Skinning allows players to gather leather and hides by skinning animals. Leather and hides are used for leatherworking. Leather is also used for some blacksmithing, engineering, and tailoring recipes.

Becoming a Skinner

First, find an NPC who can teach you the skinning profession (look for the word "<Skinner>" under the NPC's name). They will likely be somewhere near leatherworking trainers. Now, you need to purchase a skinning knife. You can find skinning knives at merchants who sell Profession-related items. Place the skinning knife somewhere in your bag. You do not need to equip it.

How to Skin Animals

Only certain monsters can be skinned. When you kill a monster, select its corpse to see if it is skinnable. If the animal is skinnable, it will display "Skinnable," with a color to indicate the difficulty. Open up your abilities book ("p") and find the "Skinning" icon. Drag the icon over to your action bar. Right-click on the icon and target a corpse that is marked as skinnable. Your character will then begin to skin the monster. You can also just right-click on the corpse to skin it after it has been looted.

As your skill goes up, you become better at gathering higher-quality materials.

The text displaying "Skinnable" is colored the same way as other Profession abilities, indicating how difficult the task is (or whether it's even possible at your current skill level) as well as how likely you are to earn skill points.

You cannot skin the monster if your skill is not high enough. You will have to practice on lower-level monsters that are easier until you have enough skill to skin a higher-level monster.

If you kill the animal (or it's your turn to loot it in a group), you must loot it before you can skin it.

You can skin animals that have been killed by other players that are just lying around if they have looted the corpse.

Beasts do not drop leather, you must instead skin them.