Use everything ....it can be made into burgers

I use it all, unless it is small and then I don,t bother with the ribs.

Fieldmouse,
How much meat do you end up with from a 150lb deer?(roughly)

Two back straps. One if it were a poor shot.

Me personally I waste nothing. The neck makes the best jerky meat. Ribs make good stew, liver is great with onions. Heart is good for giving. I can't dream of just throwing away perfectly good meat.

This is where you all have got it wrong. Rarely do I shoot anything bigger then a bambi. 99% of the time I will always choose bambi. They weigh only 50#s or less. The meat is very tender and not at all gamie. They are much easier to get out of the woods and dispose of. There just isn't much meat in shoulders unless it's 150#s. If I want more meat I can just shoot another one.

Size no longer matters to me unless it's huge (I'm still working on the one big enough to hang). I won't screw up my areas by shooting anything I won't mount until late in the season (Unfortunately I don't shoot in November or December[:@]). Even then you would be hard pressed to fill your available tags. Not that the deer won't co-operate, you would get sick of dealing with the deer after you got it.

About 13 years ago Va. went to unlimited tags. I shot ten deer and left them all in my freinds freezer. We would sit around a drink beer while we ran the whole deer through our processing station. That was the last time I think I shot more then three in a season? I no longer process the whole deer at the time of butchering. Meaning grinding things up. I can't tell you the last time I ate deer as a meal. I give the back straps away. What's left over I freeze in manageable chunks for processing later. When ready I will thaw a bag out and process it into jerky or stuff sausage links. I also give that stuff away or take it to parties. And yes, I have even qtred a few deer and drop them off to Hunters for the Hungry. You do get a $30 tax deduction.

I am purely into the sport of bow hunting. I prefer it ten fold over picking up a gun.





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I don't want to piss anybody off, but the notion of wasting the front shoulders really bothers me. The notion of just shooting another deer, so you can have more meat, and wasting those front shoulders too bothers me more. I guess that attitudes toward the game we take varies from place to place, especially where deer are very abundant. Just seems to be the epitome of laziness to waste anything that is so easy to make use of. It takes all of 10 minutes to filet the meat from the shoulder bones. Can't you hack it? Hell, I know if anybody I hunted with wasted the front shoulders, he would hear one ration of SH*T from me, and that would be the last time I hunted with him. If it's just too much trouble for you, at least try to give it to somebody else.

As for heart, I consider that to be one of the best tasting parts of the deer. If you like venison, you will like heart. I leave the liver, as I don't really like the taste, and nobody I know would take it, and there's the heavy metal concerns too.

We use all of the deer. We also have shot the small deer for the tender meat. My problem is why would you waste it after you kill it if you are only killing it for the tender meat. That's like buying a 12 pack and then drinking only 6 of them and throwing the rest away because they are at the bottom and not worth reaching down to get. Just get another 12 pack and grab the beer on top. Then you don't have to waste all the effort of reaching to the bottom.

It really does only take 15 to 20 minutes to cut out the meat off a shoulder. If the deer is small then it can take less time. You won't get what you will off a 150lb deer but you will get enough for another stick of sausage.

As this post shows it seems like everyone uses the shoulders except fieldmouse. Maybe fieldmouse you should rethink this. Spend the extra time to get all the meat of the animal you kill.

Part of the sport of bow hunting is making use of the animal. If you kill it use it. Don't waste it.

And here I thought we were going to be discussing weather when I first opened this post. Like many of the others I do not waste anything and tend to use as much of the animal as possible.

We waste very very little. We grind the next and shoulders up for chili. If its is a large deer we smoke the ribs even. Then the dogs get to feast on bone. We will freeze the bones and give to the dogs over the next month or so.


EB

I don't generally bother with the small amount of meat between the ribs, but use everything else. I take the heart and liver and cook them up for my beagles. They love it more then I do and they deserve something good from my hunts, every now and then.