Butchering other animals besides chickens

[picklespickles]

thanks for your response and everyone else's. it's making me feel like i can really do it.

 

[Mountain Man Jim]

Hey Pickles,

Sorry for butting in on your topic, the trolling for vegans comment got me off the sidelines.

Pickles wrote:

hey. i used to make tofu for years and eat it regularly. still drink soy milk instead of cow milk. etc

I sound have known ... it seems few know the term vegan.

Peace ...​

 

[picklespickles]

i was a vegan full fledged (no meat, dairy, eggs, leather, etc.) for ten years. had to quit for health reasons purely. so now am healthier though fatter and dealing with preparing my own meats so that i can feel like they had a good life.

i made a joke about being a troll on a vegan site because i sort of felt like the folks who went out of their way to say blech were doing something similar on my thread.

i tried to be funny instead of saying bug off.

 

[Mountain Man Jim]

I see ... We have chickens for a similar reason. My will only eat eggs from our chickens because she knows they are happy and treated well (she's a vegan, PETA, etc). Now we know fresh eggs are the best and chickens are one of the greatest pets to have. Though we would never have any thoughts of eating our girls...

 

[crocodile girl]

I've killed cattle, sheep, deer, hogs, rabbits, anything you could possibly imagine. But the funny thing is, I have absolutely no clue how to gut and clean them for human consumption. I just hacked them up and tossed the parts into reptile enclosures...yum yum.

 

[Rosalind]

Deer. I don't do the killing, but I can do the butchering part. Also brain tanning the hide, because I don't like wasting any. If I'm going to do the tanning, I'd rather butcher it myself because I do a neater job of skinning. Don't like getting a hide that has all little bits of meat still on, that's twice as much scraping.

Also done vet surgery on, and dissected, frogs, pigs, rats, mice, various insects.

 

[Downinmyback]

I can guarantee that if you self butcher you will get better meat. Like i said i worked in a slaughterhouse for 13 years and the only thing important is SPEED. Where i worked a hog was frozen and in a package within 45 mins/
They have machines that deskin them and there are not enough USDA inspectors to watch everything. We only had three government inspector in a plant that worked over 2k workers so you know that shortcuts were used alot.
The only advice is until you get used to killing and butchering animals do not plan on eating what you killed for supper because the only thing you will see at the supper table is the dead animal not a cooked piece of meat.

 

[miss_thenorth]

Rosalind!!!! Very interested in brain tanning!! i read up on it a bit a while ago, and when my dh shot a bear--Iwanted to preserve tha carcass myself... Having two small kids at the time-- I never got around to it, but I've always kept it in the back of my mind as something I wanted to do. I too don't like wasting anything....

 

[NewGuineaChooks]

Hmm, I wouldn't know how to kill it first, and certainly don't have the strength to hang up a large carcass to bleed out, etc. But once my b-i-l brought home the deer last month, I watched him gut, skin, and butcher it, and honestly, I found myself thinking "Gee, that's not too hard! Its like a giant chicken with 2 extra legs replacing the wings."

I don't know about the deer, but with the pig butchered in the fall, they have a lower/front 'pelvic?' bone you have to break when you're cleaning out the guts, below the tail.. ....that's the only big difference I saw compared to a chicken.

 

[picklespickles]

there is really, really excellent goat butchering explanations and very, very good photos on homesteading today.