I appreciate all the insight everyone has shared. I suppose we’re mostly getting them at least quartered before rigor sets in.
I grew up eating almost no other red meat at home besides deer and elk and while my mom is a great cook she always cooked deer all the way through. I discovered, probably from reading here, that it would generally be much more tender and milder flavored if cooked no more than medium. I’d say that in the last 10 years or so that has probably done more to improve our game for the table than any other factor.
I have also always heard about pheasants being tough and stringy but I have never found that to be the case. Of course after reading this thread I realize that we’ve been inadvertently aging them all these years. We always clean our birds at the end of the day, skin and gut them. But we always put them in a dedicated ice chest full of ice and water. The sloshing around in the back of the truck helps wash the carcasses and they’re usually in the ice water for 3 to 5 days by the time we’re done with our 3 day hunt and make the 13 hour drive home and then get around to butchering them up.
Of course I think some times with anything you can just get a bad one. Dad killed a huge old mulie one year that we skinned and hung for over a week before he was cut up. It was the strongest smelling and tasting venison of any I’ve ever seen and took him most of a year to cook and feed to his old bird dog. On another occasion my uncle killed an old warrior of a 7x6 bull elk which also was cooled promptly and hung for over a week. Didn’t smell or taste bad, but was akin to eating a tire it was so tough. A raghorn 5x was killed by the same uncle out on the ranch that was very strong and gamey. He watched him come at a fast trot for almost two miles before he ran within range and he rolled him with one shot.
I think some times you just get unlucky even if you do everything more or less “right”.
