AUTHOR: SCOTT COE, BROKER | LICENSED IN OR
My earliest memory of hunting is stumbling around the fields looking for pheasants with my dad and uncles at seven years old. I filled my first deer tag by the time I was nine years old, and since then, I have been addicted to it, hunting every season. Growing up on a ranch in Eastern Oregon, immersing myself in the ranching lifestyle, and hunting as many days as I could led me to my career in the hunting and real estate industries. Hunting was more than just a sport; we provided food for our friends and families. As I grew older, I was eager to experience more involved backcountry hunts. These require hunters to not only harvest but also break down an animal, pack it out, and process the meat for the table. As a nine-year-old, harvesting my first big game animal was both exciting and rewarding, knowing that the meat from the animal would feed our family.
The first time I harvested, broke down, packed out, and processed an animal by myself was during a bull elk hunt in Oregon. Bull elk are large and require work to break down and pack out of remote areas. The minute the elk was harvested, the work began. I had learned how to break down an animal in the field by first seeing and helping a fellow hunter do it; he explained the process as he and I broke down the animal for the pack out. We were using the gutless technique, where we did not gut the animal but simply cut it into quarters and stripped all the meat from the carcass that we could get off. My fellow hunter knew the animal we had just harvested would be rewarding for me, as, at that time, I had a new family to support. The focus of this article is on processing a large animal after harvest. Let’s assume the animal has been processed in the field and is ready to be processed for eating and storage.
