The first deer I took apart on my own took most of a Saturday, and I made every cut in the wrong order. The meat was fine. It hung in the shed, it aged well, and I didn't know back then that the muscles in that back leg make a bresaola worth waiting for. But I spent the whole day with what now takes a few hours, and most of the cuts were damaged, because nobody had told me that the animal comes apart along its own seams and that the knife is mostly there to help.
That is what this is: the order of work, from the shot to the hook, for the four animals most of us actually take home — roe deer, red or fallow deer, wild boar and moose. The method is the same for all of them until it isn't, and the places where it isn't are worth knowing before you are standing over the animal with a knife in your hand. What you do with the meat afterwards is the subject of our guide to which cut becomes what, and everything on this page ends at the door of curing and dry aging wild game at home.
The short version
Gut it, cool it, hang it, skin it, break it down. Gutting is urgent, cooling is what decides how the meat tastes, and everything after that can wait for good light and a clean table. A deer and a moose are the same animal at different sizes. A wild boar is a pig, and it asks different things of you.
What you need
Less than the catalogues suggest. A knife you can keep sharp, and a smaller one for the fiddly work around the pelvis. A saw for bone, though you will use it less than you think. Rib shears or a pair of pliers, because sawing ribs puts bone splinters into meat you are going to eat. Gloves. A game bag, so the carcass can breathe and the flies stay off. Somewhere to hang the animal — a beam, a bar, a proper gambrel, whatever is at a height you can work at.
Four more that nobody needs but everybody who has them keeps using. A gut hook — the hooked blade Americans carry on the spine of a skinning knife, and sold in Sweden as a separate U-shaped tool, the buköppnare — which opens the belly with the cutting edge facing away from the gut and takes most of the risk out of the one cut you cannot undo. A skinning knife with a rounded tip, for the same reason one step later. A sharpener, because a knife that has been through one hide is not the knife you started with. And a vacuum sealer at the end of it all.
A hoist earns its place on a red deer or a moose and is a luxury on the rest. A roe deer you can lift onto a bar by yourself, and a boar is heavy but low — you can work it on a table if you have a strong one. For a moose, plan for three people before you plan for equipment.
Where the work happens — and when the field decides for you
We gut and skin in a cool, clean space whenever we can, and that is not fussiness. Contamination arrives in the first hour and no amount of salt takes it back out. A concrete floor you can wash, a bar to hang from, light you can see membranes in — that beats a headlamp and a pine needle floor every time.
The field decides for you when the way home is long, when it is warm, or when you are carrying the animal out on your back. Then you gut where it lies, so the heat can start leaving the body, and you keep going. You still do not skin it there. The hide keeps dirt, hair and flies off the meat all the way home, and a skinned carcass dragged through a forest arrives dirtier than an unskinned one that took an hour longer.
The clock starts at the shot
Gutting — field dressing, if you learned the American words — is the one part of this that is genuinely urgent. German butchery teaching puts a figure on it that is worth carrying in your head: the barrier between gut and meat starts breaking down twenty to forty-five minutes after death, and the working rule is to have the animal open within about two hours in cold weather and an hour and a half in warm. That is the whole argument for gutting in the field when the drive home is long.
Everything else on this page can wait. The animal can hang overnight in the hide, whole and unskinned, and be better for it.
Gutting
Two phases, in this order: belly first, chest second.
Lay the animal on its right side if it is on the ground, or hang it by the hind legs if you can. Open the skin along the belly with the knife pointing up and out, not down — this is where the gutting tool earns its keep, because the one thing you cannot undo is a punctured gut. Work the stomach and intestines free, tie off the rectum before you free it so nothing escapes, then take the chest organs.
Three things that separate a clean job from a messy one. Use your fingers more than the knife — membranes come away by hand and the knife is for the anchor points. Do not cut over the bladder or, on a boar, over the glands in the groin. And if you open the gut anyway, which everyone does eventually, wash the cavity with clean cold water straight away and dry it rather than leaving it to sort itself out.
