If you think about it, the expression, “there is more than one way to skin a cat,” is pretty messed up.  I mean, who skins cats?  And why so many ways?  I couldn’t find a definite origin of the phrase.  In 1678, a variant of the idiom was first published as “there are more ways to kill a cat than by choking it with cream.”  That’s weird.  Also, Mark Twain used the quote a couple hundred years later.  It’s also been said that the saying comes from a gymnastics move called “skinning the cat,” but I don’t really buy it.  The only thing I do know is that skinning a cat is a harbinger of becoming a serial killer.