well, no PM came-- so here's my response:
To butcher a cow:
You'll need some heavy artilery to put one down. We most often use a slug, but have also used a .22 Mag. Really, anything bigger than a .22 long should do the work- shoot right in the center of the skull- and they should go down. Once they got down, their artery will buldge from the side of the neck, and you can slit it with a knife to bleed them out. Cut the hock to hang, and make sure you have a good strong double tree.
The gutting process can happen one of two ways: The first way is to skin the animal on the ground, and gut it there as well- then lift up. The other way is to life the animal with the front end loader or a fork lift- and gut it from the bottom up- dropping the insides into the front end loader of another tractor. This works the best, as otherwise you'll be left with quite a heavy load in a stock tank. Gut them completely out like you would any other species, and wash down with clean water and a hose.
To skin- you again do this like any other animal-- start at the hock and cut down to however far you want to go down on the neck- discard the head and skin. Skinning works best warm. It's best to do this in the winter time, and in a place you can let the animal hang for atleast 7 days to cure.
Once you get the animal skinned, we always start by taking the front shoulders off. The shoulders we usually cut into a few roasts-- and the rest goes into burger.
The next step we make is to take the loin off- we rarely keep any of our home processed cuts bone in-- and so we remove the loin-- cutting from the hind quarters down along the backbone-- slicing inward until the entire loin gets cut off. These are made into ribeyes, NY Strips, butterflys, and loin roasts. Don't forget the T-loin on the inside-=- best cut of meat on any animal.
After the loins, and shoulders are off- we move to the rib cage and neck-- deborn all of this into chunks and turn into burger. Again, we keep zero bones when we do it ourself.
All of the above is performed while the carcass is still whole, and hanging, except the shoulders which are removed to process.
Once you get everything from the non- round portion-- then tie the legs up good, and remove the carcass bones. lower the two back legs and cut roasts off, or steaks, or whatever you want. Burger the rest.
I am struggling to come up with words for the ways that we do things- as we have our own style and methods= that basically get used on any animal that we butcher. For the most part these things are move, and objects that we take for granted, and like most things that get explained-- are far easier to show you in person one on one-- than to type out in words.
If you have an more specific questions- let me know I'll do my best to answer them.
As to the actual cutting of the meat- It all depends on what want and what you eat. Around here, we savor our loins, make roasts from the hind quarters, and burger the rest-- regardless of what species we butcher. Pretty standard proceedures. You can make this process as hard or complicated as you want to; we prefer as easy and quick as we can-- and to take up the least ammount of freezer space. We have access to a meat saw, but it's so hard to clean and such as mess-- that we prefer doing everything with hand saws and knives.
One thing to note_ if you intend to make T-bones, or products with bone in-- you'll need a clean chainsaw, or sawsall to split the carcass...
I would be the first to watch!
