Witnessing My First Deer Gutting
A short story about how Uncle Jimmy may have turned me vegan
I stopped eating meat over ten years ago. My mother hasn’t eaten it for even longer than that. Growing up in her household, I saw how it was possible to eat a diverse meat-free diet and still be healthy. In my early twenties, I couldn’t stop thinking about the inextricable link between meat and the death of an animal. Then at twenty-three years old, I remember going to Econo Foods to buy a t-bone steak. I picked it up, saw the red blood pool in the corner of the package, put it back, and never ate steak again.
I previously wrote on this subject a bit in my Vegan at the Hunting Camp piece. I was never much of a hunter or gun kid growing up, and maybe that’s due to being raised without a father, or maybe it’s just who I am. The nature-vs-nurture debate about who we become is an infinitely complex web of early influences, gut feelings, and searing childhood memories.
Even before my father’s death, I remember shooting a finch with my BB gun and feeling terrible.
Shortly after my father’s death, I first witnessed the bloody carnage of a deer being field-dressed.
Both are burned into my psyche.
My unwaveringly pleasant Uncle Jimmy gutted that deer. And since hanging out with him and my other uncles, it’s a running joke that Jimmy inadvertently set eleven-year-old me on the path to become the vegan hippy radical I am today.
It was the first Thanksgiving after my dad passed, and my mother brought us downstate to stay with Aunt Crystal and Uncle Jimmy. They lived in a rural area surrounded by fields split by small forests. It was an awesome old farm property with an empty grain silo and a large barn with black-and-white cows painted on the side.
This happened over twenty years ago and our memories are very fallible, but this is what I remember from that day.
Being deer season in November, it was cold and a light snow sprinkled the ground. One morning, Uncle Jimmy woke me up before dawn. He said he had just shot a buck and asked if I wanted to come check it out or help bring it back or something. I was a young rural Yooper boy, so he must have assumed I’d be into the experience.
I probably had to borrow some proper clothing, and we jumped on the back of Jimmy’s four-wheeler and drove out to his kill.
The only other first-hand memories I have are watching the bloody mess of internal organs being pulled out… and the smell.
Obviously, I don’t know how to field dress a white-tail deer. But the internet does. So here’s a quick summary of what I more than likely witnessed, according to the gutting instructions at Badlands Gear:
“Take your sharpest knife and make a cut all the way around the anus. Go over this cut a few times until it’s a few inches deep and you’re confident the colon has been fully cut away from the pelvic bone…Next, spread the hind legs and either have your hunting buddy (hopefully wasn’t me) hold them apart or break out the rope and tie them off to some trees…Now, grab the skin where it makes a “V’ between the rear legs…Cut a 1-inch deep slit through the skin here…then using that slit as a starting point, use the gut hook to open the belly from the pelvic bone to the breastbone…If you don’t have a hook and are using a knife, use your index and middle fingers inside the hole to pull the hide up and away from the organs. Hold the blade facing out and carefully cut all the way to the rib cage…Now, using a bone saw or bolt cutters, cut through the ribs and separate the two halves. This will make for some horror-movie-level cracking sounds, but if you get the ribs spread enough, they should stay open a bit on their own…Take your knife and sever the diaphragm…Cut it away from all sides of the cavity walls and spine…Now, reach up into the neck and grab the windpipe. Pull it toward you to make it taut and slice it in half…If you’ve cut the anus free, severed the diaphragm, and cut the windpipe successfully, you now should be able to grab that windpipe and pull the entire gut sack out of the body.”
I don’t remember/blacked out most of that up until Uncle Jimmy pulled the entire gut sack—aka all the internal organs—out of the body. Even at that age, I remember it all looking so human and easily identifiable from school science books: the stomach, intestines, lungs, etc.
We put the gutted deer on the back of the four-wheeler and drove to the farmhouse, leaving behind the bloody crime scene.
It’s fun to imagine now, eleven-year-old me standing there in the snow probably wearing a baggy borrowed jacket, young twenty-something Jimmy being an exemplary uncle, giving me this right of passage and carefully cutting around the anus of a small dead buck as I watched in utter horror.
While Uncle Jimmy didn’t exactly turn me vegan, the experience scarred me enough to never get even remotely close to a recently slain still-steaming-with-the-warmth-of-being deer again.
And it may have been the first brick laid in the foundation of my now-vegan life.
I’ve lived in Texas my whole life and am surrounded by hunters and proud meat eaters. I stopped eating meat about a year ago after being grossed out while cutting up a chicken. We don’t talk about the ick factor enough. 😂
That’s what you call ORGANIC MEAT EH? I think I would share your same sentiment if I had to gut it myself 😆Personally, I don’t like deer at all but give me some fresh Elk and I’m gonna eat it. I appreciate how hard it is to harvest animals and the food they provide us meat eaters. Way better than picking it up at the grocery store. Again, great writing, Mitchell.