How to Field Dress, Skin, Quarter and Butcher Your Deer at Home
A step-by-step book that takes a deer from the ground to labeled packages in your freezer. No processor, no bone saw, no $300 kit. Written for the hunter who is doing it himself this season for the first time, and wants the order in his hands before he needs it.
The deer comes home. Then it is on you.
You know how it goes. The deer is in the truck, or it is already hanging in the garage. It is Saturday evening. The processor is quoting $120 and a two-week wait, and the last time you used him you got back forty pounds of "ground venison" and a suspicion that half of it was somebody else's deer. So this time you are doing it yourself.
You open YouTube. The first video says cut around the anus first. The second says never do that. The third guy has a hoist, a walk-in cooler and a bone saw you do not own. An hour later you have twelve tabs open, the deer is still hanging, and the one thing everybody agrees on is the one thing nobody explains: at this temperature you have a day, maybe two, before the meat starts to turn.
Or you are reading this in September, because this is the season you go out alone for the first time. You want the order in your head before the deer is on the ground, not after.
Either way, you are not squeamish and you are not slow. You have simply never had anyone stand next to you in the garage and say "now this, then this, do not touch that." Every hunter who does this well had someone do exactly that for them once. Most hunters today do not. That is the whole gap, and it is the gap this book closes.
One deer is 40 to 60 pounds of the best meat you will eat all year. The difference between that and a bag of hair-covered scraps is the order you do things in.
There is no trick. There is an order, and it fits on one card.
Open any serious butchering guide, state wildlife agency manual or the forum threads where men who have done two hundred deer answer men who have done none. They argue about knives and whether to skin hot or cold. But the spine of the job is the same every time: open the cavity without cutting the gut, get the heat out, keep the hair off the meat, hang it, skin it, take it apart at the joints, then cut each piece the way that piece wants to be cut. Twelve steps. The same twelve, in the same order, from the first deer to the two-hundredth.
What nobody had done was write that order down so a first-timer can follow it with a deer hanging in front of him and nobody to ask. So Huntfolk did. We kept what every source agrees on, threw out what they fight about, and put it in the order you need it, with the mistake that ruins meat listed next to each step. Read it once at the kitchen table and the garage stops being a guessing game.
The twelve steps, field to freezer
- 01Tag it, photograph it, position it. Head uphill, on its back, before the knife comes out.
- 02The first cut. Where to start, how deep, and how to keep the blade off the paunch.
- 03Open the cavity. Two fingers under the blade. This is the step that keeps the meat clean.
- 04Free the organs. Diaphragm, windpipe, the pelvic connection. Doe and buck differences.
- 05Roll it out and drain. Heat out, blood out, cavity propped open.
- 06Cool it, move it. The warm-weather rule, the drag, and the truck without ruining the meat.
- 07Hang it. A tree, a swing set or a ladder. Gambrel or rope. How long, at what temperature.
- 08Skin it. The hair-off-the-meat method, with fists more than knife.
- 09Quarter it. Four quarters, two backstraps, the neck. No saw, joints only.
- 10Butcher at the kitchen table. Each quarter into its cuts, following the muscle seams.
- 11Trim, grind and wrap. What goes to steaks, what goes to roasts, what goes to the grinder.
- 12Label and freeze. How to pack so the last package in March is as good as the first.
The eight cuts you take home
- 1Neck, roasts and grind
- 2Shoulder, roasts, stew, grind
- 3Backstrap, the loin, the steaks
- 4Rump and sirloin, roasts and steak tips
- 5Hindquarter, top and bottom round, steaks
- 6Brisket and front shank, slow cook
- 7Ribs and flank, grind or ribs
- 8Hind shank, osso buco or grind
Plus the two tenderloins inside the cavity, which most first-timers throw away with the guts. Step 4 makes sure you do not.
One step, exactly as it appears in the book.
This is Step 3. Read it and ask yourself whether you could do this with a deer in front of you and the book open on the tailgate.
Open the cavity without cutting the gut
Goal for this step: the belly open from the breastbone to the pelvis, with the stomach and intestines untouched.
- Pinch the belly skin just below the breastbone and lift it away from the body. Make a shallow cut through skin and the thin muscle wall, no deeper than the blade is wide.
- Put the first two fingers of your free hand into the opening, palm up, and spread them into a V. The gut now sits below your fingers.
- Lay the blade in the V, edge up, and ride your fingers down toward the pelvis. Your fingers push the gut down; the blade only ever touches skin and muscle.
