To butcher or not to butcher? that is the question?
 

There is just so much crap to bring to deer camp so I can butcher deer. I'm torn weather it's worth all the time and effort?
A propane lantern (that you know I'm going to break)
Knives (that will walk off during the week)
coolers with frozen jugs (so I have no space in my car)
Trash cans and bags, (who dose'nt love, leaky, bloody trash bags)
IDK is it worth all this hassle to save $90 (minimum charge per deer), OR have it professional butchered? The butcher does a really nice job. It's not uncommon for my deer camp to shoot 10 deer, that's like a $1000 in butchering costs. IDK?

Yes. You don't need a bunch of fancy gear to butcher. Everything I shoot is butchered by me. If you have a box of 2 1/2 gallon ziploc bags, a black marker and a flat surface you can butcher a deer in the field. You also don't need a bunch if fancy knives. I use the same knife I field dress with to butcher. Since it is a Havalon all I do is switch out the blade which takes maybe 5 seconds to do.

I bone out the hind qtrs into roasts, which I can later cut into steaks, and put a boned qtr into a ziploc bag and toss the trimming into a separate bag. Repeat with the other qtr. Pull the chuck steaks off the front qtrs and bag them and put the rest in the trimming bag. Pull the loins and the straps and bag them. Put both the heart and liver in a bag. Bone the rest of the meat and put in the trimming bag. Label the bags with the marker so you know what is in each bag. An average deer will fit in 6 bags (1 for each hind qtr, 1 for the chuck, 1 for the loins ans straps, 1 for the heart and liver and one for grind) and will fit in one cooler.

I finish the job at home and grind my own burger and make my own sausage. I vacuum pack everything. I leave the roast whole because that way I have the option of roast or steak. Pretty easy to make a roast into steaks but impossible to make steaks into a roast. By doing it myself I know I get the meat from the animal I took and I know how the meat was handled. Everything for butchering fits in a daypack and an extra cooler with ice is easy to pack.

If I am backpack hunting, which I do as well I pretty much follow the same pattern except everything goes into a single canvas bag until I get to the truck. There I will have a cooler that holds ice for a week and I then get the animal on ice.

I have never paid to have an animal butchered. I would rather do it myself but as always, feel free to disagree.

Good post Flags! I really enjoy doing my own deer, it's a extension of the hunt. I do most of my deer but I occasionally take a one into the locker in the town I hunt by. This year the locker closed and I'm glad. Now it forces me to do it and not to sometimes take the "easy" road and drop it off.

I quarter them on my tailgate or in the field using the gutless method and ice age them in a cooler for about a week. If your not familiar with the method just google it. Works really well.

I used to go to camp in PA with a few guys. We had a hanging rig out back that we could hang 20 deer on. We would usually go up for 4 days. We didn't butcher them at camp, one of us hauled what we called the meat wagon. Get all the deer home from up state and we would all gather at the old mans place, which had everything a butcher could ask for in his meat shed, and have a few hours of a processing party. If it took us more than 20 minutes from skinning to finish wrap per deer, someone was slacking. We would go up for rifle then late muzzleloader season so the temps were almost always agreeable with doing this. There was one season that the temps were unusually warm so we had to butcher them at camp but we did pretty much what Flags laid out and was
fairly simple.

Sometimes I butcher and sometimes I find it much more practical to hand the carcass off to a good meat processor. Chill, cut, grind with beef, wrap, and freeze takes a good bit of time and effort if it is done properly. $90 is a good deal when compared to the value of my time, and butchering is not a fun job.

Game I take on my property is butchered by me. Game I take while traveling is normally done professionally. The exception to this is elk. Most of my elk were taken while backpack hunting and the meat had to be cut into manageable size pieces in the field.

I skin and quarter my deer, put them in a cooler and take them home and process the meat and process the meat over the next week or so as my schedule allows. My wife and daughter join in and we enjoy it.

I don't lose knives, break lanterns, or leak blood everywhere. For us its part of it, Ive never taken a deer to a processor and likely never will. I will take some meat in for summer sausage,sticks,or jerky on occasion which I also do myself but sometimes I want a specific summer sausage,sticks, or jerky from a specific place.

We strive to process more of our own food rather than less.

"I skin and quarter my deer, put them in a cooler and take them home and process the meat and process the meat over the next week or so as my schedule allows. My wife and daughter join in and we enjoy it. "

Dittos. I think that is what most people do including me.

In Texas, it is not legal to process beyond quartering in camp. I take it home in coolers, let it "age" for a couple of days, and then the family all pitches in to process. Takes a couple of hours. Need a grinder and a seal a meal and a couple of knives. We know we handle the meat property and our meat is not mixed with others meat, so we know we only consume the meat we bring home.

Butchering really isn't bloody, assuming you already field dressed it somewhere else.


The space you need, well you need most of that to bring home professionally butchered meat as well.

I used to pay a butcher simply for the convenience of it. Then started hearing all the horror stories of people getting someone else's gut shot swamp buck or other poorly handled meat and decided to make the time to do it myself. It's now something everyone in the family enjoys doing together and as others have mentioned, you know exactly what you're getting. To me, that's nearly priceless....

I've always field dressed my animals where they fall. I leave the hide on them to help keep the meat clean until I get the animal home. If its cool enough, I like to hang my animals for a week or so (with the hide on) to let them age. As long as the animal doesn't freeze, leaving the hide on also reduces the amount of dried meat to trim off.


