I hear you. Lord knows I don't clean all of them either. I usually make several hundred pounds of different pork sausages a year, plus I BBQ a lot of them, so when I'm stocking up on meat I keep everything. The ribs I either de-bone for sausage grind, BBQ, or deep fry. I have 4 (soon to be 5) freezers though to store it all. OK

Yes the hook blades work good for skinning, the straight blades cut too much hair for me.

Correct, small pigs don't have a lot of meat on the ribs. The ribs on the bigger pigs do have more meat and can be tough until you learn how to cook them. They can be really good if done right.

Hey Cast, I bought a 50 pak of these to skin with & along with a good knife will do the job just fine. can be found @ Lowes/Home depot etc etc

There are a few real nice brass knuckle type handles for these carpet knives too. Can't help but think I should try one.

May not be the prettiest knife, but dexter sani-safe knifes work great. I like to run it against a steel pretty often if I'm going through the hide. But after that it holds its edge pretty well

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we don't butcher them all. But when we do take the time to butcher, we butcher them fully. For the most part it depends on what time of year it is and what else we have that we need to do. We try to shoot every pig we get the chance to shoot just to try and keep up with the numbers. If its cold weather during deer season and we're in hunting mode and butchering meat anyways we will tend to butcher most of them. In the warm seasons when we're busy working on other stuff we will still kill them but may or may not butcher many of them if we are busy with something else.

we just use regular meat boning knives. I like dexter russels, there's other makes that are good too.

I use a condor camp knife ...start to finish ...and can do two large hogs and a deer before i need to sharpen ..i love that knife.

Anybody have a link to skinning a pig without gutting it? It just seems tougher than skinning a deer, yes I know the right tools are needed, but I hate gutting a pig, too much opportunity for nasty stuff to get into the meat.

A really sharp heavier knife like a Buck 110 seems to work best for myself. With that setup, I can do a gutting number on a hog in about 15 minutes....A tad more than a deer. Practice does make it easier for sure..

I don't remember exactly who suggested it ( a member of THF) but this weekend while skinning a pig we cut the skin on the back into 4-5 inch strips and pealed the hide this way and it seemed to work a lot easier than trying to skin it in one piece. we used hooked carpet blades in a box cutter.

Goes for deer as well.

I have the small benchmark bone collector knife and I love it. Gutted 2 pigs and a few deer before having to sharpen it.