There's more than one way to skin a cat

Example: “If the bank says no, try a credit union; there's more than one way to skin a cat.”

Origin: The Oxford English Dictionary traces the underlying shape of the saying to "to skin a flint" — a 17th-century figure for extreme stinginess — which may be the direct source of the cat version. John Ray's 1678 proverb collection has an early relative, "there are more ways to kill a dog than hanging," and Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855) offers "more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream." The specifically American, specifically skinning form first appears in print in Seba Smith's 1840 story "The Money Diggers," and Mark Twain used the now-standard wording in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Why a cat's death was ever the image chosen, rather than a dog's or anything else, nobody has satisfactorily explained.