The Art of Self-Reliance - Processing Deer

It was something that I grew up with.

I don’t know how young I was when I started doing it on my own. Maybe seven or eight. Before that I watched my older brothers. I watched my dad. For years. After years of watching them there wasn’t much of a learning curve when I started. It was simply a matter of doing what I had seen done time and again.

We had a spot under a persimmon tree. A low hanging limb with a couple wires attached to it served as a gambrel for hanging squirrels and rabbits. Getting small game, doves, and quail ready for my mom to cook was a normal part of life for a boy growing up in lower Alabama. At least it was for this one.

There were no deer here. Not when I was a kid growing up. You had to get up to the northern half of the county to find deer. There, even where you started getting into them, there weren’t that many. Does were totally illegal to shoot Statewide. Times have changed a lot in the deer count department since those earlier days.

I was a young man in the Army, stationed at Fort Campbell, when I killed my first deer.

Yes. I said killed.

Nowadays the supposedly acceptable word used is harvested. Like harvesting corn. Or harvesting potatoes. One of those agricultural words.

I honestly don’t understand how using the word harvested makes any real difference when you kill an animal. Maybe it does something to assuage the conscience of some people. Maybe it somehow mysteriously takes the killing aspect out of it and makes it more civilized. It honestly does nothing to change the minds of anti-hunters and PETA supporters about the people, process, and animals involved in hunting. It certainly does nothing to change the reality of what happens to the animal. The harvested animal is killed. Its life has been taken from it. Its life is over.

I think using the term harvest is entirely too impersonal. I refuse to use it to pacify anyone uncomfortable with the realities that killing an animal involves. Killing involves levels of personal interaction. Emotions are involved. It involves an extremely intimate exchange. It involves taking life. I refuse to impersonalize the realities involved by attaching a lesser, friendlier, more socially correct label to it. I refuse to think of it as anything other than what it is.

Hunting animals and personally processing them for food is an inherent part of our historical human nature. There is something about it. Something primal about it that connects us with our roots, shows us how intricately dependent we are upon nature, reminds us of both who and what we are, and affirms our humanity is a positive way.

The vast majority of modern men and women are totally out of touch with this dimension of natural life. The extent of their meat handling is to pick something out of the cooler at the store then unwrap it and cook it. The idea of killing an animal, gutting an animal, smelling the smell of the animal’s internal parts, skinning an animal, cutting it into its various parts, then using its life to sustain their own is foreign to them. Handling guts and getting blood on their hands just isn’t an interest for the vast majority of modern men and women.

Lost, with the lack of interest, are the skills necessary to accomplish all the related tasks involved.

That first deer that I killed in the Army over forty years ago?

I had processed an untold number of rabbits and squirrels but I had never processed a deer. It was a learning curve and I’ve got to tell you that I did a real butcher of a job on that one. Pitiful. There is a lot more to working a deer than a squirrel.

How many deer since then?

I don’t know for sure. Seventy or eighty is a reasonable guess. The only processing I’ve ever had done for me is in the sausage making department. Making sausage is something I want to do … and have the equipment to do the job … and will do now that finding the time to do it is not the problem that it has been over the years.

I have, needless to say, gotten a lot better at processing over the years. I don’t have a fancy set up for processing. Once the deer is quartered, put into a cooler, and iced down I generally let it bleed out a few days then bring it into the house a piece or two at a time and use the kitchen sink and counter to do the job. I’ve noticed the past few years that the height of the counter and my own height don’t quite jive. Holding my head tilted forward gives my neck fits now that some age is catching up with me. It would be nice if the counter was 6 inches higher or I was 6 inches shorter. Working on this batch I made use of a stool that brought that distance closer together. It was a little awkward at first but worked out pretty good.

Processing a deer, or any game animal for that matter, isn’t difficult. It’s mainly a matter of tracing the lines, dissecting, separating the various muscles, then slicing what you want out of them. There are plenty of books, websites, and Youtube videos on processing all sorts of wild game.

I’ve found that the best way to deal with the front shoulders is to bone them out, clean them up a little, and turn them into ground. There is a lot of meat on the front shoulders and the sad reality is that a lot of hunters nowadays don’t care to fool with them. I don’t bother double grinding it. I run it through once and leave it a little coarse. A little coarser makes for a better pot of chili.

I don’t spend a lot of time cleaning up the meat that I am going to grind. Nor am I too picky about the bloodshot. Trim the worst of it. Remove as much of the silver skin, gnarly, and sinew that can be easily removed. Cut it into cubes. Run it through the grinder. I’ve never had a problem with sinew building up on the blade or clogging the grinding plate on the first grind. The only time this has been a problem is when I’m doing a second finer grind with the finer plate.

Save the hard fat from the deer.

This is one of the parts of the deer that most simply throw into the garbage. The better thing to do with it is to save it, bag it, freeze it, and, when you have a little time, render it and turn it into tallow. Deer tallow is a valuable commodity with multiple uses. I simply put the hard fat into a lidded pot, cover it with water, simmer it for a couple hours, strain it through a cloth, then set it on the porch overnight to do its thing. The hard tallow comes to the top and sets up. Run a sharp blade around the sides, lift it out, scrape the meat particles and soft mealy matter from the bottom of the hunk, and give it a little rinse.

Learning to procure and process your own meat is one of the smartest things anyone can do. Not only as a matter of survival in a difficult situation but more so as part of the art of living a self-reliant lifestyle.

Having the tools and owning the skills to accomplish the task involves some expenditure of time and resources. Processing the meat requires a commitment of time. The investments of time and resources are well-spent and over time those investments come back multiplied many times over.