Some years ago I offered to teach a wild-game butchering workshop for hunters in the Billings area, through a nonprofit focused on protecting public lands. I started to overthink it. Were they expecting an expert—someone who knew the technical names for muscle groups and exact cuts? That wasn’t me.
I’d spent my childhood watching and helping my parents cut and wrap meat, and most of my adult life butchering my own wild game or helping my family butcher theirs. But I wasn’t an official butcher.
It was too late to back out, and soon I was standing in front of 20 hunters expecting me to show them how to turn a carcass into dinner. I would never tell anyone that butchering your own game is easy. If you do it right, it’s physically demanding and time-consuming. Hours hunched over a butcher block doesn’t do your back or neck any favors.
That said, the alternative is dropping your animal off at a meat processing shop and hoping what you get back is edible. I’m sure many do a good job, but I’ve also seen plenty of questionable meat come out of that process—wrapped in nothing but thin freezer paper, deer hair still clinging to the roast, silver skin left sticking to the meat.
I’ve also seen the DIY versions from acquaintances—once, a whole featherless and gutted pheasant shoved into a Ziploc bag, one leg sticking out the top, ice crystals covering the meat like a blanket.
Let me tell you, my sister and I would never have gotten away with that—either butchering-wise or wrapping.
When we were kids, our first job was wrapping the meat. We stood at the counter, sheet after sheet of freezer paper in front of us, ready to receive whatever clean, perfect cut my dad slid across the table. Not a sliver of air allowed in. No loose folds. Not even the idea of freezer burn dared touch our meat. We’d wrap each piece in plastic wrap first, then in freezer paper—starting at the corner, folding in the sides just so. We learned that from our mom. The muscle memory in our hands became more cemented every hunting season.
The actual butchering I learned from my dad. Somewhere in my teenage years—maybe during college—I stopped being annoyed by the hours spent trimming meat and started paying close attention. Not just to the cuts, but to the way my dad moved: how he let the muscles tell him where to go, how he’d separate them with his fingers and only bring out the knife to finesse. His filet knife came out only for the detail work. He and I did a bison together and I remember thinking, “This will never end.”
If I threw a cut into the bin with fat or cartilage still on it, he’d toss it back across the table without looking up: “Try again.”
The care my dad passed down—the kind learned over hours of being hunched at the butcher block—is what I wasn’t sure I could teach that day, as I watched workshop participants fumble with their knives, unsure whether that piece of meat, still slimy with fat, was “good enough” to wrap and freeze.
There were no shortcuts in butchering when you were doing it with my father. It was tiring. But when I looked at that gray bin full of clean, perfect cuts, I felt proud—of the work, the care, the promise of good meals all winter long.
