Rick,
Yep, we have yet to get an off-flavored whitetail buck even when they're taken during the peak of the rut, whether in Montana or elsewhere. And I have taken hard-rutting whitetails in many other places, from Old Mexico to Canada, including several eastern states and provinces. Dunno why their flavor doesn't deteriorate during the rut like mule deer, but there it is
Of course, one of the other factors in buying sausage or jerky from a processor is that quite often the trim-scraps that that get thrown into the grinder are often from a bunch of deer, not the hunter's. Many suffer from poor field care, so the rut may not be the only factor--which is one reason we make all our own sausage and jerky. One guy we know does venison-cooking workshops,. He says that maybe 25% of the deer meat he's been brought as "samples" for workshops is actually fit to cook, particularly in states where seasons take place in warmer weather. But a lot of the deer have also obviously been gut-shot, or had the guts punctured during field-dressing.
When Eileen was writing SLICE OF THE WILD, her big-game cookbook that includes everything from field care to recipes, we decided to take a couple of our deer to local processorsrecommended by friends, because we never had before, and she needed to know what might happen. One of them did not follow Eileen's directions for the cuts on her deer, though the meat was fine and we're pretty sure it was the young mule deer buck she' taken. But the meat we got back from the other processor was obviously not from my deer, another young mule deer buck, because some packages included small chunks of sagebrush. Obviously the processor hadn't made sure the meat was clean, but I'd also killed my buck in the middle of a lodgepole pine thicket up in the mountains, far from any sagebrush.
