JeffyD;
Good afternoon to you sir, thanks for the comment, I appreciate it.
Somehow at an early age I ended up being the kid in the family that'd help Dad process chickens, geese, hogs and moose. My siblings weren't into it at all and maybe it was something that the young me saw as a place I could be useful? Not sure what the motivation was truly, but the one day I was allowed to skip school was moose skinning day when Dad and his brother my beloved Uncle Frank got back from their annual moose hunt in "the bush" along the central Saskatchewan/Manitoba border.
When I started to really get into hunting the first time I moved out to BC in '81 my hunting buddies seemed to hang back when it came to gutting and skinning, so fairly quickly I became the "community evisceration specialist" I guess you could say.
In '89 when my wife and I were both hunting and we hung out with a group who also did, our meat cutter retired and sold his place, so we bought a 22 cubic foot fridge for cooling animals, started buying knives and cutting boards and began to process not only ours but help our friends as well. We had a garage and were sort of set up for it, so it wasn't a huge imposition to help out that way.
When we moved to our rural property that group grew a bit larger for about a decade and a half, so again we got a lifetime of meat cutting compressed into a shorter time. I want to say our busiest year was 13 or 14 deer, a sheep, a few bears and a moose.
Again I'm sorta wired to find fulfilment in being able to be useful in practical ways for others, so it ticked a few boxes in my life personally. Honestly the rewards outweighed the effort several times over for me.
Anyways that's my gutting, debarking, making it into pieces background and I'm certain it's not unique in a place like this.
I will say that I've just "sort of" learned to fillet fish properly in the last couple of years - so that took more than half a century.
Thanks again and all the best.
Dwayne
