What to do with coon tallow?

[buspete]

I got a raccoon that had been massacring chickens. I assume he is one of many, but I got one of them in a cage trap.

He weighed 12 lb, minus the skin and guts I got 7.5 lb of meat (counting the head, lots of jowl-meat there). There is a whole lot of fat and tallow.

Not wanting it to go to waste, I was going to render it down. What are some uss for coon tallow? Is it good for dressing leather?

[Alice In TX/MO]

Bug repellent.

[gone-a-milkin]

and people repellent.

[Paquebot]

Not much that you can do with so little but it is widely used in cosmetics cosmetics and skin conditioners. Although most wild furs are sold scraped and dried, coon hides are accepted as is with the fat still on. That because of the commercial market for it in large quantities. We've never used it for cooking but I had a great-aunt who insisted that it was better for baking than lard. Other uses would be whatever bear fat would be used for as that is similar.

Martin

[MELOC]

i never heard that about coon hides. my dad used to hunt quite a bit and i remember him spending quite a bit of time scraping coon hides.

i used to have a pdf of the saponification values of many odd fats. i am not sure if raccoon was on there or not. if you knew the value, you could make soap!

[Paquebot]

Originally Posted by MELOC

i never heard that about coon hides. my dad used to hunt quite a bit and i remember him spending quite a bit of time scraping coon hides.

It has been a few years since I sold any hides but I note that my buyer, Groenewold Fur & Wool Co., still wants the coon as green hides. www.gfwco.com/

i used to have a pdf of the saponification values of many odd fats. i am not sure if raccoon was on there or not. if you knew the value, you could make soap!

Should make a decent beauty soap. Hands never chapped or cracked when having a coon or two to skin every other night.

Martin

[RoseGarden]

I'm always afraid a coon will have rabies, so I never even touch them after I 'dispatch' them with a .22 I usually pick the corpse up by the tail with a pair of pliers or with a glove on.

I'm afraid of coons with rabies because once when we first moved to my old place, we were standing on the back porch one day (this was back in '88) and a coon came tearing across the yard toward the house, from the woods, going full tilt, and it just looked strange to us to see a coon running this way in the daytime. We wisely stepped inside and closed the door and that coon slammed headlong into the storm door and brained itself. DH-of-that-time got a gun and dispatched it and picked it up by the tail with pliers and buried it deep, and I poured bleach on the porch where the blood was. Talked to a friend of dh-at-that-time who was a game warden and he said it was likely rabid. Ever since I shoot coons that I see around the place because they are chicken killers, they will rummage through the garbage, and they can be rabid.

[buspete]

Everyone is paranoid about raccoon rabies. Just being a raccoon doesn't automatically mean it is suspect. A coon who is running around the yard in broad daylight, snarling would be, but a thief-in-the-night chicken killer that managed to outsmart the pit bull for two weeks is obviously not operating with an impaired mind.

All sorts of animals get rabies. One of the cases in NH was a horse! Rabies is killed by cooking the meat. It does not live long outside of the host body, so drying the hide will kill it.

Counting the fat that I trimmed off of the carcass and the fat that was under the skin, there is a good pound and a half to render down and experiment with.

The meat is going to get simmered off of the bones and turned into stew. I'll tan the hide, and try to salvage the skull (gotta glue it back together) to put on the curio shelf with my other skulls. The customers that come into my shop get a kick out of the skulls; there is a young winter-killed deer, a pig, a mink and a mouse.

[MullersLaneFarm]

NaOH SAP value for racoon falls between .135 - .140

Render at a low heat. Plug the amount of racoon oil into space for 'lard' and you should be fine.

[MELOC]

Originally Posted by Paquebot

It has been a few years since I sold any hides but I note that my buyer, Groenewold Fur & Wool Co., still wants the coon as green hides. www.gfwco.com/


Should make a decent beauty soap. Hands never chapped or cracked when having a coon or two to skin every other night.
Martin

lol, i remember dad saying the same thing.

It's an aphrodisiac.

[RoseGarden]

I still won't touch them. Nasty things.

[Paquebot]

Rabies in particular species of animals varies greatly, even within close proximity. I would never ever expect to find a rabid coon in Wisconsin but could find a rabid bat. In Tennessee, #1 would be skunks. In Tennessee's neighbor, North Carolina, every coon could be considered as having a chance of being rabid. The oddity is that 2001 figures show 386 confirmed cases of rabies in coon in NC but not a single case in TN!

Martin

[foxfiredidit]

Rub it into your boots or other leather articles that you don't mind smelling bad.

[hotzcatz]

If you are eating the coon, then you can also eat the tallow. Render it down just like you would for beef or pig and use it instead of lard for whatever recipes you are working on.

[fin29]

Feed it back to the chickens...another case proving that in the circle of life, karma's a batch.

[buspete]

Originally Posted by fin29

Feed it back to the chickens...another case proving that in the circle of life, karma's a batch.

You know, I put the gut pile out for the chickens with irony in mind, and they wouldn't eat it. I think they are afraid of the raccoon smell.

I started eating a crockpot full of coon meat last night, it will probably feed us for a while. The coon was 12lb whole, and we got 6.5 lb of meat out of it when "quartered" like you would a rabbit. I put it in the crockpot overnight with celery, onions, garlic and a can of crushed tomatoes. Cooked tihs way, the meat tastes like something between goat and moose. Lots of little bones to pick out though.

I checked my trap yesterday to find that it had been rolled over and bent open from the inside. Now my quest begins to hunt down the mother of all coons!

[fin29]

Originally Posted by buspete

You know, I put the gut pile out for the chickens with irony in mind, and they wouldn't eat it. I think they are afraid of the raccoon smell.
!

Nothin' a little curry powder won't fix...the international fix-all for gnarly animal products.

[Scrounger]

Bury it deep, or burn it, like you should do with the rest of the coon....

[fin29]

Originally Posted by Scrounger

Bury it deep, or burn it, like you should do with the rest of the coon....

Why? Because of the rabies potential? Rabies is destroyed at a little over 120 degrees fahrenheit.