Several of our local butchers will also process game animals. My favorite one closed up shop several years ago. Between butchers that will process game, and dedicated game processors, there are probably 8 or 10 of them within 20 miles of my house.
In these here parts, there are fewer and fewer hunters who butcher their own harvested deer. Most every small town still has a meat processor/butcher shop, and I’ve been told that they are so busy in the fall during deer season that they typically schedule a lot fewer hogs and cattle to be butchered.
Around here some do their own, but a lot of people use a butcher shop; either one dedicated to deer or, I think more often, one that also does sheep, pigs, and cattle but in season does deer; at least sometimes as @Railer13 says putting off scheduling other species during deer season.
I’m not married to it but I think it may be the deer wasting diseases that have kept actual butcher shops from butchering wild meat.
(I’m not even sure there’s a dedicated butcher shop, period.)
And, it may be illegal, or frowned upon for wild meat to be brought into legit butcher establishments.
(I just looked on the Game and Fish website. There’s one lis. and approved place. 50miles from me. Happens, they contribute any donated deer to a Feed the hungry organization. Roadkill was not mentioned.)
Apparently not in New York; or in the other states people have reported them in.
That is the kind of things that almost certainly varies by state. I just poked around the internet looking for places that butcher deer in my home state and a neighboring state. There are lots of them, and some of them also advertise they will process your livestock. But i haven’t found one that actually sells cuts of meat. They all seem to sell butchering services. (You bring the carcass, side of beef, etc. Or sometimes your own live animal.)
Indeed it seems to. In my state, Nebraska, butchers/meat processors may process wild game. They require deer be in season and tagged that it is from a licensed hunter. The butchers/processor seem to be in small towns or villages. I’m in the capital, our second largest city-the nearest game processor seems to be about 32 miles away. Fortuitously genuine kolaches are also available in the same small town, so the drive would not be wasted.
FWIW, their price to skin, process/butcher, grind and wrap then freeze a deer is $140. Storage beyond two weeks costs a small additional fee.
Nebraska hunters may donate their deer to be processed and distributed to food banks. “Hunters Helping The Hungry”:
My husband tells the story of when his grandmother was driving cross-country somewhere in the west, and hit a cow that had wandered onto the road. The cow was donated to some kind of organization, though he has no idea of any of the details. This would have been 55+ years ago.
I butchered 2 of the 4 elk I have shot. It’s brutal on the back and shoulders. I sent the next 2 to the processor.
My only experience with witnessing the butchering of a wild animal was quite unusual. I was walking on the beach and came across a dead elephant seal washed up on shore. I’ve seen a lot of dead harbor seals on the beach, but elephant seals are vastly larger and this was the first dead one I’d ever seen. It was a relatively small one, maybe 10 feet long and I’d estimate weighed around 1500 pounds. I continued my walk, and on the way back when I reached the seal again I saw a man cutting its head off with a long knife. WTF? I approached him (cautiously) and asked what he was doing. He said he was a scientist at the San Francisco Academy of Science who specialized in skulls. Whenever he heard of an interesting dead animal in the area he would drive over to it and collect its skull.
The headless remains of the seal stayed on the beach rotting away and was eventually buried by sand movement over a period of months. The smell was pretty horrendous for a while.
That’s a different category. To legally sell individual cuts of meat, you need federal licensing, and a federal inspector on site: too expensive for most small slaughterhouses. To legally butcher animals for those that own or legally hunted them, you only need state licensing, which (at least in most states, I don’t know about all) is cheaper and simpler to comply with.
At least in NY, when you buy a half or quarter of an animal, unless it was processed at a federally licensed place, you’re technically buying a share in a live animal from a farmer; even when you’re picking your meat up at a state licensed slaughterhouse. You pay the farmer directly per pound of live or hanging weight (which information they get from the slaughterhouse), and pay the slaughterhouse your share of the butchering cost (which may vary depending on how you wanted your meat cut, whether you wanted to pay for wrapped-and-frozen, whether you wanted sausage made or any meat cured).
The processor can also provide services many individuals can’t; including freezing a whole lot of meat all at once fast enough to produce a good product. And not everyone wants to grind, mix, and case their own sausage; though I know some who do.
There are some complicated laws regarding game meat, butchering, and commercial sales, not to men economies of scale. The venison sold in the grocery store I work at can not be wild venison, it has to be farmed, and it’s imported from New Zealand. I don’t think you can sell wild game meat in the US (although I might not be correctly informed) but there are butchers/deer processors that will cut up and package your deer (or other wild game) for you. And, of course, some people like to do it all themselves.
OK, I’m gonna show my city-boy ignorance on this topic again. What does it mean to “dress” a carcass?
Getting rid of the entrails.
Field dressing is often done as soon as possible after the animal is killed to ensure rapid body heat loss, which prevents bacteria from growing on the surface of the carcass. Field dressing also aids hunters in transporting hunted game by lightening the weight of the carcass.
Removal of the innards; when hunting, they are mostly just extra weight and won’t be used, so usually are just left behind for scavengers.
Or dumped on my road.
People are nasty.
Glad we have buzzards and crows.
After dressing and before butchering into various cuts/pieces, even of a domestic animal killed in a slaughterhouse, the carcass is generally hung for some days; the length of time depending on the species (and, to some extent, on the slaughterhouse; I once got some lamb from a place that clearly didn’t know how to handle lamb, which shouldn’t be hung anywhere near as long as beef.) Slaughterhouses, of course, do this under refrigeration; but in places where people hang deer at home, it’s usually done in cold weather.
Poultry don’t get hung; just dunked in cold water for a while, as near as I can tell. And, at least in NY, they’re generally handled by different places, if not done at home.
if you want “brutal”, you should hear the elk’s angle of the story …
.
oddly enough, the whole process seems to move more in the direction of “undress” than “dress”
This was a big story in my area a few years ago. TL : DR - a homeless man “noodled” a huge catfish out of the Mississippi River, and in the end, a local butcher shop that I patronize myself filleted it and got about 30 pounds of salable meat from it. (This place doesn’t usually do their own slaughtering, so they had to get a meat inspector, which wasn’t a problem because they were happy to do it.)
Several places offered him a job and a place to live; unfortunately, his alcoholism was just too severe, at least at the time.
In my old town, there was a butcher that did deer and other game processing, and some people didn’t want their deer, or certain parts, so those would go to charity, and that included the animal shelter in some cases.