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What to do with carcasses and bones?

Butcher

Active member
Joined
Apr 8, 2020
Messages
154
Location
Iowa
Curious to see what everyone does with the carcasses and bones of critters they kill? I sometimes give them to a friend who has a bunch of hounds or toss them in my ditch. Wondering if there was a way to do something else worthwhile to possibly enrich the soil around my place. Like a burn pit? Compost?
 
I just throw them in the trash. Pack out in quarters so I don’t have spine and ribcage to deal with. Don’t dump them if you killed the animal in a different geographic region, as you could be introducing CWD or something else.
 
Vast majority of mine go in the trash. Sometimes the dogs might get to chew on them a bit first
 
Permission to dump hides, bones and trimmings in a neighbor’s old gravel pit. Ravens and coyotes appreciate that.
 
We process anywhere from 60-150 deer a year. We have some people that use them for trapping, others like it for their dogs. We will bag them in heavy duty bags and people come pick them up. It is a pretty slick process, no part of the animal goes to waste. Heads go to game and fish for CWD testing. We have had a collection site at our house last few years for that. Hides get sold to a buyer.
 
I hide them. I don't ever want anyone to know that I harvested an animal in this location or next year some yahoo might be hunting it - Maybe I shouldn't have told you!
 
The few bones I'm left with I usually just dump them at our property. It would be just as easy to put them in the garbage can, but it doesn't stink when I drop them off!

I know some people that put all their fish guts in gas station garbage cans 🤣🤢🤮
 
Depends on kill location and animal. Elk I'm almost always going to bone out in the field. If I ever happen to shoot one next to a road might be a different story. Bones stay with the gut pile.

Deer, close to the road, less than 200 yards probably, I'll drag and then bones go to the dump with normal trash.

Deer far from the road could either be boned out leaving them with the gut pile, or just quartered adding them to normal trash. Really depends on what the pack out looks like in almost all situations.

Used to ditch dump but with cwd in some areas I hunt I stopped to try and be a better citizen
 
On my private property lease we have an area we dump that stuff. I try and only bring home boned out meat. If I did have to bring bones back to suburbia I would just put it in heavy contractor bags and put it out on trash day.
 
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Hide goes to the collection box, the rest goes to the recycling center (dump) where they keep that stuff separated. It gets composted with lawn waste in the end.
 

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