Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Field dressing / deboning

Ain't figured out how to get the rib meat out doing the gutless method. Besides, it only takes a minuted to gut on.

True dat re time to gut. Gutless doesn't bleed out as well either making for more liquid in the meat. Re why do it: The most recent gutless I did was a horrible mess of gutshot. Hmmm... this is a time for gutless.

How? Peel the hide down from the back and zip between ribs to get rib meat. Easy.

Re rib meat: On some small deer, the rib meat is simply not worth trying to retrieve. A small buck last week had paper thin layers of meat wafered sporadically through heavy layers of fat, impossible to seperate from the less tasty tallow and in total not enough to mess with. I retrieved about 2/3 of the rib meat but after taking it home finaly tossed it all, both the strips from between ribs and the sheet layer cut off the outside with a fillet knife. On some deer however, there is plenty of meat on and between ribs and well worth retrieving. Like gutting method: decide when handling the specfic critter.

Not worth trying to retrieve has not much to do with game salvage laws. Leave rib meat on a deer in Alaska and watch what the brown shirts do.

Deer don't have much between the ribs but elk have enough to make it worthwhile. Idaho doesn't require taking it from between the ribs but I do it anyway.
On elk, I prefer to skin from the belly up unless it's too hard to turn over. The reason is that elk have very long hair on the neck and along the spine. It's very hard to keep it off the meat while skinning up only leaves the hair on the belly where there's very little meat anyway. I'll lay it on 1 side, skin what I can, then remove the meat. Roll it over on the hide and repeat. I've done it from the top down and also by slitting the hide end to end midway down, whatever's the easiest.

You can leave rib meat in Colorado. I take it on elk, but not deer.

As always, common sense reality bows to law, and we must comply.