Quick Skinning, Cleaning and Butchering a Deer

These days, most of us drop our game off at the butcher on the way home and go back a few days later and pick it up in nice white butcher paper. That’s all fine and good for now, but what are we going to do if we have to hunt for survival and can’t just drop the animal off to let somebody else do all the work? I’ve done it myself before and I’m sure I could do it again without any real problems, but if you’re hunting for survival the last thing you want to do is ruin your meat by doing something stupid!

To help with this, I have a couple books that are very detailed and show step by step how to process multiple types of game. My favorite one is Basic Butchering of Livestock & Game by John Mettler.  I also really like Deerskins Into Buckskins by Matt Richards, this book has excellent instructions on brain, soap and egg tanning.

To help me make sure I’m up to speed with processing animals, I’ve decided to do it from home for a while.  We just did a pig in our garage a few weeks ago and we’ve got two elk tags for this season.  I plan to process both of those here in the garage.  To get ready for that, I’ve been reading both these books.  I’ve also been watching instructional videos on Youtube.

The biggest issue I hear people mention about home processing is the amount of time and energy it takes to process.  I totally agree!  While watching videos on processing deer and elk, I came across these three videos which show the entire process being done VERY quickly and was quite impressed by them!

If you are squeamish at all about blood and guts – don’t watch these videos!  They show people skinning, gutting and cutting up deer – extremely quickly.  I wish I had this kind of skill!

Skinning and Gutting:

Skinning (a different method):

Deboning: