This is a series of photos I took last weekend. I was on the way home from Grandma’s house when I saw this pass me by. Can you believe it? Only in Texas.
Imagine the conversation with my 8 year-old daughter in the car. On top of that, I was trying to stay up with the car in order to get the pictures.
Although it is distasteful, I wasn’t too offended by the sight of this. It was about 40 degrees outside so the meat was refrigerated.
When you hunt in Texas what you really are doing is “Herd Management” or “Culling” or some other euphemism to describe killing a deer. Based on the size of these two deer (Yes, there are two. Count the legs) I’d say this was a meat hunt.
What’s a meat hunt? That’s when you go kill a doe or two just for the meat. IT’s not about the hunt but about getting a couple of pieces of back strap. You take the whole carcass down to the processor and ask for jerky, sausage, chili meat and of course back strap filets.
To hunt this way you need just a deer stand. Any will do. I hunted a brush blind once. It was all of about 30 yards from the feeder. I was waiting for a trophy buck (not a meat hunt) and was covered up with does. One got so close to me that I poked it’s side with the end of the barrel of my gun to scare it off. It jumped and ran like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s amazing how smart and how STUPID these animals can be.
OK, so you’re sitting in the deer stand. The deer you want to take home for meat arrives in a group. You pick out the meatiest (use your own judgment here), scope in the shoulder, pull the trigger. If you’re using a 7mm mag then the dear drops over. Dead. If you’re using something else, you may have to go for a walk to find the deer. What you’re supposed to do next is “gut” the dear. That’s the process of removing the innards. You just slit the skin from the sternum to the butt and then cut out the insides. It’s a delicate operation because you don’t want to puncture the innards or else you end up with a rather smelly mess.
Now you have a dead dear (still warm) that has no guts. It’s going to look just like the pictures to the left.
Traditionally the deer carcass is strung up at the cleaning station at the camp. Even the most rag-tagged deer camp will have a cleaning station. That’s where you string up the deer with a spreader bar. That device hooks through the legs at the ankles between the Achilles tendon and the bone. Then you pull the skin off, cut the back straps out, and cut the carcass into quarters. Those pieces are supposed to go into a ice chest. That way you can discreetly transport the meat to the processor without raising to much alarm.
Or you can do like this fool did and travel down Interstate 35 with your prize strapped to a luggage rack on the back of Mom’s taxi. What a duffus.
