I didn't really grow up hunting. My dad took me shooting a lot, but we only really hunted squirrels a few times when I was younger. Dad still gets grossed out by touching fish and guts. When I got my drivers license at 16, my friend Michael and I would go dove, rabbit and squirrel hunting. It wasn't until I moved to Arkansas and lived out of town that I started deer hunting. My roommate and I started seeing deer around the house so we went and bought a couple cheap bows to practice with. We went out behind the house and made some treestands out of milk crates and forklift pallets. The first evening we actually hunted I had a doe come in about 20 yards and I shot right below her. She came back about 5 minutes later to the same spot and I put one right through the heart. She ran off about 50 yards and died. We had no idea what we were doing, so we left the guts in, tied her legs to a log, and carried her back to the house. We had Papa come guide us through the cleaning process. He hung her up by the neck, stuck a 6" fillet knife straight through the chest, and ripped straight down all the way to the bottom. That deer was probably the worst tasting meat I had ever eaten. About 30 deer later I am finally getting it right. It's amazing how experience has changed the process in which we do all our deer cleaning now.
The main things I did inefficiently were:
Field dressing at the house instead of on site
Carrying instead of dragging
Cutting straight through all the organs instead of cutting the skin and pulling the organs out
Laying the deer on a table and cutting off every piece of meat instead of quartering
Wrapping in butcher paper instead of vacuum sealing.
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