The heart, liver and kidneys come out here. Eat them fresh if you are into those parts — they will never be better than they are this week — and if you are not, chopped up and dried they make excellent dog food. The heart is worth knowing about for a third reason: trimmed and hung, it dries beautifully, and it is one of the few pieces of offal that does.
Cooling and hanging — briefly
The hide protects the meat and slows the cooling, and which of those matters more depends on the weather. In the cold, leave it on. In warm weather, get the animal open and skinned sooner so the heat can leave.
Then it hangs, and it hangs longer than most people have the patience for. We count aging days — the number our hook counts for you — and Swedish hunters often count degree days instead, temperature multiplied by days on the Celsius scale, aiming at about forty, which is the standard from a roe deer up to a moose. Either way, do not let the carcass hang colder than about +4 °C, and do not chill it hard and fast in the first day; meat that cools too quickly goes tough and stays tough. German game practice puts a floor under it from the other side: three days at +7 °C before you break anything down.
The full version of this — species by species, with the ranges — is in our guide to hanging and aging game. It is worth reading before your first season rather than after it.
Skinning
Hang the animal, open the hide along the inside of each leg, and then pull rather than cut. Grip the hide right where it meets the meat and work it down with your fist; the knife comes out only for the anchor points along the back and around the neck. Every centimetre you cut instead of pull is a centimetre where you leave hide on the meat or meat on the hide, and hair lands on whatever you touch next.
Deer come out of their skin easily. A boar does not. The skin is thick, it is welded to the neck and shoulders on an old animal, and you will use the knife far more than you want to. Rinse the animal down before you start — grit in the bristles blunts a knife faster than the hide does — and work front to back, in sections rather than trying to peel the whole animal at once.
The cut map
1 neck · 2 shoulder · 3 front shank · 4 loin, the backstrap · 5 ribs · 6 flank · 7 rump · 8 hind leg · 9 hind shank.
Two more are not on the picture because you cannot see them from the outside. The tenderloins hang underneath the spine, inside the cavity — two small straps, the best eating on the animal. And note how 7 and 8 sit together: the rump is the cap of meat over the top of the hind leg, taken off as its own piece, and what is left underneath is the leg proper. That leg is not one thing either: it is the top round on the inside of the thigh, the bottom round on the outside, the eye of round buried inside that, and the sirloin tip at the front. Those four come apart with your hands.
Breaking it down, in order
Cut meat, saw bone, and only saw when there is no joint to open instead. Work from the front so the carcass stays manageable on the bar.
1. The shoulders
There is no joint to find. The shoulder blade is held against the ribs by connective tissue alone, so pull the leg away from the body with your free hand and let the tension show you where to cut. Run the knife behind the blade, into the armpit, and keep scraping the tissue until the leg hangs by the shoulder joint alone. Then overextend the joint — bend it the wrong way until the cartilage gives — and the whole forequarter comes away in one piece. On a roe deer this takes a minute a side. On the table, take the front shank off at the knee if you want it as its own piece; on a small animal most people leave it on the shoulder.
2. The ribs and the flank
Mark your line first: about half a hand's width out from the spine, running parallel to it, curving down from the hind leg towards the chest. Score it with the tip of the knife so you can see it, then cut the ribs along that line with shears — a saw here fills the flank meat with bone dust, and you will taste it. The belly flap comes off where the ribs end.
3. The tenderloins
Inside the cavity, along the underside of the spine, two straps the length of your forearm on a red deer and the length of your hand on a roe. Free the thick end with the knife tip and peel the rest out with your fingers. Get them out before anything else on the back happens, because a saw cut through the spine ruins them.
4. The loin, the backstrap
Run the knife down one side of the spine, hard against the bone, until you feel the rib heads. Then work in short scraping strokes along the ribs, keeping the blade pressed onto the bone, and lift the whole strip off in one piece. The less you leave on the vertebrae the better you are doing this. Repeat on the other side. On a moose the strip is long enough to divide into several roasts; on a roe deer it stays one piece.
5. The hind legs
This is the part people cut through with a saw and shouldn't. Spread one leg out with your free hand, put the knife into the seam between the legs and run it along the pelvic bone, staying against the bone the whole way. Keep pulling the leg outwards as you cut and the hip joint opens by itself — a ball and socket, and once the socket is exposed you cut the round ligament inside it and the leg comes away. No saw, no bone dust, no splinters.
On the table, the shank comes off at the stifle joint: open the joint, cut the Achilles tendon, follow the seam. Next the rump — number 7 — which lifts off the top of the leg as a cap once you find the seam under it, in one piece on a big animal. Then take the flat hip bone off the top of the leg carefully, without cutting into the muscles underneath, and the four muscles are yours. They separate along visible seams of silverskin, mostly with your fingers — the sirloin tip at the front, the top round inside, the bottom round outside, and the eye of round buried inside the bottom round, which frees most easily from the shank end.
6. The neck
Lay the back on the table, cut down through the meat to the vertebrae, then overextend the spine and snap it. Trim off any bloodshot meat around the wound channel while you are there — it discolours fast and it spoils whatever it is packed with.
What changes with the animal
Roe deer. The whole animal fits on a bar and can be worked hanging from start to finish. The legs are small enough that seaming them out gives you pieces the size of a fist, so many hunters leave the shanks whole and the shoulder in one piece. The loin comes off as one strip and stays that way.
Red and fallow deer. The same animal, scaled up, and the point where seaming the hind leg starts to pay. The cuts reach a size the kitchen recognises — a top round off a red deer is a roast by any standard. Fallow is the finer-grained of the two; red deer carries a stronger flavour and a darker colour. On a bigger animal the rump is worth taking off whole rather than hacking through it, and it is one of the pieces most often wasted.
The one mistake worth naming: when you separate a hind leg in a hurry, it is easy to leave half the rump behind on the carcass. Follow the femur up and over the hip before you cut, and the whole cap comes away with the leg, to be lifted off as its own piece on the table.
Moose: the same animal, three times the problem
Nothing about a moose is different except the scale, and the scale changes everything. A hind leg is more than a person can comfortably hold at arm's length, which is why the rule is three people: one to take the weight, one to cut, one to keep the meat off the floor.
Break the carcass into quarters before you try to do anything precise, and split the spine with a saw rather than wrestling the whole animal. Then work each quarter on a table, in the order above. The hindquarters are the last part of the animal to cool, so they are the ones to get off the bone and spread out first if the weather is anything other than cold. In a Swedish slaughter shed the moose chart on the wall names the same leg muscles we have already met — the pieces are simply three times the size.
Wild boar is a different animal
1 shoulder · 2 collar · 3 belly · 4 loin on the bone · 5 ham · 6 tenderloin.
A wild boar, or a wild hog if you hunt them in the States, is a pig, and the chart shows it. Look at that list beside the deer chart and you can see the whole difference. A boar has a collar and a belly you can cure, and a deer has nothing that does either job. That is not a labelling quirk — it is why the boar is the more useful animal on a hook: the belly is a pancetta, the collar is marbled enough to cure whole as a coppa, and the ham has a fat cover a deer will never give you.
The order is the same as a deer with two changes. The shoulder comes off the same way, through the armpit, and the collar — the marbled block between the shoulder and the start of the loin — comes off with it or just behind it, a few vertebrae long. The ham separates at the hip joint like a deer's hind leg, and most of the time you will want it whole rather than seamed — dried whole, it is a prosciutto. What is new is everything along the middle of the animal.
The side: bacon and pancetta
The belly comes off in one slab. Start at the sternum and run the knife along the line of the ribs, keeping the blade against the bone, and take the whole side away in a sheet. Then square it: trim the ragged edges and the thin flap at the back until you have a rectangle of even thickness, because a slab that is three centimetres at one end and one at the other cures unevenly and dries unevenly. The trimmings are not waste — they go in the sausage bowl.
That squared slab is the single most useful piece on the animal. Salted and hung, it is a pancetta. Salted and cold-smoked, it is bacon. It is also the one cut a deer will never give you, which is why we say start here if you have taken a boar.
