So, this is your only warning. If you are upset by images of dead animals, blood, etc., and you do not want to see pictures or read descriptions of dealing with DIY cow butchering, do not read through or scan further down this page.
Ok, here it is. You were warned.
Yup, that is a picture of a black angus cow bleeding out from a cut artery in the neck.
Friends of ours had an issue to deal with. They do pastured animals, nearly all of which you can walk up to and pet if you want to. Last year Jerid (husband in the pair Jerid & Katrina) purchased 10 animals from his father who was getting out of the beef business. He had them at a leased pasture for the summer, but discovered that one of the cows was expressing feral traits instead of the docile, domestic nature that is preferred. As a cattle farmer, if your cattle are not going to be kept in stock yards, standing hock deep in their own crap, behind high fences, you need to cull those wild-spirited animals out. In this case, the cow’s expression of the feral trait meant that she jumped fences and “lived off the land” in the woods and marshes of the area, shunning all contact, to the point of running away from anyone who came within visual sight of her. So Jerid and I had to hunt her. Quite literally. Not going to go into all the details of that, but it took us three hours to get her. We lucked out in the end and I was able to dispatch her with a knife near another farmer’s buildings after she was knocked out with a slug bounced off of the top of her skull, and he (this other farmer) was kind enough to assist us in moving her with a bobcat and chains, and even a sawzall to take the head off to finish bleeding her.
That is Jerid. 
Jerry (other farmer) got her up in the air for us. You really want to drain all of the blood out of these animals.
This is how fast the blood is still coming out about 20 minutes after I cut her throat. 
This is how it all looks sans head, once bleeding had slowed down enough to cut through the meat and skin with a knife, and then the spine with the saw.
Jerid called Katrina, once the cow was hanging to bleed out, so that she could come get us and the cow. We were a mile away from where we had parked our vehicle, and after hours of stomping through snow, marshes, woods, and buckthorn thickets, there was no way I was walking back to the car through all of that. She had to hook up a trailer to their truck, and drive out to where we were, which was about a 20 minute drive away from their farm. Gave us time to recover from our physical ordeal. Well, gave me time. Jerid has a physical stamina which I cannot match. Going through knee deep snow in fields, well, every quarter mile or so, he would have to stop to let me catch up because I would be 25-30 yards behind.
We got back to Jerid & Katrina’s at about 330 pm. Jerid and I had started all of this at about 11 am. A farm cat came to cuddle up on the hood of my jacket and I got a selfie in.
They had to rearrange their shed so that we could use the bobcat and chains to hang the animal later, in a temperature tolerable environment to do all of the meat work. We went inside for a bit to eat and coffee. Dinner was planned to be at 630. 
Gets dark early this time of year. I have gutted plenty of ruminant ungulates by flashlight. I needed to make sure I did this one carefully for a couple of reasons: One, this is a first for me only on the side of scale, being the guts from this animal weigh, by themselves, as much as most adult deer, secondly, knives this sharp would take one of my fingers down to the bone with just a small slip, and third, due to the other two issues, I was worried about puncturing things I really would not want to, and getting things on the meat I do not want there. 
Once the bung was tied tightly shut, and I had as much cleanly cut as I could reach by manually moving things around, I had them raise her up by a front foot so I could use gravity to do what my arms could not, which was get things out of the way so I could reach with a knife to finish detaching them from the abdominal cavity. Once that was done, gravity took over and it all slid out cleanly to the ground.
At this point I was working without my jacket, had my coveralls around my ankles, and shirt rolled up to my shoulders. Outside temp was about 10 degrees, but I was warm. Mostly, I did not want to have my clothes covered with blood and fat. Also, working that close to a body which holds that much heat, keeps you warm.
There it is. All clean, no punctures, no nasty mess. Sorry I have nothing in the pic to indicate how big a pile this is, but it is about 200 pounds, making it the size and weight of an adult doe deer.
Then I took out the heart, diaphram and lungs. Lungs and diaphram went to the farm cats. Heart is for us.
The steam coming off of the body made working a bit difficult. Kept steaming up my glasses and making it hard to see at all. 
When we were done with this part, it was 617 and we went in to have dinner. Got a picture of the cow, hanging in the shed, with Benji, when Jerid and I came back out to skin her after we were done eating dinner. This was at about 730.
Once we got going skinning, it went pretty smoothly. Gravity, once again, was a good help, and the sheer weight of the hide helped to pull it off, once we had worked one third of the way down the animal.
Jerid worked on one side, while I worked on the other, once I had it at that point.
We had the skin completely off by 915, then it was time to go inside for another break.
Just a closer shot of the cow before the meat cutting/sectioning started.
These are the knives I used. Same knives I use for cutting up deer. Only difference between the cow, and deer, was I needed to use a saw to get through bones.
Took the rib eyes off, both sides, in once piece each.
Ribs were a bit daunting. Finally decided to do them in two sections per side. Glad I made that decision. Each of those pieces was about 35 pounds. 
Remember the intro to The Flintstones? Yeah, that is how it looks, with a half side of full ribs. 
Jerid was wrapping sections up in cheese cloth and twine as I was sectioning up the animal. One side for them, one side for me. He has an unheated room in the shed that stays just above freezing where he is keeping his for a few weeks. 
There is my Nell, at midnight, once we were all done.
Me and my girls got home at about 1 am. The drive was a long slow one due to 2+ inches of unplowed new snow. Made it home safe, got a long night’s sleep in, and now we need to hang our pieces up here at our house. It was a lot of work, but that fills out, along with the two deer we got last weekend, our meat requirements for the year. Glad and happy to know, here in mid November, I really have the pressing food gathering done and finished for the year.
