Do you clean and skin your own gators?

[jpatz18]

If so what the process. Is it easy it hard? Are the special regulation on where you can dispose of the body? I dont really want any part of the gator besides the meat. Do processor exchange the meat for the gator skin, head and all the other stuff. Do you gut them or do the processor do all of that? Whats the best meat? Do you use any of the meat besides the tail?

[admin]

We have cleaned a number of gators. This year I picked up a ten foot stainless table to process on. All of the meat is good to eat. The tail, jaw and backstraps are white meat and the legs are dark meat. We chunk most of it up to make nuggets with wing sauce. We take it to most of our gatherings. The Mississippi web site has a good doc on the skinning process. Look at the links on the left side. We do the beach solution as suggested. If you do not have a good table to get the gator up on then you can lay a clean tarp down and skin on the drive. You will feal it if you stay bent over for a long time. To cool the gator down you can wrap it up in a tarp with the ice. Those cheap ice bldgs will save you money over the stores. If you get a big gator then you might want to get someone else to process it because they take much longer and are much harder to handle. One of the guy we outfitted this year sold his gator to a guy out of Clermont for ten dollars a foot and got twenty pounds of meat to boot. I have used all american in the past for hide / meat deals. Not sure what they are offering this year. One of their dropoff stations is close to the house and has easy access. I can take it straight to a walkin cooler. If you are calling around to some of the processors post the info.