The photo to the left is that of a two year old piece of chicken skin that was simply skinned off the thigh and placed in a custard dish for the time period. I was sure to skin it out leaving ALL the fat attached to the skin.
You can see how the oils have continuosly bled out of the skin.
It does smell a little rank, even after two years. If you would like to smell this piece, place your cursor arrow over the orange dot.
This photo is the other half of the piece that I skinned off the thigh. I just whacked it roughly in half. The difference is that I treated this piece with STOP-ROT before placing it in the custard dish.
This chicken was typical of modern farmed chickens that are fed out on pretend chicken feed. Extremely fatty. What this piece looks like in real life is pretty much like you see in the photo. Notice the lack of grease bleed.
It smells a lot like chicken.
Fats and oils are areas of experimentation that are really wide open. We know there is "something" apparently going on with both saturated and unsaturated fats. The possibility of spin off products, or applications, exist here.
Everyone here is probably already aware of the sources of menhaden oil and Neat's Foot Oil. The possibilities exist that the naturally occuring lipids in skins of other animals could be manipulated to preservation advantage.
The fat deposits, size and location can be a genetic predisposition factor, one would have to couple that with the fact that the contents (structures) of these deposits will be directly affected by what the animal has eaten in order to make the stores. So what may work on one genus and species in one locale may not even work on the same in another locale.
The whitetails around here seem to have a lipid at the base of the tail dock that has natural preservation qualities, BUT they are also a genetic hodge podge, and they also eat a large amount of corn, soybeans, and legumes. The visual manifestation for the effects of the beans and corn can be seen by the color of the fat. The fat will be strongly yellow in color as a result of the stored carotenoids. So I really couldn't tell you if a deer with a diet exclusive of browse could produce the same chemical reactions in it's skin. I know their meat sure does taste good.
If you are one of those that likes to eat "The Other White Meat", such as channel cat, the taste difference of the fats produced by different food sources is real obvious. A cat feeding heavily on hair algaes will have that nasty pond bottom taste, while again the grain fed fish farm fish will cause you to start having cravings for the taste in the middle of the night, and that's without even being pregnant or nuthin'.
I used the above to point out that fats and oils can be remarkably complex, but until venturing, a person will not know if applications will be simple or impossible.
Below is an address for anyone freezing skins. The cape was frozen for just over 3 1/2 years. You will notice the fat deposits to appear "fresh", you'll notice the same thing about the rest of the skin........
The Weathered Stump original sculpture is pictured above left, and foam reproduction above right.
See what is going on behind the scenes, check out more sculptures I have in the works for taxidermy forms!
Glen Conley
Truth of the matter is, I had started out testing to see what STOP-ROT would do if anything to yeast decompositions on bird skins. I was so amazed with what I saw going on with the fats that I forgot all about the yeast!
The skin samples pictured are from the same chicken that I show the live yeast photos in the article at this address:
