A few months ago, I got a bit high last week and watched videos of trout being gutted and filleted for twenty minutes. I eat salmon more often than any other kind of animal, and I realized had no idea what this process looked like.
You slit vertically along the belly and make a shorter slit at the jaw. You put your thumb in that first long hole, and the second and third fingers into the smaller hole. When you pull, most of the organs come out at once, like a magic trick. I guess when you yank out the entry point of the GI tract, the whole thing and everything attached to it pulls out as well.
Then the air bladder, which looks like a narrow, light gray balloon. The single kidney is the last organ to be scraped out. It is long, and runs along the spine.
The part you eat seems so marginal, just a slender encasement around the organs.
It’s mainly for living, all that meat.