Thanks for the replies and the advice. I guess 'survival hunting' wasn't the best term for what I had in mind. Flags, you nailed it in the following sentence:
If you are doing what they did a lot of back in the early days of this country and were hunting meat as you were traveling and game was plentiful then you would drop a deer and take the prime cuts and leave the rest.
That's the kind of hunting I mean. By 'taking the prime cuts' I presume you mean a sort of on-the-spot butchery that didn't fuss too much with method and would, indeed, 'leave the rest.'?
Otherwise, I feel confident in my descriptions of field dressing a deer carcass as they are exhaustively researched, including feedback from experienced hunters. It was the 'travelling hunt' that I was unsure about. If preserving the hide or smoking the meat wasn't a concern, how would someone proceed?
Your answer confirms my intuition. Thanks