Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Why don't guys field dress their deer?

I haven't hung a buck in years. Everything comes out quartered and in game bags. I could care less about the guy who kills a trophy on the beach, in a clearcut, or on the side of the road. More power to them though if that make them happy. Killing them in the mountains on a difficult hunt is what floats my boat.

How did you get the tenderloins inside the lumbar spine without opening it.

There's a place I go where public ground backs up to private and I can kill a decent white tail every time I hike in. No one else will go back in there because they don't want to work that hard for a whitetail. There is something uniquely satisfying about a 7 mile or so round trip to shoot a deer that most only want to put a foot outside their truck to shoot.

You sound like my type of person. I enjoy the extra sweat when needed.

I also appreciate loading one on and taking back to camp on the samurai. And then a nice mixed drink while hanging it and anotehr after skinning and gutting.

OTOH if headed home in a hurry and its cool, not uncommon to rip the guts and grab two 20 pound bags of ice and toss in cavity and leave deer in the bed of the truck in the camper....only a 2 hour drive.

Come out west and pack an elk out by yourself. You will swear you'll never do that again.........until next year! lol There is a true satisfaction in hunting and packing solo that many will never experience.

Very likely. I went on my first real deer hunt when I was in college 32 years ago in middle Georgia and killed my first deer. It then occurred to me that we had to "do something" with the dead deer and when I mentioned it my hosts said, "we'll take it to the processor", and thus I was introduced to the concept. It cost about $35 in those days to take a deer in whole and come back in a few days and pick up your cubed steak and hamburger all nicely packaged for you. It is about $75 or $80 now depending on what you have done. Unless logistics dictate that you need to gut the deer to make it easier to drag out, if you are going to go the processor route, there is absolutely no need to gut it. Most guys I have hunted with go this way. I know guys who have hunted their whole lives, killed piles of deer, and never cleaned one.

It makes sense in a lot of ways. If you are working a job, have kids, and honey-dos, processing a deer takes time away from that, and you probably only get to hunt on the weekends as it is. Obviously because of the warm weather, hanging a deer and letting it age outdoors is off the table, so you are going to need coolers and ice or an extra fridge or some arrangement out of the norm. You will need a grinder if you want burger or sausage. The processors make all that go away for a reasonable fee.

I do my own because 1) I have the time 2) I am picky and nerdy about making sure the meat I get was from the deer I killed, and 3) I am a cheap bastid! I've saved enough on processing fees over the years to somewhat offset the gas, license and lease fees, and other expenses that come with hunting...probably about 3 grand over a decade.

Even so, I don't gut the deer in the "field" because would you believe it, the place I get to hunt now forbids it because the owner does not want "guts and carcasses on his land". I could try and explain to him that the yotes and buzzards would clean it all up over night but choose to keep my mouth shut and just thank him for letting me hunt because the hunting on this property is tremendous and it does not cost me much. Plus with the temps as they are now, if you open one up in daylight hours, the blowflies will just about take it from you, which personally grosses me worse than one possibly swelling a little before I can get to it. In my experience, that does not hurt a thing.

My home is very close to where I hunt so I take my deer back to the house and do everything there. Guts, heads and hides get buried in my garden.

As Mule Deer says, things are different in different areas of the country. I guess we all do what we have to do, what works best in each situation.