Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting why do people not gut deer right away?

can't figure this one out. I gut every animal that i'm planning to eat as soon as I get to it. I can't figure why anyone would not do this. I want the blood out of my deer or bear as soon as possible. when I was young the first time I was around hog butchering they shot one,and stuck him right away to drain the blood. if it wasn't for scalding them they would have just gutted them right away.


I have had to look for a few deer that I have shot and finding one 6hrs later then gutting the meat holds a lot more blood.

I'm with ya.' I was at the butcher shop just Wednesday dropping off a doe I shot when 2 fellas pulled in with a decent buck in the back of the truck - ungutted.

I hang and quarter my deer within 30 minutes of shooting, but I never gut mine unless I fuuck up and gut shoot it. I always gutted mine before a guy showed me it was a waste of time.

If you don’t gut a deer, how do you get the tenders?

Yeah, that just doesn't make sense, if for no other reason that the deer's a lot heavier to drag out if it's ungutted. I always gut 'em right where they fall, and as soon as I possibly can. We've got wolves up here, and they wouldn't think twice about getting some easy eats.

No reason for me to gut a deer. Get it back to skinning rack and take meat off the bone. To get inner loins, let guts sag a bit and get em.

Bingo.....same for me. I can have one back to the skinning rack within minutes of laying my hands on it so never seen the need to gut one unless it was going to be a very long drag.

Firm believer that 3 things are required for truly good (tender and flavorful) venison steaks and roasts:
1. Field dressing asap to start getting the heat and fluids out
2. Clean the cavity out as soon as I can get the deer hung, flushed with hose and sprayed with saline solution
3. Let hang for several days, so long as the temperatures are in lower 30's. If weather is to cold or to warm, off they go to a shop that has cooler that can hang and age for at least 5 days prior to processing.
The tenderloins often get consumed earlier.
Any deer that can't get properly aged is processed into several kinds of sausage.
I put a lot of effort into keeping my venison cleaned of hair, blood, and fat. [u][/u]
The work really starts right after the shot.

The key to quality venison is timely heat removal.
The sooner you can get the carcass cooled, the better and less gamey the meat is going to be. Gutting is the easiest way to remove the most heat from the carcass. The next most important step is to remove the skin.

That gamey taste? Really not much to do with "game". It's really the taste of spoilage.

a12 said it all. Fug a bunch of gutting unless it’s gut shot.

Curious how blood moves into/out of muscle once the heart stops? I understand blood can diffuse a bit around a wound channel but other than that????? The vessels at the top of the heart are the only connection to muscle tissue within the visceral cavity and again, once there's no blood pressure there isn't much blood moving. Gravity will of course move blood out of the visceral cavity but gravity doesn't move much blood out of actual muscle tissue. If you take a freshly killed game animal, get a pristine (not shot up) rear or front quarter hanging quickly and then lay some cardboard or a bunch of paper towels under it you can leave it for days without much dripping out.

While we're on the subject of "bleeding" game animals, I'm reasonably certain that those who insist on "slitting the throat" of an animal that's already dead are also guilty of eating their own boogers as adults.

I gut mine just to make them lighter

Or the taste of "Overcooking/Under-Basting".

I was sitting up on a hill in north Texas years ago. I saw a guy shoot a buck, get out take off his coat, put on some arm length plastic gloves, get his knife out, walk over to deer to gut it. When he got about 10’ from that buck, it jumped up and hauled ass, hopped over on our lease. It ran a couple hundred yards, fell over dead. He looked up when he heard me laughing. I will never forget him standing there like he lost his best friend. I went down there, helped him drag it back to his side of the fence. That was thirty years ago.

I quit gutting deer a few years ago. I hang em, skin em, take the backstrap and debone the hindquarters and some of the shoulder meat. Then we put the meat on ice for a few days, draining off the water occasionally. If it’s a gamey buck, we’ll salt the ice (a tip I got from a lady hog hunter).

The gamey taste isn’t spoilage. It’s in the blood. That’s what a few days on the salt and ice do, is to remove the blood.

Many years ago I spent some time trying to get within range of a big buck who loved eating wild onions. He often fed in a big patch of them. Finally got him. His blood had a strong onion odor. My hands smelled like onions after I cleaned and deboned him and so did the meat when we cooked it. I think 3 or 4 days of the meat in salted ice might have made that meat edible.

The grandson killed a big stinking hog last season. I’d have thrown it away, but he was a starving college kid and wanted the meat. That’s when I first tried the salted ice soak. After a couple of days, the wife cooked a bit of backstrap just to see how it tasted. It was great. Not at all gamey/stinky.

Try it.

Wether gutting of boning out, it important to do I it quickly. I get a kick out of guys that Don t gut their critter for some time.Don't remove the wind pipe, if they do, or gut it and drag it through the dirt for a ways. And oh yes, break the bladder and scatter pee all over, and wonder why their meat doesn't taste good. Almost forgot to mention driving around with it in the truck for 12 hours to show it off. Meat preparation is an art, and it starts when the critter hits the ground. I wouldn't want to eat half the deer i see other people kill either.

Once you kill an animal and the heart stops beating, you are not going to be getting any more blood out of the animal's muscle tissue. In the hog butchering situation, the old timers (like my Grandpa) would shoot them in the head with a 22 and then stick or cut the throat ASAP like you are describing....attempting to bleed them while the heart was still beating its last few times and they would get blood out that way. When you shoot an animal with a rifle it usually lives for a short time........they either run, or lay on the ground kicking for a few seconds. During that time, they are bleeding out what they are going to bleed. When you gut the deer, you see the result of that but are not enhancing it.

I've seen guys who will go up to a deer they just shot and cut the throat to bleed it. It does not hurt anything but its basically a waste of time.....because the pump is no longer working.

As to your original question, I've answered it probably 3 times before. I don't gut deer in the woods for a couple of reasons:

One, I have access to a lease 30 minutes from my house which is the best hunting situation I have ever been in and probably ever will be. One of the stipulations in the contract is that we are not allowed to leave guts on the property.

Two, during the best part of hunting season here, temps vary from hot to very hot. I killed one early in October at around 7 am and the temp was probably 80 headed for 90. Had I opened it up, every blowfly in the county would have swarmed me and the deer. I don't like that. Since we have to get the deer on ice ASAP, those of us who process our own deer usually do everything at once by taking the deer someplace we can hang it for skinning and butchering......hopefully out of the flies.

Fail to understand why some make a big deal out of gutting a deer. It takes less than 5 minutes, with a good knife, and rids the carcass of the stuff that can cause the most problems.
As others have noted, its the single best step to initiate cooling, critically important to making great venison.
The coyotes and crows gotta eat to.
I understand that those who hunt in hot weather might have an entirely different situation than we enjoy here north of the Mason Dixon line. I regard 70+ degree weather as time to go fishing, not hunting.

Don't know, I can saw the chest cavity open with a folding limb saw I keep in a cargo pocket on my hunting pants and have the guts out of a buck deer in two minutes, have also found out gutpiles DO NOT bother other deer, have seen it firsthand, BOOM, dump the guts and go.

Don't get it either, even if the "drag" involves an atv or other vehicle. The steam that rolls out of the body cavity should tell you all you need to know.