Day 1- skinning, gutting, boiling

Today we got to work on our rabbit. On Allison's front lawn. A little bit sketchy, but the sun was so nice it only made sense. Where to start? If you've never taken an animal apart before, starting is the hardest part! We had to cover the face in order to finally make that first cut.

Once we got going on it, it wasn't quite as bad as we thought. Nowhere near as easy as the internet made it sound, but some sections of skin/fur peeled off quite nicely. I compared this to peeling an orange.

We had to be really careful on the feet. There are so many tiny bones, and we eventually just had to leave some fur on them for the time being. Here are the ears and a part of the eyeball. Some parts were more difficult to cut out than others, physically and emotionally! The rest of the eye was quite jelly-like, and made an oozing mess all over the place.



Then we opened it up to reveal all the guts. Some stuff we tried to identify, others was just a mess. We had been warned not to break the intestines because they would be filled with poo and it would stink. However, we opened them right away but it wasn't too bad, it was still partially frozen. Slightly unconventional, but it worked. So we had a nice pile of guts and fecal matter. Crazy how much was inside that rabbit.

Then with as much off of the rabbit as possible, it was time to boil it the first time. Up to this point took about two hours. The grossest part complete!



After boiling it for about an hour and a half we took it out and removed as much meat as we could. By now it did not feel as much like a rabbit or a nasty dead animal, it was just some cooked meat and bones. No eating this meat though!

So here is what we had left at the end of day 1. We felt like we had accomplished a decent amount in the hours we had, and the worst is behind us. In terms of grossness that it; it's obvious that this project is a huge undertaking, and that many more hours will be needed to carefully take it apart, clean all the bones, and glue them back together. Next week we will continue to work!