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A hide or skin is an animal skin treated for human use. The word "hide" is related to the German word Haut, which means skin.The industry defines hides as "skins" of large animals e.g. cow, buffalo; while skins refer to "skins" of smaller animals: goat, sheep, deer, pig, fish, alligator, snake, etc. Common commercial hides include leather from cattle and other livestock animals, buckskin ...
The word skin originally only referred to dressed and tanned animal hide and the usual word for human skin was hide. Skin is a borrowing from Old Norse skinn "animal hide, fur", ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *sek-, meaning "to cut" (probably a reference to the fact that in those times animal hide was commonly cut off to be used as garment).
A dorsal incision is made by laying the animal on its abdomen and making a single cut from the base of the tail to the shoulder region. The animal's skin is easier to remove if the animal has been freshly killed. [11] Cape skinning is the process of removing the shoulder, neck and head skin for the purpose of displaying the animal as a trophy. [12]
The tanning process begins with obtaining an animal skin. When an animal skin is to be tanned, the animal is killed and skinned before the body heat leaves the tissues. [6] This can be done by the tanner, or by obtaining a skin at a slaughterhouse, farm, or local fur trader.
The skin from buffalo, deer, elk or cattle from which most rawhide originates is prepared by removing all fur, meat and fat. The hide is then usually stretched over a frame before being dried. The resulting material is hard and translucent. It can be shaped by rewetting and forming before being allowed to thoroughly re-dry.
The membrane can also show the pattern of the animal's vein network called the "veining" of the sheet. [16] The makers remove any remaining hair ("scudding") and dry the skin by attaching it to a frame (a "herse"). [3]: 11 They attach the skin at points around the edge with cords and wrap the part next to these points around a pebble (a "pippin").
However, when old books and documents are encountered it may be difficult, without scientific analysis, to determine the precise animal origin of a skin, either in terms of its species or in terms of the animal's age. [5] In practice, therefore, there has long been considerable blurring of the boundaries between the different terms.
A study skin is a taxidermic zoological specimen prepared in a minimalistic fashion that is concerned only with preserving the animal's skin, not the shape of the animal's body. [43] As the name implies, study skins are used for scientific study (research), and are housed mainly by museums.