- Stop at the pelvis. Do not cut through it. The book shows you how to free the lower connection without a saw in Step 4.
- If you have a buck, the cut goes around the genitals, not through them. The diagram on the facing page shows where.
There is a page like this for every one of the twelve steps, and nothing on any of them assumes you know something the page before did not teach you.
Deer to Freezer. Five parts, one printable field card.
A PDF of about 70 pages with a photo or diagram for every cut. Every step has the same five parts in the same place: the goal, the tools, the moves in order, the Do Not list, and the "if this happens, do that" box. By Step 4 you stop reading instructions for how to use the book, because the book only has one shape. Read it once before the season. Then the Field Card is all you need in the garage.
Also inside
- ✓The three tools you need and the twenty you do not. A $25 knife list that is enough for every step.
- ✓The warm-weather table. How many hours you have at 40, 50, 60 and 70 degrees, and what to do when you do not have them.
- ✓"How much meat will I get?" A table by live weight, so you know how many freezer bags to buy before you start.
- ✓Doe and buck, early season and late. The four things that change and the eight that do not.
- ✓The seven mistakes that spoil meat, each one placed in the step where it happens, so you cannot make it by accident.
This is for you if
- You hunt whitetail or mule deer and have always dropped it at a processor, or watched someone else do it, and this season you want to do it yourself
- You want the meat done right, not fast, and you want to know what is in your own freezer
- You have a knife, some rope, a cooler and a kitchen table
- You learn from steps and pictures better than from a guy talking over a video
This is not for you if
- You want a video course. There are good ones; this is a book.
- You are processing for sale. That is regulated and this is not that.
- You already do your own deer every season. You do not need it.
- You want taxidermy. We cover saving the cape, not mounting it.
Sixty seconds from now.
- 1Pay $17 on a secure checkout. Card or PayPal. Within a minute the book is in your inbox as one PDF, with the Field Card as a separate page.
- 2Read it once, before the season or the night the deer comes home. About an hour. Print the Field Card and tape it to the garage wall.
- 3Next deer, start at Step 1 and do what the card says. The book stays open on the kitchen table for the part where the quarters become cuts.
No login, no portal, no modules to unlock. It is a book. You own it.
Before you decide
Is this really written for a first deer?
Yes. Every step starts from zero. If a step needs something an earlier step taught, the earlier step taught it. The Field Card is there so you can follow along in the garage without scrolling a phone with dirty hands.
I have no garage or anywhere to hang a deer.
Step 7 covers a tree, a ladder, a swing set and a truck tailgate. Step 9 covers the gutless method for when you cannot hang it at all.
What tools do I need?
A sharp 4-inch knife, a way to sharpen it, rope or a gambrel, and a cooler with ice. The book lists the few things worth buying and the many that are not.
Does it cover warm weather?
Yes. The warm-weather table tells you how many hours you have at each temperature and what to do when you are out of time, including quartering in the field and icing the cavity.
Buck or doe, early or late season?
Both, and both. The steps are the same; the book marks the four places where a buck or a late-season deer changes what you do.
Is it a video?
No. It is a PDF with a photo or diagram for every cut. You can read it in the field with no signal and print the one page you need.
Who wrote this?
Huntfolk's editors, from the sources every experienced hunter already agrees on: state wildlife agency processing guides, the standard butchering references, and the forums where hunters who have done hundreds of deer answer hunters doing their first. Our work was reading all of it, keeping only what they agree on, and putting it in order. The sources are listed in the back.
What if I get stuck halfway through a deer?
Email us. A person answers. If your question is one the book should have answered, it goes into the next edition, and you get that edition free.
Deer to Freezer
Field Dress, Skin, Quarter and Butcher Your Deer at Home
- ✓The full book, twelve steps, five parts, about 70 pages (PDF)
- ✓The printable Field Dressing Card, one page
- ✓The eight-cut chart and the cooking guide for each cut
- ✓The warm-weather table and the meat-yield table
- ✓Every future edition, free
A processor charges $90 to $150 for one deer and hands you back somebody's meat, maybe yours. This is $17 once, and you keep it for every deer you ever take.
Order
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Summary
P.S. The deer you take this season will either end up as 40 to 60 pounds of clean, labeled meat you cut yourself, or as a $120 receipt and a bag of somebody's ground venison. Twelve steps, one card, $17. Read it before the season, or tonight if the deer is already hanging.