Skinning and Quartering

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Preparing a deer for the freezer is not very hard. It just takes some patience and a few simple tools. Most of what I'm about to show I learned by reading internet web sites and good old fashioned trial and error. My methods may certainly not be the best out there but they seem to work fine for me. I've also found that every deer I have done required some amount of modification to the overall process. For example, the location of the wound will dictate that certain parts may have to be cut around or completely removed.

This deer was tagged with a nuisance permit on my family's farm. It was about 1000 degrees this day so I was definitely in a rush to skin and quarter the deer. My goal was to get the quarters into the freezer (which was set to make the meat very cool rather than freeze) and then butcher the parts at a later time. It is not a real big deer but the process applies equally well to larger deer. The nice part about this deer being small is that it fit better in the frame of my camera!

The tools I'm going to use to skin, quarter and butcher the deer are shown here. Notice that I don't really have anything fancy. I have one small bladed fillet knife and a regular sized fillet knife. I used the small knife for the entire skinning and quartering of the deer in these photos. The saw is not really the best type for the job but I sort of relegated this particular saw of mine to this job out of necessity when I began butchering deer myself. The saw is used to remove the head as well as the legs at the elbows. I'll also seperate the hips with the saw.
 

I've already hoisted the deer up using a gambrel hook. I've also already removed the head and front legs just behind the elbows. Doing this first tends to make skinning a bit easier. At this point, I have begun to remove the hide by making an incision around the leg as can be seen in the picture. Be careful to not cut through the tendon at the back of the leg! The weight of the deer will cause the leg to bend forward sharply which in turn, may cause the entire deer to fall off the gambrel. I've pulled the hide down about this far because I want to try to use my four wheeler to remove the rest of the hide. I've never tried this technique before so this should be interesting. Note that the entire tail was removed. To do this, just find the base of the tail and saw through the bones right about where these bones meet the spine.
 

In this picture, I've worked the hide down a little bit further. Next I used a golf ball as well as the tailbone to create an anchor under the hide in which to tie a rope to. I'm using a hangmans noose since it should continue to tighten as I pull on it with the four wheeler. My wife is going to drive the four wheeler and I'm going to work the hide as it goes. Like I said earlier, I've never tried this method before so it should prove to be interesting. Here goes!
 

Well, it worked but not as expected. The rope kept working itself off of the golf ball. I kept having to re-attach the rope to the hide. Still, it seemed easier than removing the hide by hand. As the four wheeler pulled on the hide, I kept working my knife under the skin making the necessary cuts to free it from the meat underneath. Most of the time, the hide would fall away pretty easy under the tension. The picture right shows the deer with the hide removed. Notice all of the white material. It is a fatty film-like substance that makes butchering a pain. I've heard it referred to as silverskin but I do not know the actual technical name for it. Remove as much of this stuff as possible. To do that, slip the knife between the silverskin and the meat. Then draw the knife along to bring up the silverskin.

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