Weird, National Outdoor Show, Muskrat Lovely, Dakota Abbott, Amy Nicholson

Muskrat-Skinning Champion Also A Beauty Queen

2 March 2009, 5:00 PM. By Camilla Rowan

17 year old Dakota Abbott is our new girl crush because she’s accomplished the unheard-of feat of winning a beauty pageant and a muskrat skinning competition at the same time, in Maryland’s National Outdoor Show.

Check her out in her full, be-ruffled glory (is it just us or are her eyebrows verging on chola?):

dakota-with-trophy-3209

Dakota won the 2008 beauty pageant title “Miss Outdoors” in Maryland’s National Outdoor Show, and then became the first woman to also win a separate Muskrat Skinning event at the Outdoor Show, when she skinned two muskrats in one minute, forty-two seconds and won the junior championship. The National Outdoor Show is held at a school gym in Maryland and besides the pageant, centers around traditional hunting-related activities like trapping and skinning. Dakota’s community is one where hunting and fishing aren’t just pastimes, but links to their past, as trapping was a way of life for most of their ancestors. Dakota says her father taught her to skin a muskrat when she was 14, and when she isn’t flouncing around in sparkly dresses she’s happiest getting her hands dirty. “You get bloody, but I don’t mind. I mean, I work in a butcher shop in deer season.”

Director Amy Nicholson filmed a 2005 documentary, Muskrat Lovely, on the girls who compete to be “Queen of the Muskrat Skinners”- check out the trailer:

We’re pretty obsessed with this competition now, and with Dakota Abbott. The pageant portion of the Outdoor Show does include traditional crap like heaving cleavage, anorexia and inane flute-playing à la Sarah Palin, but women at least have a chance to be judged on skills outside the narrow bounds of normal pageants.

Some other pageant ideas we could get behind: