Objects

Small Game Cleaning Device Makes the Next Move Easier to See

A new small-game cleaning tray joins four decades of inventions for a task hunters are still taught to do with gloves and a knife.

Clay-diorama editorial illustration related to Small Game Cleaning Device.

What changes in this design

The record does not say how people usually gut and clean small game, or what they use to keep it from moving.

It describes a tray with a wall around its edge and a neck slot, plus removable straps that fasten in pairs over an animal lying belly-down.

For a reader looking at the object, the straps explain how it is intended to secure small game during gutting and cleaning.

The tangled rope

In 1985, Julius Horvath set out to solve a small, stubborn problem: how to keep a small animal still while someone worked on it. His Portable Small Game Holder's background complained that rope-noose holders tangled while being carried in the field and that hook-based holders could cause injury. The situation is plain, which is why I start there. There is an animal to clean, a sharp knife, unsteady hands, and a person who wants the work done cleanly.

That patent did not settle the issue. The later filings kept showing me individual inventors returning to the same basic constraint: before someone can clean small game, it has to stay put without making the setup another hazard. The devices changed shape. The need they presumed did not.

The ratcheting spool

In 1993, Walter Frith filed a design with a base plate, cable, and ball that wedged hide against a corner so it could be pulled free. In 1996, Herman H. Rothove filed one with a ratcheting spool and two three-pronged claw hooks, one anchoring and the other driven by a cord. Both have an appeal I can see. Rather than asking a hand to hold and cut at once, they tried to turn skinning into a controlled pull.

Then the restraint split in two directions. Marty R. Sayers's 2004 filing hung game from a suspended beam using detachable, self-tightening drop-line nooses. Another support device filed that year used upward prongs and a stabilizing element to keep fish or small game from twisting during cleaning, skinning, or filleting. By 2014, Tim McDonald had moved to a later part of the chore, proposing a perforated pipe in a container that sprayed water in a cyclonic pattern over cleaned game. The field I found was trying several answers: pin it, hang it, pull against it, or clean afterward.

The neck slot

Into that history comes US20260256152A1, Small Game Cleaning Device. The small amount of machinery it needs struck me. The filing describes a tray with a perimeter wall around a game area and a neck slot. Small game can lie prone inside it while removable first and second straps extend over the animal and releasably mate in pairs, securing it for gutting and cleaning. The device reads to me as a return to passive restraint: stabilize the body, then let the person do the rest.

The slot also has a predecessor. An earlier small-game carriage used a tube with a neck slot sized to admit a neck but not a head, aiming to prevent bites from a stunned animal that revives in transit and to keep blood off a hunter's clothing. Those devices aren't ones I would call interchangeable. One is for carrying, and this one is for cleaning. Still, the repeated neck geometry suggests to me that a narrow opening can solve more than one field problem.

The shrinking count

While inventors kept refining the fixture, the audience for small game was contracting. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey found about 5.43 million small-game hunters in 2001 and 4.51 million in 2011, a decline of roughly 17 percent. Their reported hunting days fell from about 60.14 million to 50.88 million, roughly 15 percent. A later account traces licensed small-game hunters from above 17 million nationally in 1982 to just above 11 million at the time it was published. The comparison is one I treat cautiously: the measures and periods are not identical, but their direction is.

That decline does not make field dressing a fiction. The federal 2016 survey still counted 11.5 million hunters overall, though hunting participation had dropped by roughly two million people over the prior five years. This filing does not look to me like proof of a growing market. A persistent, hands-on difficulty remains worth solving for some people, as I see it, even as the broader pastime has lost ground.

The open question

The idea that dedicated hardware is necessary is where I pause. A state-affiliated hunter-education lesson lists plastic or latex gloves and a knife as the equipment required for field dressing small game. No tray. No straps. No nooses. That is not proof that a fixture cannot help, but it does put the category in proportion.

A stable surface could, I imagine, be welcome when a person is working with a blade. But a welcome aid is not automatically a necessary one. The real question is whether this strap-and-tray arrangement gives enough practical control or cleanliness to earn a place beside the simple kit hunters are already taught to use. The filing offers another attempt. This strap-and-tray arrangement hasn't yet persuaded me that it changes the job.

Sources

Reporting for this piece drew on the published filing and the references below.

The record, briefly. US20260256152A1, “Small Game Cleaning Device” The device has a tray with a perimeter wall defining a game area and a neck slot. Small game may lie prone in the area, while removable first and second straps extend over it and releasably mate in pairs to secure it for gutting and cleaning.

More angles on this

CPC A22B: SlaughteringThe official classification family this record was filed into, published in the USPTO Cooperative Patent Classification scheme.
CPC A22C: Processing meat, poultry, or fishThe official classification family this record was filed into, published in the USPTO Cooperative Patent Classification scheme.
The Judgment Space Between Washing and PackagingAnother reading from the wider A23B classification family, preservation of foods, foodstuffs or non-alcoholic beverages; chemical ripening of fruit or vegetables.
A Plate, a Stage, and One QuestionAnother reading in the same Objects category on this site.

Read around this one:Public patent record USPTO published figure