Now that is a beautiful fur! I had the same hardness develop on my rabbit furs but as you said, its easy to trim them off to keep the softer skin, its quite a taste getting those layers down towards the edges, I found a rather nice seawater eroded piece of slate from the coast I've been using for rubbing the layers down, something I notice they use in Asia a lot, works well yet a knife seems unbeatable!

I'm proud that the solution worked for you though, the bark method would be really interesting to see, I wonder how much bark would be required for the tannins to take effect, I suppose nothing will tell apart from experimentation :D

As for fishing, I've pulled plenty of Bream out when fishing in the UK but we're never aloud to eat anything! coarse fishing is a big money maker for pool owners over here, you'd be hung by the angry fishermen if they ever saw you eating one aha and then the big fine would arrive from the enforcement agencies :/