I have a lot of people ask me why I bother taking the time to do a lot of things myself, that nearly everyone else pays another to do for them.
This is the ribcage of Claire’s deer, attached to the spine, with a boned out leg above it. There is meat left on the deer, but only connective bits, and the meat between the ribs which I only save on yearlings. I take off everything else and pack it up for us. What is left, is for Piper.
I had stayed on at my Parent’s after Thanksgiving, planning on processing their deer for them. That gave them all of the meat, and left me with the bones for my dog. They decided that they wanted the bucks primarily made into sausage and ground meat, so they were just going to pay a professional processor to take care of it for them.
My dad was going to drop them off on Monday, so I asked him to request of the butcher, that the bones be saved for my dog. Weight wise it is not much and you can fit a big buck into a 13 gallon kitchen sized garbage bag once I am done with it.
When my dad got to the office, he said the butcher had given him the bones from two deer he had just finished boning out, and he had put the two bags into my vehicle.
When I got home, and opened the back of my vehicle, there were two bags. Big heavy duty lawn waste ones, heavy ply so sharp sticks cannot poke through them. I went to grab both to sling over my shoulder, but could not lift them both at the same time.
So I carried them, one at a time, to the back where Piper’s run is. I was wondering just how huge these deer had to have been for the bones to weigh this much.
The weight was not bones.
The weight was meat.
Not spoiled meat. Just minimal meat removed from the animals.
Piper is thrilled. I am a bit sickened at the whole thing. What should have been less than 25 pounds of bones from each animal, is about 50 pound bags of waste that was going to go into a dumpster.
I checked both over, found where the animals had been shot, and both deer had clean wounds through both sides of the rib cages. No damage to the legs. The only meat taken was the tenderloins (likely by the hunters themselves), backstraps, shoulders (and a crappy job at that, they did not take the time to fillet the meat off of the shoulder blades, leaving .5-1″ of meat all the way around it) and the big rounds off of the rear legs. They did not even take the time to defat and bone out the rumps, which are great steaks or roasts. None of the rib flank meat was taken, which is forgivable around the entry and exit wounds, but these were good sized deer, so no reason not to take the rest.
There was no issue with spoilage on any of it.
If this was all I did with a skinned deer, it would take me about 15 minutes to butcher and pack up the deer assuming no time grinding or making sausage.
I am not going to name the processor. Maybe the hunter requested that only the easiest to remove meat be packaged up for $150, and the rest could go to the landfill. Maybe that is what they are going to do with the deer my family is having them process. I won’t know as my dad told them they could garbage the leavings since he got those two big bags. I have to admit, this will carry Piper for quite a while, as she is a 40 pound dog and there is a hundred pounds of bones and meat for her to work through.
But it is something to remember: Just because someone is a professional, US Government licensed and approved processor of meat and wild game, does not mean they give two shits about what you did to procure your venison. If you do something yourself, maybe you do not have some official stamp of approval from the government that you know what you are doing, but having that stamp from them just means that you paid them for it and passed some government approved qualifications which have nothing to do with the job you do later.
If you are not going to do it yourself, know the person doing the work, talk to them about it, and trust them.
Or do it yourself. Honestly, it is not that hard.
