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| I heart deer season! |
I spent a good part of Sunday either meeting up with hunters or slicing and dicing what they gave me into more appropriately meal sized portions. Throwing, say a whole ribcage, in the backyard loses it novelty after the first few times and the neigbhors have stopped calling the police. I ended up with several hearts, livers and meaty leg bones. I sliced up some of the heart and liver for myself... I look forward to comparing it with the grass-fed beef heart and liver I have been eating lately. And for lunch today I cubed some leg meat and cooked that in lard. It was delicious!
Although I currently do not hunt, I know I will eventually. Other than time, luck, and a well placed arrow or bullet, here is free food for you and/or your dogs. I have been offering the hunters help to clean the deer they shoot, hoping to learn everything so that when I do start I can be self-sufficient and avoid wasting anything. Of course if you have dogs that eat raw it is really hard to waste anything. Personally, I can easily justify the taking of a life of a deer if I can do it in a manner that utilizes the whole beast.
The above hanging deer was from the first hunter I met with. He hunts rather close to Caliope Organic Farm who have lost most of their lettuce to deer like this one. While we were talking we saw cars slow down and a herd of five deer come sprinting by. They ran by about 100 feet from us. I will admit it was a strange feeling seeing in my vision both the quite dead cleaned deer and the quite alive running deer.
I just finished rereading Meditiations on Hunting by Jose Ortega y Gasset. It is interesting that one of my favorite books is on hunting and I have never hunted. He does delve briefly into the morality issues with hunting, and ultimately posits that "Every good hunter is uneasy when faced with the death he is about to inflict." In a future post I intend to present some of the ideas in the book and how they relate to our hunter-gatherer roots and the domestication of dogs for hunting.
