful and managed to only cut on the muskrat….relax!  And even if he had of cut himself, he was well protected with the rubber gloves that were WAYYYY too big for his hands….I joke!

Anyway, here he is and has a lasting memory implanted in his brain that nobody can take away.  Thanks for the good job Cody!  Next year maybe you can come up and skin some more.

This carries on with a young man forever and even if he never picks up another muskrat, his bucket list now holds the fact that he skinned a few.  He was fun to watch and it was equally as fun to listen to his dad coax him through the tough parts.  There were no nicks in the hides and every one ended up with all their ears, clean eye holes and noses intact!  How can it get any better than that?

So, 733 rats went up in the shed this year and 733 rats went out the door last night.  The auction house now has them and from this point until after the auction in May, we wait.

I didn’t catch the young men’s names that accompanied the pick up man, Corry Hatch, but we met them at a pre-determined spot last night and loaded up all the furs.  I really didn’t think they were going to fit in the car, but they did.  Does this picture show a tradition that will be handed down to these two youngsters?  Time will tell, but they sure were there and very much a help in loading the furs.

Thanks Corry and Thanks Boys!  Drive safely!

Bears Butt

March 29, 2014

This picture is one that Reed took with his smart phone while we were grading our rats by size.  It becomes obvious it takes a lot of people to make short work of a project of this size.  Can you imagine being at the auction warehouse where they are dealing with hundreds of thousands of furs from all over the country.  Grading, sorting, inspecting and trying to keep them all organized by “ownership”….I’d like to go see that sometime.

Well, today is our day to take the furs to market.  We meet up with the pickup driver this evening and off they go.  I have sent him a text message making sure the meeting time is still on, but have not heard from him as yet…..

Speaking of “heard from”, Bob got a call yesterday while he was away and the person left him a message, the message went something like this:

“Bob, this is _____ (I won’t say his name), I think I can get you $9.75 for your rats!  Give me a call, Bye”!

What did I say?

Bears Butt

March 28, 2014

So, What’s a Bears Butt worth at auction?  Bag ‘im, Tag ‘im!

Boy what a day!  It took a whole lot longer to get things done than I expected today.  When you think about it, pull down the rats on the stretchers, take them over to the garage, pull down the hangers full of furs, take them to the garage, pull the furs out of the freezer, dump them….Easy huh?

Well, sure it’s easy, but it took a long, long time to do it.  I started at 10 a.m., Bob and Reed showed up around 11 a.m. and the rest is history…I got back into the house about 5 p.m.

So, it’s not an issue of pulling down the rats and taking them off the stretchers…after all we only had 175 of them…..

But the fun began when we moved them over to Bob’s garage and piled them all up…YEEEHAAAA!

And the pile grew and grew!

That pile is all the rats we caught this year.  It doesn’t look like much does it…but I’ll tell you it is a LOT to us who had to go out and catch them and then deal with them back at home…we discovered two more than we thought we had…733!!!!  That is always a good thing to find out and much better than finding out you miscounted by two less!  More is always better!

So, here we are with piles of rats sitting on the tarp.  Now it’s time to organize them by size….Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large, 2X Large, 3XLarge ect.

We use the ruler with the grades marked on them in order to do that.

In order to be “critical” of our measuring, we decided to measure the “belly” side of the fur and of course measure from the saddle to the nose.  A tie (or line measurement) went to the lower grade by length.  Here is a solid XL, no mistake about that one.  All the tough calls come from those that hit “on the line”, do you toss it in the bigger size or the smaller?….Hey!  What did I say?  A tie goes to the smaller pile!

We were very critical about our grading into size!

As we neared the end of the grading by size, Weasel broke away from his busy computer business in order to help.  A welcome addition, as Bob was beginning to interrupt and question how I was doing the measuring.  Yes, I was being critical, Yes, I was being partial, Yes, I was measuring the belly side and not the back…At least I was consistent!  What’s more is I wanted our count to reflect a tough grade, not an easy grade.  If I had wanted an easy grade I would have insisted that Bob grade them!

So, when we are all done we have several piles of rats, all sorted by size!

NOW, those are good looking piles of rats!  Guess which one has the most rats in it?…..Large of course!  Which has the smallest number of rats in it?  2X large…that’s to be expected!  What about the next smallest group?  In this case the “smalls”!

It sort of goes like your school days grades…a certain percentage of the students are over achievers, a certain percentage or under achievers, the majority are average and the rest sort of just fill in between the over guys and the under guys.  And so it is with our rats.  What about the counts by sorted sizes?

Let’s start with the Pile farthest to the left <– Those are the Smalls…18 of them!  Next to them is the 2X Large…8 of them!  Behind those two piles are the Mediums….84 strong!  Behind us are the Xtra Large…119 of them!  (Yeaaa) and the big pile is for the average size,  LARGE!  504!!!!  Add them bad boys up and you have a total of 733!  It’s no wonder we carry side arms out in the field when we are trapping!

So, I’m sure you are interested in the percentage of big, medium and small we have in our catch…here are the numbers!

Small 2.45%, Medium 11.46%,  Large 68.76%, X Large 16.23% and finally 2X Large 1.09% (2.45+11.46+68.76+16.23+1.09 = 99.99)

I have told you that without knowing how many, I was guessing that we had over 90% large plus…well, I was wrong…we have 86.08% that are Large or bigger!  My bad.  But to be so close…I pat myself on my back…OOOOOOO, that feels good!

So, next is the breakdown as to how many DAMAGED rats we have!  Damage is always a matter of who is looking at the hide.  A slightly broken skin for some is “bad damage” (“he” says that!)  Any mark at all is “BAD”!  (“He says that too”!)  And other graders look at the mark, the tear, the hole, the damage and consider where it is located, on the end, near the nose, near the tail, near the side, near the ear, near the edupus erangularis…where ever and will say…it’s a NO call…no damage or slight damage.

SO!  We decided to take the “He” side of things and grade our damage according to “him”…any mark was bad and any mark constituted a toss into the “damaged pile”!  And then once that was done, we went through and sorted that pile into what we called “Bad”  and “Slight”!  Oh how tough it was to remove ourselves from “his” way of thinking and into the reality of reality….NOT!

I would like to be a rat hide grader some day, but I am too old to get into that profession.  For now I’ll just have to be entertained by this method of having fun.  It’s going to be very interesting to see the results of this auction and how we graded and how they graded our hides.  It’s all so new, we can only speculate.

Speaking of speculating…”he” didn’t show up today.  Sorry…my bad…another expectancy of mine that did not come to fruition.

We began sorting the size piles noting any defect at all, and if we saw a tear, a rip, a mark, a nick, a “anything”, it went into a separate pile…no marks at all went into another separate pile, again keeping the sizes separated from the other piles.  Once that was done, we carefully went through and analyzed the marks, nicks, holes, tears etc., their placement withing the hide (front/back etc.), the size of the hole, tear, nick etc. and decided if it was a “bad” or a “slight” damage.  We leaned toward the “bad” side and came up with these numbers:

Small:  3 Slight/1 Bad:  Medium:  11 Slight/6 Bad:  Large: 93 Slight/45 Bad:  X Large: 17 Slight/12 Bad:  2XLarge : 1 Slight

When you toss the mathematics at these numbers you see there was a total of 25% damage factor in our mix…however, keep in mind we were VERY critical of our inspection and ANY mark was counted in the damage category.  A second look at all the “damage” yielded the numbers:  Bad = 64 and Slight = 125  (a total of 25%), but the breakdown yields Bad at 8% and Slight at 17%.  How the guys at the auction house grades them will be a different situation.  When you consider it the “run” time of year, a damage of 25% is very low…again we were very critical to count EVERY mark we saw on the hide regardless of where we saw it.

We feel VERY good about sending our hides off to auction and are looking forward to the end results!

When we were finished with our inspection and separating them by size and grading them via damage, we jumbled them all up and began to count them out for bagging.

We counted them out in piles of 10, and then bagged them 4 stacks of 10 each, across in the bottom of the bag,

staggering the noses of the rats and stacked them 5 high…200 to the bag!  Marked the tags accordingly and they are ready to ship them off!

When you think about it, the amount of time it takes to put your hides in the bags and make out the paperwork that goes with them, WHY would you ever NOT want to ship your hides to the auction????  Why have WE sold ours to the local buyer when it is SO EASY to ship them off????