If its hot weather, like some of my pronghorn hunts, I'll bone out the meat and pack it in ice in a cooler.


Except for my American buffalo, I've butchered all of my animals myself. That includes dozens of elk, two moose, and a Herford cow that I had to put down for my ex-mother in law . I'm very picky about trimming off all of the fat and tendons (gristle), even for my burger, and butcher shops don't do that.


I also cut all of the meat off of the bones, and the only time I saw a bone is if I split the spine at home. Fat, bloodshot meat, and bone saw dust contribute to the strong gamey taste.


Like Flags, I package my meat as roasts or 1# and 1.5# packages of burger. I double wrap the roasts, first in a plastic produce bag, then in freezer paper, squeezing as much air out as I can. I mix 10% beef fat with the burger and double grind it.

I enjoy butchering. I've done up to around fifteen deer a year sometimes when I'm cutting up for friends. I've cut back now that I have kids but still do about six between my family and my dad each year.

It's really not hard. Get a sharp knife, and learn as you go.

Over the years I've added grinders, slicers, stuffers, dehydrators, mixers, all that.

But all you really need is a good knife. My local butcher will grind and wrap your bulk meat for .30cents a pound if you don't have a grinder of your own.

-JaKe

it is good
 

a great part of a hunt, and fun to get the kids involved in it. we are sure to get our own meat, and keep the quality high.

it is a lot of work though - it helps to have a clean sawz-all for big game, and i prefer fillet knives for boning big pieces.

so many videos and helpful tips online, it is a great 'learn as you go' effort.

Why do you need a sawz-all? I haven't cut a bone in decades. Bone it out and leave the bones in the field if it is legal to do so.

I'll use a sawz-all to cut the skull cap with horns off of the skull, and if I'm lucky enough to get an elk back home either whole or just cut in half, I'll use my sawz-all to split the spine.


Like I posted earlier, I like to hang the carcass, with the hide on, for about a week. With elk, that's quarters, with deer and antelope its usually the whole critter.


At 71+ years old, I can't drag more than half an elk at a time out of the woods. I can put one or two antelope and usually a whole deer (field dressed) on one of my wheeled game carriers. I can also still carry half a deer or antelope or an elk hind quarter out on my pack frame.

I carry a light weight folding bone saw for this if I'm after bucks or bulls. But normally all I target is females for meat. I don't take any bones out of the field unless I have to.

In TX where I currently live I can't break them down any further than qtrs but I simply take the hinds and fronts off with a knife and bone all the rest. Spine stays with the gutpile on everything I shoot.

Butcher your meat yourself. It is part of it. More specifically.


"Hunting provides an opportunity to demonstrate endurance, courage, and skill, the characteristics everywhere of the powerful person." (from Jose Ortega y Gassett's "Meditations on Hunting") I would say an extension of this insight is that a major part of the pleasure of hunting is in demonstrating . . . endurance, courage, and skill. Why that should be the case -- why human beings take pleasure in demonstrating these qualities -- is not something I'm clear in my own mind about, but I do think this gets at the heart of the pleasure I feel in hunting.


Thus, by butchering your own meat, you get to further demonstrate endurance, courage, and skill -- namely the endurance of butchering the animal and the skill of butchering the animal. I'm not sure courage is engaged in butchering the animal.


Speaking for myself, I prefer to leave my bones in my meat until I get it home. This includes my elk, and elk bones are big and heavy (thus this means "paying for" my preference by increased effort lugging the elk meat with embedded bones back to camp). I think this keeps the meat in better condition. Additionally, I make broth out of the bones by boiling them up along with left-over scraps of meat and sinew as well as an onion, carrots, bay leaves. But this is a matter of personal preference, I acknowledge.

don't need to, but it sure is nice. i've used the sawz-all to split the spine and sternum on steer to hang the halves for a week or so. also use it to cut ribs. it is lightning fast, easy, and portable.

any bone cutting you might prefer, it works great. i keep a single blade i clean and keep separate. easy peasy.

I always process my own deer that way it is done just the way I like it. I enjoy that whole aspect of the "after hunt". It normally takes me about 4 hours from the skinning to the butchering then vacuum bagging and clean up. I normally do all the grind and sausage making on another day. The elk I have killed some were done with a local processor but as time went on our hunting party decided that it was better in the long run to do our own.

If you do it yourself you are guaranteed to get what you want. I’ve been doing it for years and when my boys started hunting I insisted they participate, even if it was just front shoulders and neck meat. The importance of this came home when hunting with my son who was 10 or 11. We were in a 2 person stand and he made a great shot on a doe that was in a herd over 100 yards away. She dropped in her tracks, and the herd had no idea what happened. He looked at me and said “can I shoot another one Dad?” and I said “sure, as long as you don’t mind butchering two.” He thought better of it and didn’t...now if all he had to do was pull the trigger and help me gut and load them on the truck I’m sure he would have. The point is this, I think, taking that life is a big deal and by my insisting he close the loop on it by helping butcher and packing the meat he had to ask himself if he really wanted to do that. To me it’s all about respecting the kill and ensuring the meat is processed as I like so we use it and understanding that the work,begins when the arrow flys or the trigger is pulled.

We just took all our Elk round steaks, and turned it into a big pot roast. 8 steaks total. 7 hours in the slow cooker, and it was good. Now the meat is just right for eating.