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How Many Ways Are There to Skin a Cat? We Asked Some Cat-Skinners

Turns out that skinning a cat isn't all roses and formaldehyde.

Here at Motherboard we're sometimes stumped by existential questions like, just how many ways are there to skin a cat, anyhow?

So we turned to the pros. Cats euthanized at animal shelters often wind up on biology class lab tables, where students are invited to dissect the animals. The first step is removing the skin.

"There are nearly as many ways to skin a cat as there are lazy students who don't really care, and want to leave lab early," Professor David B. Fankhauser at the University of Cincinnati wrote in an email. "The goal I set for my students is to get an intact skin that can be easily wrapped around the body so that it is preserved for the dissections for the rest of the year."

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Shannan Muskopf breaks it down further for us. She's the author of AnatomyCorner.com and a biology teacher at Granite City High School outside of St. Louis.

"I would have to stick with the two main ways," she wrote in an email. "Either from the ventral (belly) side of the cat, which is my preferred method, or going from the dorsal or the back side. The skin is looser at the abdomen which makes it easier to lift from the underlying muscle. I've attached a rudimentary drawing of how I would approach the skinning of the cat."

Before you get too excited and order that new set of scalpels, know that skinning a cat isn't all roses and formaldehyde.

"There is not too much amusing about skinning a cat," Fankhauser wrote. "No one really enjoys it… I play hip-hop music during that lab to take the edge off."

It is also more difficult than it looks. "The process is so time consuming that I now pay extra to buy my cats pre-skinned," Muskopf wrote. "What is amusing is that the company folds the skin over the paws of the cats as a convenience to avoid getting scratched."

"There is not too much amusing about skinning a cat."

Occasionally, though, the cats arrive with skin intact, offering a different kind of teaching moment.

"I did have some leftover cats that had their skin and fur on them and one of my groups this year asked if they could try their hand at skinning the cat," Muskopf wrote. "I gave them minimal instructions and left them on their own. Hours later, they were covered in fur and gore and decided that skinning the cat wasn't nearly as much fun as they imagined."

"I think it was a good lesson," she added.

The use of cats for dissection has attracted the ire of animal rights activists, and several anatomy instructors we spoke to declined to comment for this article. Fankhauser emphasizes the ethical component of the practice on his cat dissection page. "The ethical argument against the use of cats would be stronger if cats were bred specifically to be killed for dissection," he explains. "However, the cats we use are the product of uncontrolled reproduction of pets. The surplus wind up at the animal shelter."

As for the popular aphorism "there's more than one way to skin a cat," etymologists debate its origin, but the most compelling arguments suggest it has nothing to do with cat skinning at all, but may be a reference to a popular 19th-century gymnastic feat ("skinning the cat") or to the custom of peeling catfish ("cat") in the American South.

So if you're looking to practice your small mammal skinning technique, Muskopf suggests avoiding cats altogether. "Squirrels and rats are much easier to work with," she wrote. "You can just start at the neck and peel downwards, as if you are removing pantyhose."