How to Clean Animal Bones so You Can Proudly Display Them in Your Home
Life is a winding road with many unexpected detours. I never expected to end up with an impersonal, frozen pig skull, but after a particularly ambitious part of Will It Sous Vide? , which is what I discovered.
The most obvious next step was stockpiling, but since I’m a bit creepy, I decided to go ahead and clean up the skull so I could proudly display it in my creepy little apartment.
There are many different ways to cleanse some bones. You can leave them in the field (although they can be stolen by humans or beasts), toss them in a bucket urn, or cook them over low heat. I didn’t think the other tenants in my house would like the pig skull in the common yard, and I didn’t want to buy a bunch of beetles, so I chose the third option.
Some sites recommend boiling water to cleanse bones, but this can be a little dangerous for your biological treasure and can cause fat to enter the bones . I chose the slow and slow cooking method instead, using my, you guessed it, reliable immersion circulator. (If you don’t have an immersion circulator, don’t worry; a slow cooker will work too.)
After 24 hours at 165 ℉, I was able to pull out a lot of meat and cartilage, including the delicious cheek meat that escaped my knife while cutting the meat.
I also managed to get most of the brain out through the back of the skull using a bottle brush and plenty of running water. This was the only part of the process that I found truly unpleasant, as the cooked brain smelled strongly of iron and death. (Actually I gagged and rarely.)
A few stubborn pieces were stuck to the skull, however, and the nasal cartilage was not soft enough to remove, so I put the whole thing back in the brine bag for another night in the sous-vide bath.
After another 12 hours, I was able to extract the last pieces of flesh, connective tissue, brain and cartilage from the skull. Many teeth also fell out, but that was to be expected. I just collected them and saved them for the end.
Then I soaked the skull in a vat of soapy water – Dawn is your best bet – to degrease it and prepare it for bleaching.
The result is a fairly clean, albeit rather beige, skull.
Finally, it’s time to whiten. You don’t want to use real bleach because you will damage your precious bones and ruin all your beautiful work. Instead, grab a lot of hydrogen peroxide bottles (a 3% solution you can buy at the pharmacy, strong enough) and make yourself a small bone bath.
Then I covered and left Wilburine in the peroxide bath until it brightened (it took about six hours), then rinsed it well and allowed it to dry completely. I glued my teeth back with crazy glue and basked in the gorgeous white glow of my new treasure.
In fact, everything turned out to be much simpler than I expected, in fact, so simple that you can follow it at home. If you want to clean your own bones (skull or otherwise), you just need to follow these simple steps:
- Cook bones slowly to remove excess pulp, cartilage, or other soft tissue. You can use a multicooker or pan, but you should aim for a temperature of 165-180 ℉. Bones of different sizes may take different times to clean, so check yours every few hours to see how they feel.
- Rub, pick up, and (gently) scrape off any loose meat and tissue, preserving missing teeth. If you’re working with a skull, use a bottle brush to drain the brain out, then throw the brush away and think about how you got to this point.
- Soak overnight in a soapy bath using a degreaser such as Dawn.
- Rinse, then soak in 3% hydrogen peroxide solution for several hours, removing bones as soon as they turn the desired shade of white.
- Rinse thoroughly, let dry and re-glue any loose teeth. (Of course, this only applies if you’re working with the skull; don’t glue the teeth to the thighbone. Where did you get those extra teeth anyway?)
- Show off your creepy memento so everyone who walks into your home can take in its disturbing beauty.
Team up with another taxidermy to really lift your spirits.