If weather permits I like to let them hang over night to set up. I then debone the entire deer and bag it in freezer bags and freeze it. It then waits for the call from my butcher for delivery to be made into bologna.

I never hang them. I just butcher them right away.

Tom

Well first we get the animal home and we skin it there, be it a deer or moose we are setup for it. We half it, then if its a elk or moose we quarter it. Then i take a stiff brush and get all the hair off, then i take hot water and completely wash the animal off. Then we move it to the meat cooler, we have a A/C unit in there and the room is completely insulated and we pull a tarp across so we dont try to keep the whole garage cool. Now depending on the size of the animal and the temp we are able to keep the animals at depends on how long we let them hang. Deer we will at max let hang for a week, bigger game such as moose or elk we usually let the fronts hang for a week and the hinds 2 weeks, only if we can keep it cold enough, if its too warm we will cut it up within a few days unless it is way too hot then we will do it that day or the next morning. We make all our own cuts since we learnt the proper way of doing it from my uncle who was a butcher for 30 years. The only thing we dont do is sausage, pepperoni and jerky, we do make our own hamburger though.

When you refer to quartering, are you just cutting off the hind and front legs, removing the backstraps and tenderloins and putting the lets in the cooler?

Wow...never seen a Moose being skinned.....that looks huge!!!

The weather makes my decision for me.

I hang mine for a day with the hide onif it is not too warm. (May be tough this year.)

Nope to properly quarter an animal all you do is count three ribs down from the last rib(rib that is closest to the hind) then cut it right threw there and now you have the fronts and the hinds separate, which makes it alot easier to work with and you get two equal size backstraps. When we are cutting the animals up we always quarter them cause its just so much easier to work with then a whole half of an animal.

Yah they are huge but that was a smaller one, that was only about a 2 1/2 year old bull, the biggest ive seen is one my dad shot and one i shot, both were transplant Yukon/Alaska cows(we had some bad numbers in the area so they brought some down to help the numbers, and now they are running around like cattle) we had the rear ends of them jacked right up to the top of our 8 foot ceiling and the shoulders were still laying on the ground. We figured we got about 300lbs of meat out of each. Just huge animals.

Ive heard its actually not the best idea to leave the hide on if its hot out, all that hide is gunna do is keep the meat insulated therefore keep it warm, you want to get the hide off asap to let the animal cool down, but if it is just over nite that is fine, but id imagine skinning it isnt all that easy cause the membrane that holds the hide to the meat hardens up and makes the hide stiff, when its fresh most of the time you can just pull the hide right off my hand with just a few cuts, along the legs.

All depends on temps outside usually if its cold enough deer will hang for a < week