It feels kind of weird to be about to shoot a deer. You definitely hesitate, but you're mostly focused on waiting for a good opportunity to take the ethical shot, and you're excited about being able to harvest it. It was nothing really bad for me. I started about a decade ago - my now wife got me into it.
Antlers are nice but we don't put much stock into that. We'll hold off on antlerless harvest for the opening morning so as not to disturb the forest for people nearby who care about that more. But then after that we'll shoot a buck or a doe if we see one.
Whoever shot it is the main person to gut the deer and clean it, and the others just assist. We butcher it for steaks and bring the scraps to a place that does meat grinding for pretty cheap and also can make you summer sausage, bratwurst and things like that. Those are all a lot cheaper to get made than what it costs at the store. We might get like a meat grinder and sausage casings etc. at some point, but after you just hunted that feels like a lot. We don't get much time off work.
Last year my father in law and I got some chest-high waders, crossed a river and a swamp, and tried to take deer from a strip of inaccessible public land adjacent to some local petty bourgeoise psychopaths who refuse to properly manage the deer on their land, have an overpopulation of does, and lose their fucking minds when people kill a doe near them because they have a child's understanding of "more doe make big antlered buck". It really doesn't work that way for several reasons.
The intent was to take the bag limit of 6 does and donate all but one of them to this food charity nearby that accepts deer. When we got there all the deer were totally bedded down and the surrounding area was dead quiet, we probably heard 4 shots the whole day versus 200 to 300 in years prior. We'll get them next time - might try again this year. Climate change is fucking with their movement patterns though.
We get all those steaks, ground and sausages and keep it in a chest freezer. We give 1 or 2 pounds to a bunch of our friends and like 5 or 10 pounds to friends who are feeling those meat prices right now. We keep about half the deer I'd say.
It's the majority of our red meat throughout the year. It's really not gamey at all, because we promptly gut, cool, and clean the deer. Deer have fat but it's always trimmed because it doesn't taste good. The tenderloins are amazing and melt like butter. The steaks are so good- gotta be careful but if you time it right they're amazing. For burgers or other less-seasoned dishes, ground venison is maybe not the best, but in chili, pasta sauce, indian dishes and stuff like that, it's perfect. In some recipes you gotta add butter, tallow, or whatever you want to adjust for the leanness of venison.
Yeah I butchered the deer that I killed, I guess I should have mentioned that. I think the adrenaline of killing the first deer and the fact that the sun was almost down, it was cold, and I had to gut it and pack it out 3+ miles made it just feel like work and the urgency to do everything right and not waste anything felt really important... I took a moment to process my feelings, but I had put in so many hours and miles at that point that I was just really stoked. Eating the tenderloin that night was really nice. I think it set in the first time I cooked a meal, and then for a few weeks after I was processing the violence of taking the shot and watching a frightened and confused animal take its final steps.
But, it is a shitload of organic, freerange, blah blah blah meat that doesn't support anything besides the ammunition manufacturer.
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It feels kind of weird to be about to shoot a deer. You definitely hesitate, but you're mostly focused on waiting for a good opportunity to take the ethical shot, and you're excited about being able to harvest it. It was nothing really bad for me. I started about a decade ago - my now wife got me into it.
Antlers are nice but we don't put much stock into that. We'll hold off on antlerless harvest for the opening morning so as not to disturb the forest for people nearby who care about that more. But then after that we'll shoot a buck or a doe if we see one.
Whoever shot it is the main person to gut the deer and clean it, and the others just assist. We butcher it for steaks and bring the scraps to a place that does meat grinding for pretty cheap and also can make you summer sausage, bratwurst and things like that. Those are all a lot cheaper to get made than what it costs at the store. We might get like a meat grinder and sausage casings etc. at some point, but after you just hunted that feels like a lot. We don't get much time off work.
Last year my father in law and I got some chest-high waders, crossed a river and a swamp, and tried to take deer from a strip of inaccessible public land adjacent to some local petty bourgeoise psychopaths who refuse to properly manage the deer on their land, have an overpopulation of does, and lose their fucking minds when people kill a doe near them because they have a child's understanding of "more doe make big antlered buck". It really doesn't work that way for several reasons.
The intent was to take the bag limit of 6 does and donate all but one of them to this food charity nearby that accepts deer. When we got there all the deer were totally bedded down and the surrounding area was dead quiet, we probably heard 4 shots the whole day versus 200 to 300 in years prior. We'll get them next time - might try again this year. Climate change is fucking with their movement patterns though.
We get all those steaks, ground and sausages and keep it in a chest freezer. We give 1 or 2 pounds to a bunch of our friends and like 5 or 10 pounds to friends who are feeling those meat prices right now. We keep about half the deer I'd say.
It's the majority of our red meat throughout the year. It's really not gamey at all, because we promptly gut, cool, and clean the deer. Deer have fat but it's always trimmed because it doesn't taste good. The tenderloins are amazing and melt like butter. The steaks are so good- gotta be careful but if you time it right they're amazing. For burgers or other less-seasoned dishes, ground venison is maybe not the best, but in chili, pasta sauce, indian dishes and stuff like that, it's perfect. In some recipes you gotta add butter, tallow, or whatever you want to adjust for the leanness of venison.
Yeah I butchered the deer that I killed, I guess I should have mentioned that. I think the adrenaline of killing the first deer and the fact that the sun was almost down, it was cold, and I had to gut it and pack it out 3+ miles made it just feel like work and the urgency to do everything right and not waste anything felt really important... I took a moment to process my feelings, but I had put in so many hours and miles at that point that I was just really stoked. Eating the tenderloin that night was really nice. I think it set in the first time I cooked a meal, and then for a few weeks after I was processing the violence of taking the shot and watching a frightened and confused animal take its final steps.
But, it is a shitload of organic, freerange, blah blah blah meat that doesn't support anything besides the ammunition manufacturer.