Quartering

[03A2]

I, like most, was taught to gut a game animal immediately.  This fall I found myself in a nasty, brush choked hole with a large muley and had an idea.  I skinned one side, removed those two quarters, the backstrap, cleaned up the neck and ribs, rolled it over and repeated.  Once that meat was cleaned up and in my pack, I gutted it, took out the tenderloins and trimmed the ribs a bit more.  I didn't leak urine on my hindquarters, and I didn't wade around in a gut pile for an hour.  I did nick the stomach lining while cutting off one of the hind quarters, but I managed to keep it together until I finished.  Anybody else do it this way?  I really thing I butchered it quicker and cleaner this way.

[Snareman]

x

[elmer]

I often just take the quarters and backstraps on pigs, but our recordkeeping requires weighing the deer field dressed so I can't use the gutless method on deer.

[bilmac]

When I used to bone out critters so that I could backpack them out, I would skin them, without gutting, from the belly center line to the middle of the back. Then remove the meat from that side. Then roll them over and repeat. When I was young I could haul all the meat from an elk in one pack load. Deer were an easy load. It took a long time to do this in the field, but to me it was not time wasted, because it was the first steps in butchering.

[buck460XVR]

  However in MN we can't dispose our carcass in the "wild" but at the dump, so I gut the deer and bring the rest in.

Here in Wisconsin, we can dispose of the carcass in the wild, but need to have the deer intact in order to register it. In some of the places I hunt this means an all day drag to get a mature buck out.