Butcher poll

[Crow Hunter]

Self butcher here, also do my own burger and sausage.

[WIMN]

For those of you who self-butcher: I did my second deer ever this year, and felt like I spent more time making my meat look clean and presentable than I did actually skinning, quartering, and butchering the animal. Would it be ok to leave small amounts of silverskin left on some meat if you're going to grind it or get it turned into sausage? Or would it lower the quality of the product?

[CANOPY SAM]

WIMN. You can leave lots of stuff on the meat and it'll grind up just fine. Only thing I get real picky about is the tallow. That's all gotta go.

[paul pachowicz]

I'm the guy they bring em to.

[highlife4me]

I butcher my own, matter of fact I just did my buck I got with my muzzleloader this afternoon. Sure was nice being able to butcher outside on such a nice day.

[cold one]

We do all our own, from cutting and wrapping to smoking all the brats & sticks. We also cut up a few of the neighbors deer, it helps buy the extra toys for the butcher shop.

[JIvers]

I've been self-butchering for over ten years.

Through the late 1990s, a local locker just across the state line from Fillmore County would cut up deer and package them for $25, plus they kept the hide. Sausage and ground meat cost more. By all accounts, the deer you brought in for processing was what you got back. For all that and $25/deer, I let them do the work.

Then the locker changed hands. I think that happened before the CWD outbreak in Wisconsin, but I am not sure. The new owners jacked the prices up, and whether you got your own deer back was no longer certain.

I tried another local locker, and had a bad experience with them (I am sure I did not get my own deer back) that finally got me to go back to cutting up my own deer in the early 2000s. No way will I go back to having someone else do it, especially for what many places charge now.

[JIvers]

As I suggested in my last post, I know some lockers hundreds of miles from the CWD zone in Wisconsin used the outbreak as an excuse to no longer process deer.

A lot of lockers hate doing deer: the hair gets everywhere, many deer are in very bad condition when they arrive at the locker, and people expect "a hundred lbs. of raw meat from a one hundred lb. deer", to quote an in-law who owns a locker and used CWD as a reason/excuse to stop taking deer. Other lockers raised their prices dramatically for the same reason.

Another reason to be wary of lockers is that you do not always get your deer back. Some lockers throw all their cuts of deer meat for the day in a bin, with a note on about how many loins, roasts, or whatever your deer contributed to the tub. At the end of the day parts are portioned out, and even if you treated your deer right you still run the risk of getting someone else's gut-shot, dirty, or rotten deer instead of your own.

A final straw for me was when some meat, supposedly from a buck I killed cleanly with a double-lung slug shot, came back from a local locker obviously tainted. I ended up throwing some cuts out because they stank so bad--others were fine. The next year I went back to butchering my own deer, and have not had a problem since.

[buddha]

Self butcher. We make ring and stick sausage too. Made 220 rings last weekend and will make summer sausage this spring. It's a fun hobby for sure.

[Eric Wettschreck]

The group I hunt with is myself, 3 brothers, and and their kids. This year we ended up with 9 deer. We skin em in my garage the evening we get home from hunting and let em hang for a bit. Then we set up the butcher table and get busy. It goes pretty well when you have 4 adult males cuttin stuff up, some kids grinding, and the wimmins cooking chili and packaging everything.

My garage is heated, well lit, I have good tunes and a TV out there for when Sportscenter is on. It works out real well for us. When it's all said and done, we lay everything out on the table, divie it out equally, and start trading. Some guys want more burger than steaks and vice versa.

Butcher day has turned into as much of a tradition for us as the hunting has. We have such an operation going on that other people always stop by and check us out. One feller in town had a couple hanging in his garage this year and was going to bring them to the locker until he saw our production line. He grabbed his couple of deer, got a couple of knives, and saved a ton of dough.