Why not salt pelts?

I've always heard not to salt pelts and I can't figure out why not. I used to pull trailer loads of cattle hides to tanners and they were salted, all the home tanning recipes I see have salt as an ingredient, I talked to a tannery about getting some pelts done last week and they told me it don't matter, as far as I know most if not all hides shipped from Africa for taxidermy are salted. So why is using salt on pelts a no no? What am I missing here?

Salt is used on heavy hides like cattle to draw out the moisture and to keep them from spoiling until they get tanned, you may have noticed that they don't dry cattle hides before they ship them off. Can you imagine what a stinking rotten mess it would be if they weren't preserved with salt?

Fur skins are shipped off to market after they've been preserved by drying. However, the fur industry doesn't want salted skins because salted skins are hydroscopic and will get wet and soft when in storage. Fur skins will dress (tan) just fine if they've been salted, and if a trapper want to have some of his skins tanned you can salt them if you want. But don't expect a fur buyer to buy salted skins as they will most likely spoil the dried skins that they are stored with.

Fur market:
It's a grading nightmare.
Salt draws moisture and can cause spoilage to neighboring nonsalted pelts.
$$$

You opened a can of salty worms...

I 've never put salt on any fur bearers but some guys do.

Salt shrinks skins and also turns the leather white,even on blue skins,so you would lose size and buyers wouldn't be able to grade some fur in hides as well.Plus,I believe a lot,wouldn't be able to salt properly.As a taxidermist,I would never air dry a skin I have to mount,but taxidermy requires good,give and take stretch that garments don't require.I think salting would really mess up a buyer's ability to grade.It's not an issue with deer,elk or beef hides.

drying a hide=permanant fix.salted hide=temporary fix,if that makes sense.

O.K.. If I understand correctly air drying removes the moisture and forms a natural barrier that does not attract moisture (something on a cellular level I vaguely get). Salt sucks out the moisture but the pelt will retain some of the salt qualities and therefore reattract moisture over time. Salt will turn all hides white therefore not allowing for an honest grading of what the quality of the leather really was at time of harvest. It that anywhere near correct?

Drying a hide sure doesn't preserve it. Moisture will destroy dried hides and so will bugs. I can see the grading issue on fur that is sold leather out. But seeing as how many guys are putting borax on canine hides, I don't really see how a little salt would be much different. I don't think a pinch of salt for insurance against slippag in a coyote ear is going to hurt anything.

Correct.Also,salt dried skins are prone to leather damage(cracking,breaking) when dry.

I've always heard that salt can mess with the solutions some companies use to tan with - is that true?

Dried skins are the gold standard for preservation prior to dressing.
Of course moisture will allow bacteria to destroy a skin,that is why they are dried in the first place.
Salt dried skins will suck moisture from humid air,and allow the halophilic bacteria to grow and degrade the skins.
Moisture will also spoil tanned skins.
Its OK to salt the feet and ears on a taxi skin if you aren't a very proficient skinner.

This, this, this, this!

As a p.s. to above....air drying a piece to be tanned and THEN MOUNTED, can be a real p.i.t.a. to work on. Most African crap comes back all stiff as a board from air drying....or "flint dried" as some people are prone to call it. I quit handling African trophies many years ago because of the way most tanned up. They were just a nightmare to work on. I'm with Taximan...I would never air dry a pelt or hide that was being tanned for mounting. That being said, over the years I sent a zillion pelts to the tannery that trappers had air dried. They were all for wall hangers, so it never mattered if they wouldn't have the original stretch when rehydrated, because they never were, they just hung on the wall for display purposes.

We always went to the taxidermist before a bear hunt and picked up free fifty pound bags of salt to hold the hides over until we could get them out of the field. That was the prescribed method.

Waggler said What he meant was hygroscopic, not hydroscopic (just a minor typo). Hygroscopic substances draw moisture from the air, which is exactly what salt does. As Waggles says, that's a very bad thing for furs in storage.

In the case of a hide taken in the field that could spoil in a matter of days or less, salting will keep the hair from slipping. That hide is still "wet" and should get tanned or frozen very soon.

Furs taken and dried can be stored for months in your fur shed and then sent to an auction house where they are sometimes kept in cold storage for years. It is an entirely different situation. There is no good reason to salt your furs. Use borax if you are having trouble getting them dry.

I might have left ya all with the wrong impression, I'm not going to do it. I figured there was a good reason it wasn't done that way, I just couldn't figure out what that reason was. I feel no need to reinvent the wheel, I just like to know why the wheel was made that way.

you used to tear everything apart to see how it works when you were a kid didn't you??me too

Still do. My wife usually cringes when she hears "I ain't scared".