The ribs, long and short
You get one rack or the other, not both, and the choice is made when you take the belly off. Leave the ribs on the belly and bone them out afterwards — slide the knife under the bones and follow their curve — and you get spare ribs: the long ones, with meat between the bones. Take the belly off the ribs instead, then bone the loin off the spine, and what is left on the backbone is a rack of back ribs: the short ones, leaner and quicker on a fire. On a boar both are worth having; on a young animal the whole rack is small enough to cook in one piece.
The loin and the chops
Boned out, the loin is a long cylinder of lean meat with a fat cover — the same cut Spain cures whole as lomo embuchado. Left on the bone, it is a rack, and it cuts into chops: take the tenderloin out first, saw the chine bone off the underside so the rack will lie flat, then cut between each rib. Three centimetres is a chop worth eating; thinner than two and it is dry before it is done.
Testing for trichinella
Wild boar carries Trichinella, and the rules are not yours to interpret. Keep the njurtapp — the thickened muscle where the diaphragm meets the spine — or meat from the lower legs, and send it for testing: in Germany it is a criminal offence to pass the meat on before the result, in France analysis is required before any hunt meal or transfer, and in Sweden before the meat leaves the hunting team. Freezing is not a substitute; Sweden's national veterinary institute, SVA, is explicit that four weeks at −18 °C, which works on domestic pork, does not reliably work on boar, while 68 °C throughout does. So: never dry or cure boar that has not been tested. Cured meat is never cooked, so the margin a hot pan would give you does not exist — wait for the result before the meat goes anywhere near salt.
Packing it away
Pack for how you actually eat. Count the people at your table, decide what one dinner looks like, and make that the size of the bag — because a two-kilo block thawed for four people means you eat boar three days running or you refreeze it, and neither is what you shot it for.
Mince and stew meat go into even portions, the same weight every time, so you stop guessing: half a kilo, or whatever one meal is in your house. Write the animal, the cut, the date and the weight on the bag — the weight is the one everybody leaves off and the one you want six months later when you are cooking from the freezer. Freeze the bags flat so they thaw evenly and stack.
Lean venison keeps a long time vacuum-sealed. Boar does not: the fat that makes it worth curing is also the first thing to go rancid, and Swedish game guidance puts it at six to nine months. Anything you have promised yourself you will cure is better kept in the fridge than the freezer if you can — a piece that has been frozen and thawed loses water differently on the hook, and you will be chasing a target weight that keeps moving.
And then the interesting part
The reason to do all of this yourself is not the money. It is that a carcass you took apart yourself is a carcass you know: you know which muscle came off which leg, you know what you trimmed, and you know it was cool within the hour.
Hang it before you do anything clever with it. Dry aging is not an optional refinement on game — it is what makes the meat tender and what brings the flavour out, and a roe deer that went from the woods to the freezer in a day will taste of very little no matter what you do next. Give it the days, in a cold room with air moving, and let the Meatdryer hook count them for you.
Then the classics. From a deer: bresaola from the top round or the bottom round, biltong from the same bottom round cut into strips, and the whole loin cured as a lomo embuchado. Start with the top round — it comes off the leg almost whole, it is one grain all the way through, and it is nearly impossible to get wrong. The eye of round is the classic bresaola muscle, but on a roe deer it is a snack rather than a project; save it for a bigger animal. From a boar: start with the belly and make a pancetta, then come back for the collar. A whole prosciutto off the ham is the next level, and it is a year of your life — worth doing once you have made something smaller and know your room.
Which cut becomes which product, and why the fat rule flips between the two animals, is the whole subject of our guide to curing wild game. Read it before you cut the leg up, not after.
What you need
Everything for taking an animal from the hook to the board, and back onto a hook.
- Meatdryer Hook – Uses recipes, temperature, humidity and weight to tell you exactly when your meat is ready.
- Butchers Twine – Ties a muscle straight so it hangs straight and dries evenly.
- Protective Fly Net – Breathable cover that keeps insects off a hanging carcass or haunch.
- Accessory Meat Hanging Hook – Hangs the second, third and fourth muscle from the same leg alongside the first.