I guess we still have something to learn about all of this, but right now we are questioning our past intelligence.

Bears Butt

March 26, 2014

A great day in store for us today…rat grading day!  The weather isn’t as nice as it was yesterday, but we can tuck ourselves inside a garage and stay dry and relatively warm.  The temp is supposed to be in the low 50’s, that’s better than low 40’s…gotta admit that!  Cut the wind and all is well.  Besides we will be busy sorting and bull crapping each other with our theories and such.

Yesterday I talked with another trapper who caught around 400 rats this Spring.  He was asking about the selling price of rats that I have heard was being sold and what I recommend he do with his rats.  My recommendation to him was to ask $10 straight through and to freeze them until next year if he didn’t get that amount.

He is OK with that as the money he gets from the rats he catches is just used as his slush fund to buy things outside the household budget and by stockpiling this years catch he would have twice as many to bargain with next year.  Again I cautioned him about the international political scene and the impacts that could have on the price paid for rats.  By that I mean, if the U.S. puts sanctions on Russia for whatever reason, then the Chinese will have to watch how and where they deal with the Russians as well.  And since the bulk of the finished fur products that China produces goes to Russia, that would directly impact the demand for furs the Chinese would want…thus buying price goes down.

Then again, the Chinese aren’t the only buyers of raw furs, the Greeks and others also buy them and perhaps with the Chinese out of the picture those smaller countries just might pick up the pace and buy the furs at a even higher price than the Chinese have been buying them…just not in the volume as the Chinese….It’s all speculation and nobody really knows how things are going to go.

HEY!  Are any of you restaurant owners is need of some Muskrat bodies?  I’ll even clean them before I sell them to you!  McDonalds?  Taco Bell?  Carls’ Jr.?  Wendys?  Ho Duk Mein?

Muskrat is much more rich in protein and assorted other nutrients than is cat….just sayin.

Return to Search Results Full Report (All Nutrients) Statistics Report Download (CSV) Print (PDF)

Nutrient values and weights are for edible portion

Nutrient	Unit	Value per 100 g	oz 85g	piece, cooked (yield from 1 lb raw meat, boneless) 313g
Proximates
Water	g	55.58	47.24	173.97
Energy	kcal	234	199	732
Protein	g	30.09	25.58	94.18
Total lipid (fat)	g	11.74	9.98	36.75
Carbohydrate, by difference	g	0.00	0.00	0.00
Fiber, total dietary	g	0.0	0.0	0.0
Minerals
Calcium, Ca	mg	36	31	113
Iron, Fe	mg	7.10	6.04	22.22
Magnesium, Mg	mg	26	22	81
Phosphorus, P	mg	271	230	848
Potassium, K	mg	320	272	1002
Sodium, Na	mg	95	81	297
Zinc, Zn	mg	2.27	1.93	7.11
Vitamins
Vitamin C, total ascorbic acid	mg	7.0	6.0	21.9
Thiamin	mg	0.080	0.068	0.250
Riboflavin	mg	0.710	0.603	2.222
Niacin	mg	7.190	6.111	22.505
Vitamin B-6	mg	0.470	0.399	1.471
Folate, DFE	µg	11	9	34
Vitamin B-12	µg	8.30	7.06	25.98
Vitamin A, RAE	µg	0	0	0
Vitamin A, IU	IU	0	0	0
Lipids
Cholesterol	mg	121	103	379

Sorry:  No data on “cat”…….

Bears Butt

March 26, 2014

Just an update about our rats.

The other day Bob was visited by a local fur buyer who was just wanting to make conversation.  To me it was a spying method on his part to make sure we had not sold our furs.  Yesterday he had another visit from the same guy, who wanted to see the furs hanging in the shed.  Bob always likes to show off the good work we do and so they visited the fur shed.  The comment made by the potential buyer was: “You didn’t catch many big ones did you”?

Oh boy.  I don’t know what Bob said at that time, but they eventually went back into Bob’s house, where the spreadsheet of who caught how many was sitting on his desk.  The buyer picked it up and inquired as to what it was…Bob told him and he studied it for awhile and then, like usual, changed the subject…the conversation went on and as it did, he calmly folded up the paper and stuck it in his pocket….Now folks this is the kind of guy we are dealing with.

