“The hunt’s not over until the meat has been properly cared for,” Stated Bob Rob. “That means field dressing the animal and/or quartering the carcass, then cleaning the meat and preparing it for butchering.
For some reason meat care takes on a sort of mystical quality for the inexperienced. It shouldn’t. In reality, field care of big game is an easy process requiring nothing more than a few basic tools and some simple skills.
There are two basic ways to care for meat in the field.
The first is old-fashioned field dressing, or gutting, a process designed to both remove the entire digestive system, as well as the heart, lungs, and windpipe, and facilitate cooling before internal bacteria begins to multiply and taint the meat. This is the common method when the sportsman has easy access to mechanical or four-footed transportation, like an ATV, truck, or pack animal, and the carcass can be transported to a clean, civilized area to be skinned, washed, and cut up. Here’s how to do it.
Make sure the animal is dead: Approach it from uphill, and watch for movement. Touch the eye with a long stick; if it doesn’t blink, the animal has expired.Unload your firearm. Safety first!Position the animal with its head uphill, and butt downhill. This will facilitate the drainage of blood and body fluids. Prop the carcass on its back, and secure it so it will not roll or slide around.Remove your knife and other tools from your pack, and set them within easy reach. Put on your rubber gloves before making any incisions.Make an incision that encircles the external margin of the anus, cutting deep enough to free the terminal end of the digestive system from the surrounding tissue.Make a small opening in the abdominal wall, taking care not to puncture the underlying internal organs, from the pelvic bone upwards to the bottom of the sternum. Using the index and middle finger of your non-knife hand to lift the abdominal wall away from the internal organs helps.Pushing the stomach out of the way, locate the diaphragm (the thin horizontal wall of muscle that divides the digestive tract from the chest cavity.) Completely cut the diaphragm from one side of the rib cage to the other.With your free hand reach up past the heart and lungs, locate, and securely grasp, the windpipe. Sever with your knife blade as high up into the throat as possible. Take care not to nick yourself with your knife! (Note: using a serrated blade or small saw to cut through the center of the sternum up to the throat will make removing the heart, lungs, and windpipe much easier.)Holding the severed windpipe, begin pulling the heart, lungs, and internal organs free and out of the chest cavity. It may be necessary to cut several adhesions to the body cavity, but this whole mess should come free relatively easily.Reach down into the pelvic opening and grasp the lower end of the intestines, then pull them up and out of the abdominal cavity. If you’ve cut the anus free, everything, including bladder and rectum, should come free. If not, use the knife to carefully cut through the resisting areas. Take care not to puncture the bladder and get urine on the meat.Elevate the carcass, draining all the blood out of the body cavity through the hole where the anus used to be.Transport the carcass to civilization, where further cleaning, skinning, and butchering can take place.
While rapid skinning will promote cooling, when transporting the carcass whole from the field I like to leave the skin on simply because this will keep the meat cleaner and more free of debris that would otherwise need to be trimmed away later.
