So the deer are shot.. now what??

***Just a warning these pictures arent 'graphic' they just show blood and meat.. so if thats not your thing feel free to skip! But its very educational!***

We take my deer, load it on the four wheeler after its been gutted and take it back to camp, put it in the truck and head down to hang and skin it

In both cases with both deer we take them to the meat shop and skin them out

Taking off all the hide and hair

Cleaning up any parts that were missed before and taking off the legs

Theres no meat on the lower halves

We cut a hole in the upper back legs and put it through the hooks onto the hoist

Then we can lift it up slowly out of the back of the truck as its skinned

The deer has been dead a while but there is still blood that comes out from where it was shot at or the meat was damaged

Thats part of why its important to get it skinned and uncovered

Then once the deer are skinned out they are placed in the cooler for a few days

The one is mine and the other is my dads

You can see there is a bit of a size difference also fat difference

After a few days we went down to cut it up

We placed them onto the scale to see what they weighed 

Dads was 130 lbs!!!

It was very dense and heavy

Zack stopped by for a minute so we put him to work helping the guys lift the deer up and onto the hooks

My deer weighed just over 70lbs 

Next we take the cold meat into the cutting room

Trim off pieces of fat and damaged meat

Chris's first time in the meat shop sporting his cute goatee he got to keep for a whole day

Dont worry thats not an actual garbage can

Its a meat waste container

Hunter is trimming up part of the deer

We cut off pieces and chunks

Make several different steak cuts, a few roasts, and cut the rest into chunks to make jerky, salami, summer sausage, brats or german sausage with

Then we wrap it up and take it home to put in the freezer

As for the rest of the deer this is where ours meet different fates

Dane takes the cape (head and neck area) from dads deer and cleans it up

He uses a flesher to take off all the meat and left over parts

Then he mixes up a solution and does a 'hair on' tan.. so basically makes the hair stay on but tans the hide so he can mount it

All the skin has been taken off the head of Dads deer 

The antlers are cut off

The body part on a mount is like a dense styrofoam body

Theres no bones or anything like that in it

The eyes are like a glass marble

The nose and parts are air brushed and the hide is sewn over the mount once its tanned and touched up

Dad will get a mount to hang on the wall that looks like a real deer

My antlers were smaller

I decided for a different option

I boiled the left over hair and parts off of the antlers after they were cut off

Its a bleach water mixture

Cleans them up and sanitizes them basically

Then I will show you the finished product when its done :)

While I was boiling these Kennedy was upstairs

She came down and said

Mom... you're not cooking us antlers for dinner are you!?????