Gut them where they lay. Neither the gut pile or the body of a dead animal has spooked another deer in my experience.

BURYING it is more ETHICAL??? I realize we usually do as we are taught, but I don' t follow your logic. What is more ethical than leaving the gutpile for other creatures of nature, from coyotes and coons down to flies. What does burying it acomplish. I am not saying you are wrong to do it, just that it doesn' t make sense to me. I am lucky enough to be able to hunt on a family ranch. I grew up hiking and hunting on this ranch and it is part of my SOUL. It would make me fighting mad for anyone to throw a scrap of paper or a soda can on it, and they would never be invited back. However, I gut every deer where I find them and after taking them to the headquarters and skinning and quartering them, I take the hide, excess bones and any other extraneous parts out to what we call the boneyard. We kill anywhere from 15-20 deer/year and when we go back the next year with more hides, bones, you can' t hardley tell that any had been thrown out the year before. A lot of critters get nutrition from this " boneyard" . So I guess I would say that it is more ethical to leave it up to nature to take care of.

Also, where I hunt, you hit rock about 4-6 inches deep, so you would have a lot of trouble burying anything!