Yeah, they recover from the rut pretty quickly, especially if there's plenty of feed.
The general Montana rifle season opens about three weeks into October, depending on where Saturday lands that year. Most mature bulls have left the cows by then, but they're worn down. A friend calls them "blue-meated bulls," because their meat has a purplish tinge and often a musky flavor. But when they quit chasing cows (and younger bulls away from their cows) they try to find a place with good grass and rest and eat, so put weight back on pretty quickly. The earliest I've taken a mature bull (the one mentioned in my previous post) during rifle season was November 3, and the meat looked and tasted fine, but was a little chewy, because the weather was too warm to let it age long. Which is why Eileen has been using it as a "test case" for some of her tenderizing recipes.
Don't have as much experience with moose, but what we do have indicates their "meat cycle" in the fall is similar to elk. We've killed bulls from early September (the earliest an Alaskan bull I took on September 3rd) to early November, and again the early and late ones have been fine. But they rut about the same time as elk, which does affect the meat.
I've done quite a bit of caribou hunting, but all before the rut starts in mid-September, and they were all fine. Hunters who live up there, however, including Inuits in Canada, say bulls can get so bad during the rut that even sled dogs won't eat 'em.
Mule deer often get a little raunchy during the rut as well, and the big bucks are the worst. The meat can acquire that same sort of musky flavor as in bull elk, and like off-flavors in many game animals seems to settle into the connective tissue. I much prefer eating bucks killed before the second week in November; bucks from October or the first week in November are usually very good. In fact we've fed them to people who refused to believe the meat came from a big mule deer.
After that they can get iffy. Eileen killed a 5x6 buck many years ago on November 17th, the peak of the rut, and while the big muscles that make up steaks and roasts were good, even the tiny amount of connective tissue in the burger had some musky flavor--and it grew more obvious the longer it was frozen. After six months we had to make sausage out of the remaining burger.
But she also killed a pretty big 3x3 a few years ago on the next-to-last day of the rifle season, which that year was November 27th. He was so rutted out there wasn't a speck of fat on his body, and we thought he'd have to be all sausage. But after a few days of aging, the meat was not only tender but mild-flavored--and even the burger stayed that way. So there are always exceptions.
Like you, we've rarely noticed any change in the flavor of rutting whitetails, and we've killed quite a few late in November after they've been rutting hard for a while. Which is one reason I sometimes tear myself away from hunting mule deer in Montana toward the end of the season, and go for a whitetail buck instead.
Have also hunted pronghorns from New Mexico to Montana, during seasons from late August to early November, and have yet to find the rut affects the taste of bucks. But not cooling the meat down promptly in warm weather sure can!
“Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.” John Steinbeck