Did he ask if he could have it?  Nope.  Just took it and Bob sat quietly and watched him do it.  That is all just fine and dandy, it helps me support where I have been coming from for years…I just don’t like dealing with this type of guy.  His head is all wrapped around one thing…himself!  He cares not how hard we work to get the furs we have and he just wants to offer us a token of what the furs are worth, knowing all the while he is going to make a killing when he sells them….No we did not catch many big rats this year…We caught a TON of BIG ONES!  Over 90% of the 731 are over 14 inches and 14 inches are considered Large.  And while that probably doesn’t mean much to an outsider, of the 90%, 90% of them are over 15 inches!  Which means the majority of our rats will grade out at Xtra Large or Bigger.  Tomorrow we are going to sort them out by size and do our own grading.  Those results will be posted up on here and then you can see (pictures) of this 90% I’m talking about.

So, he steals the paper, which by the way has nothing of importance to him, except maybe bragging to his co-horts and telling them how much he knows about our trapping success for this year.  I’m Ok with that…Ones reputation for “Things”, good or bad, always precede you in whatever you do.

And the story goes on:

About 8 last night Bob called me to inform me that “he” had called and given a bid on our rats…$9.30 something…I didn’t really pay much attention to the amount as I know what we are doing and it just reinforced what I have told Bob would happen as the crunch time nears for sending rats off to auction.

Bob told him that was not near enough to peak our interest and that he would have to offer over $10 or we would not even consider the bid.  “He scoffed”.

So, what do I expect now?  You know he is having a hard time securing furs, especially muskrats.  All of the trappers had a bad time catching them, the year was an odd one, with a late ice melt and an early run.  The catch rate for everyone except us, was maybe 1/2 to 2/3 rds what they normally catch.  So this buyer is having to pay a bit more than usual to get his “batch” up before he ships them off and our 700 plus count is really looking like a premium to him (this is all speculation on my part, but I know Greed when I see it).  My suspicion is telling me that today (Tuesday) he will visit again and make a higher offer…something in the $9.50 range and will promise that if he gets more than he expects, he will make up the difference to us after he gets his fur check.  EVERY trapper in this area has heard him say this and NONE of US have EVER seen him come back and give us more money…NONE!  So, does he think we will fall for that line again?  Come on! (Baby, you have such beautiful eyes..I have never seen such gorgeous eyes in my life!  I need to get closer to you…Oh Baby…Oh Baby…OHHHHH)

But, my speculation is not over….Bob will tell him again we want something over $10 and that we are going to be grading our furs ourselves tomorrow, which we have planned and “he” will invite himself down to watch…you watch and see…I’ll make sure I have a picture of “him” sitting there with his coffee cup, drooling over this large batch of $20 rats passing before his eyes, his left leg twitching as the day progress’.  And he will sit there and watch us grade these various piles of Xtra Large and Xtra Xtra large rats into smaller piles of damage…Big damage down to slightly damaged…as we want to make ourselves aware of how the auction house grades.  We will be very tough on our grading and “he” will be sitting there all the while wishing he had his hands on them…his mind will be racing.  When we are satisfied and ready to bag them up, he will make another offer in the $9.80 range and then spit and shuffle off when we tell him NO.

When he is gone, we will bag them up in official Ok-Doki NAFA bags, put our tags on them and put them away in a locked environment while they wait for our Friday rendezvous with the man who picks up fur for this auction.

My story is not finished:

Later in the evening of Wednesday, “he” will call Bob one last time and make an offer of $10, straight through for our rats.  Bob will tell him, “we will think about that” and let him sweat the night away at his home, hoping Bob will call him on Thursday morning.  After he has had some time drinking his coffee, he will then call Bob and ask about his decision on the $10…Bob will tell him NO!  But then, he will continue to bug Bob at least once more on Thursday, quite possibly with a higher bid, but not much higher and then again on Friday a couple of times.  He will most likely come to Bob’s on Friday with a personal visit…

Well, that’s my speculative take on it all!  Let’s see how things play out.  On the trap line I was fooled every day I tried to let you know how my expectancy was with the rats being caught and every time I was wrong…close a time or two, but never right on with my expectancy.  Am I expecting too much from this guy in this regard?  I think not, but we will see.

Bears Butt

March 25, 2014