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    The Ultimate Guide to Butchering Deer: A Step-by-Step Guide to Field Dressing, Skinning, Aging, and Butchering Deer
    The Ultimate Guide to Butchering Deer: A Step-by-Step Guide to Field Dressing, Skinning, Aging, and Butchering Deer
    The Ultimate Guide to Butchering Deer: A Step-by-Step Guide to Field Dressing, Skinning, Aging, and Butchering Deer
    Ebook386 pages3 hours

    The Ultimate Guide to Butchering Deer: A Step-by-Step Guide to Field Dressing, Skinning, Aging, and Butchering Deer

    By John Weiss

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    About this ebook

    The process of getting a deer from the field to the dinner plate can seem overwhelming, especially for beginners. Fortunately, this book of expert advice from veteran deer hunter John Weiss, packed with helpful illustrations and step-by-step explanations, makes it simple. Weiss covers everything you need to know to do your own butchering, including field dressing and transporting your deer, and aging and freezing your venison. The Ultimate Guide to Butchering Deer also features instructions on how to grind burger and make sausage links, and even comes with delicious recipes. This truly is a must-read for any aspiring home deer butcher.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateJun 21, 2011
    ISBN9781626369696
    The Ultimate Guide to Butchering Deer: A Step-by-Step Guide to Field Dressing, Skinning, Aging, and Butchering Deer

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      Book preview

      The Ultimate Guide to Butchering Deer - John Weiss

      1

      The Selective Deer Hunter

      There is certainly no shortage of animals these days. Even trophy bucks abound. In fact, this season an estimated nine hundred of those deer will find their way into the Boone & Crockett or Pope & Young record books. Hunters will take millions of deer nationwide. With such a large number of deer available to the country’s hunters, why shoot an animal that no one except perhaps the family dog will eat? You wouldn’t go to the grocery store and put on a blindfold before making a large meat purchase, and then expect your family to suffer through months of tough, flavorless beef riddled with sinew and gristle. Why take that approach when entering the deer woods?

      e9781616083212_i0002.jpg

      This year hundreds of deer will make the record books, while millions of others are destined for home freezers. That’s something our ancestors could only have dreamed about.

      Of course, as we saw in the Foreword, early man didn’t have the luxury of being selective in his hunting. When you’re hungry and must rely upon primitive equipment such as a spear to avoid starvation, you can’t be fussy about what you kill. You take what comes along, and you’re grateful for it.

      Today’s hunter lives in a different world. Undoubtedly, he owns a freezer that can preserve his game in excellent condition for many months–a distinct advantage over his predecessors. Moreover, early man hunted long and hard most every day of the year, and missed countless shots before eventually collecting game. Yet today’s hunter, equipped with state-of-the-art shooting equipment, enjoys a thousandfold greater success rate in terms of hours spent afield.

      We no longer need to hunt in order to eat, and so we no longer need to be opportunists. Yet counterbalancing this to some extent, today’s hunter is restricted by season dates and the number of deer he can take in a given year.

      The bottom line is that sensibility will, or at least should, govern the attitude of any hunter. He’ll want to be selective in making his choices, to ensure that the animals he does take offer the best possible eating. If it turns out that the deer a hunter levels his sights upon yields delicious, tender venison and also is a buck with impressive antlers, then that hunter has the best of both worlds.

      e9781616083212_i0003.jpg

      Unlike Indians and prehistoric hunters, today’s deer hunter has the liberty of being able to look over many animals and evaluate their condition before deciding which to take.

      Judging Tender Deer

      Many myths surround the subject of what makes for a tender deer, but professionals in the food industry will tell you that the sex and age of the animal are not the most important considerations.

      Components that go into the quality (tenderness and flavor) of virtually any game animal include: (1) the health of the animal at the time it was killed; (2) the diet of the animal throughout the year; (3) the amount of stress the animal was subjected to just prior to its demise; (4) the meat-handling techniques used from field to kitchen; and (5) the cooking method, since different cuts of meat require different cooking techniques. There is nothing a hunter can do to control the diets of deer, since they eat just about anything at one time or another. But over the years I’ve noticed that deer taken from rich agricultural regions, where they undoubtedly fed regularly upon corn, soybeans, alfalfa, oats, wheat, orchard fruits, and truck-garden vegetables, have been fatter and consistently more tender and flavorful than leaner animals killed far back in the hinterland where they subsisted mainly upon twigs, buds, leaves, weed species, wild grasses, and similar native foods.

      One thing a hunter can do at the outset is evaluate the health of any animal in question before committing to squeezing the trigger or releasing the bowstring. Evaluating the health of a deer is not difficult, either; it can be accurately determined by merely examining its various body features.

      Sometimes this is easier said than done, because few deer are enthusiastic about posing long minutes before a hunter wielding a .270-caliber rifle. And, of course, impulsive hunters who are more interested in shooting and getting their animal on the ground any way they can, and as quickly as possible, obviously have no way of evaluating the quality of their venison until after the fact. By then it’s too late, and they must hope for the best because their hastily made decision is now irreversible.

      But many times (I’m talking now about the careful, methodical hunter who plans his strategy and is selective about what he takes home), it is indeed possible to watch a deer for quite a while before deciding whether or not to try and collect it. By doing this, the hunter gains a valuable education for future hunts when he perhaps does not have so much time to look over a particular animal; then his accumulated experiences from the past allow him to merely glance at a deer and instantly know its worth. If and when a particular animal does not measure up to his expectations, he withdraws back into the shadows and continues to hunt, hoping to come across something better. Hunters derive immense pride and satisfaction from this type of hunting

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