First animal harvested..now I’m meat skittish

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Jackson Smith

Jackson Smith

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Okay so this may get me laughed out of this sub but here goes nothing. So the past couple years I’ve been wanting to be in control of my food chain more, specifically where my meat comes from. This year I’ve been on multiple bow hunts and after freezing a few weeks ago on some does..I got my first ever deer. A small buck. (I’m having my second child soon so I don’t know if I’ll be able to get out again this season, hence not waiting for something bigger)

All this to say that I’ve never really liked bone in meat of any kind, but now I’m noticing that I’m skittish of pretty much all meat, Chicken and pork that’s been in my fridge.

Has anyone else experienced this? I’ve been eating chicken and rice everyday for years now and it hasn’t bothered me. I don’t regret my decision to hunt and the first thing I did when I walked up to the downed animal was thank it.
 
My guess is you’ll get over it. A small buck won’t take you far this winter so you’ll need to supplement.
More importantly; Congratulations on your second child and connecting on your first buck. We eat Pheasant, chicken or salmon for variety from elk. Deer as well. We switched to boneless chicken thighs years ago. Much more flavorful and I would say they are more in line with eating wild game.
Once your second child is on the ground perhaps you can start thinking about hunting upland game or waterfowl, time better spent than watching football or God Forbid, soccer.
Welcome aboard, good luck.
 
I don’t really understand the question. What do you mean by “skittish”? You aren’t enjoying eating meat? It grosses you out? Don’t like the idea of it? Don’t like the taste of it? Don’t know how to prepare it? By all meat, do you mean your deer meat as well? Did this only get worse after you harvested meat for yourself?

At the end of the day, you should eat what you enjoy eating. If that isn’t meat, there are plenty of other options these days. Nothing wrong with that.
 
Hunting Wife said:
I don’t really understand the question. What do you mean by “skittish”? You aren’t enjoying eating meat? It grosses you out? Don’t like the idea of it? Don’t like the taste of it? Don’t know how to prepare it? By all meat, do you mean your deer meat as well? Did this only get worse after you harvested meat for yourself?

At the end of the day, you should eat what you enjoy eating. If that isn’t meat, there are plenty of other options these days. Nothing wrong with that.
Click to expand...
I 2nd this from top to bottom. Don't really understand what you're asking but it sounds like you don't want meat...
 
Welcome to the forum! Congrats on getting a deer. Congrats on your family addition too.

In modern society we are mostly removed from food acquisition and processing. The closest most of us get is handling ingredients in neat, clean little packages from the grocery store.

A small percentage of persons in our society specialize in gathering food from the wild via foraging and fishing, as well as cultivation of fungi, aquaculture, industrial farming, and ranching.

As a young person I became interested in learning more about the sources of what I eat. I was not content to continue consuming everything prepared from neat little packages from the store without having to smell, feel, touch, and see the process of how the food got into those packages. Meat was at the top of my list to learn more about.

I toured a hog confinement, and an industrial cattle feedlot. I also talked with all kinds of farmers including oyster aquaculture, organic produce, dairy farmers, row crop farmers, etc.

Some of my personal conclusions were that I supported GMO farming, I dislike food labeled “organic”, and “free range” is a nearly meaningless marketing term. I also concluded that I wanted my own large vegetable garden and I would greatly prefer to harvest my own red meat, birds, fish and other wild animals in lieu of buying meat from someone else. My freezer currently has morels, squirrel, rabbit, pheasant, elk, pronghorn, and deer.

The first time killing a large mammal can come as a shock, especially if that is not something you grew up doing. My 3 and 5-year-old kids handle animal carcasses and we eat the meat the same day or the next day, so it’s just normal to them. They were a bit squeamish at first but they are not so much any more.

When you’ve lived your whole life disconnected from meat acquisition and processing, and one day as a 20-something or 30-something you kill a deer and walk up on it I can imagine it could be overwhelming in many ways. That is normal and natural. The deer’s eyes fade from glossy black to a murky green-white, the intestines stink, and there is a lot of non-meat tissue visible. Also, you just ended the life of a being not too dissimilar from yourself.

In the course of human history it’s abnormal for a person to be so disconnected from food acquisition and processing for so much of their lives. In 99% of human history 3-year-olds got a front row seat to the process and precious few were probably bothered by bone-in meat. Those who were may have risked starvation.

Some ideas: practice a vegan or vegetarian diet for a while. No harm, no foul.

If someday you want to push yourself to embrace your primal ancestry to hunt, kill, and eat, give it another go. Expect discomfort and plan to push through it. Maybe back off deer hunting and try something a little less intense such as catching and eating fish.
 
np307 said:
Cool. Reddit can be helpful but I think you'll find this site to have a better knowledge base for you to bounce questions off of as you learn to hunt.
Click to expand...
The more you give yourself to the universe ( System) . The more you increase and level up your knowledge . I decided to register in this forum so as to increase my room of thought 💭 and also share some mental idea thanks np307
 
Salmonchaser said:
My guess is you’ll get over it. A small buck won’t take you far this winter so you’ll need to supplement.
More importantly; Congratulations on your second child and connecting on your first buck. We eat Pheasant, chicken or salmon for variety from elk. Deer as well. We switched to boneless chicken thighs years ago. Much more flavorful and I would say they are more in line with eating wild game.
Once your second child is on the ground perhaps you can start thinking about hunting upland game or waterfowl, time better spent than watching football or God Forbid, NASCAR
Welcome aboard, good luck.
Click to expand...
 
Elk Fever said it best.. take it how you will and adjust in a way that will help your situation. Personally, I felt similarly after processing my own deer. I never got that feeling until I processed it myself, and it was something I had to kinda tell myself to buck up. No pun intended.
When you make a deer or elk steak that rivals the best beef steak you’ve ever had, the caveman inside of you wants to go cut up another animal and make more steaks 😂🤣
On the flip side, if you overcook it every time- it’s chewy and terrible and you’ll feel bad about killing that animal and ultimately disliking it.. nobody wants to waste anything.. we all feel that inside. The first two years I hunted deer i literally turned the WHOLE thing into jerky over the course of the winter.. dehydrating once a week easy.. Ate not a single steak.. they were gross. Lol you’ll learn to cook game more particularly, and not every meat or cut or species is created equal. you’ll learn to like it, or maybe not… No stress either way. Just my $0.02
 
I’m not sure if you meant all processed meat or the wild game too? I can relate a bit to the processed meat part. I don’t relish handling raw chicken and pork, and sometimes even beef. I don’t like the plastic wrapped packaging, the freezing/thawing that likely has happened, CO treatments, or even always trust the dates.

Wild game on the other hand, even if it can be messy or just a lot of work to handle and to butcher yourself, seems clean and fresh and smells “good” in the right kind of raw meat way while I’m processing it. I can be covered up to my elbows with deer or elk and still not feel icky as I sometimes do opening a processed pack of chicken.
 
I will probably start going back hurting as you said
Salmonchaser said:
My guess is you’ll get over it. A small buck won’t take you far this winter so you’ll need to supplement.
More importantly; Congratulations on your second child and connecting on your first buck. We eat Pheasant, chicken or salmon for variety from elk. Deer as well. We switched to boneless chicken thighs years ago. Much more flavorful and I would say they are more in line with eating wild game.
Once your second child is on the ground perhaps you can start thinking about hunting upland game or waterfowl, time better spent than watching football or God Forbid, soccer.
Welcome aboard, good luck.
Click to expand...
 
Mudranger1 said:
I 2nd this from top to bottom. Don't really understand what you're asking but it sounds like you don't want meat...
Click to expand...
I want meat but my conditions those not permits me to consume at the moment . Will continue eating it when my second child will see the day . Lol
 
I started by thinking Jackson didn’t want store bought meat anymore, that I understand. Don’t know have much more I can help at this point
 
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