I have yet in my long years of elk hunting seen a cow that weighs 500+ pounds and I have killed a lot of them and I have yet to get more than 150 pound of meat out of one.
Butchering beef ( of which I have done more than a few) is different than butchery elk. Completely different yields.
This exactly. If you get 150 pounds of meat from a cow elk on a regular basis, you are keeping a lot of fat and other junk in the meat to add pounds.
Some of the Arizona and New Mexico cows are pretty big, because they do not have as rough of winters in many spots. However, there are not a lot of them that will produce 150+ pounds of well-trimmed, processed meat.
