amount of meat...?

[musky_xl]

Has anyone had any problems with getting a smaller amount of meat from their game when it has come back from the butchers?

A friend of mine got some meat back last year...not nearly the amount I would have thought for its size. Did the butcher take some home for mom?

Ive never cut meat before, but it makes me consider it.

[yogi]

yes i am sure it does happen.. i used to cut meat for myself and a few others .. so i know first hand it is quite possible.... here is a way to tell if your getting ripped off or not .. what i do is ..on the way to pick up for the butchers ..i stop at a traffic scale and weigh my truck and then on the way back with the meat i reweigh it and it will surpise you how close those scales are..

[bearhunterfromthestart]

we haves a lot of butcher friends because we work with them (taxidermist and butchers go hand in hand) but they get a lot of people coming back and saying this. they say that when you work at a butcher shop the last thing you want to do is to take meat not only because they would normally get a discount on the meat that they sell but because they dont know what kind of care that animal got before it came in. and when you think about it, if you take out all the scrap, yucky pieces, and bone... you're going to lose some meat/weight.

so ummmm yeah. hope that helps

[bullmoose38]

My uncle owns a butcher shop. And if my memory serves me right I think you get a 3rd of what the animal actually weighs.

[Monie]

I do my own meat and you'd be surprised how much weight is lost. If it's boned out, you can figure the meat to be about 50% to 60% less than the weight of the field dressed animal

[OhioCooner]

We do most of it ourselves. But I know what we do take to the guy that makes sausage and smokies, he weighs it right in front of you and writes it down and has you double check it. Like already mentioned though, there is some cut off, etc, that gets fed to the dogs.

[YorkArcher]

Yeah. What everyone already said.

You loose alot in scrap and bone

[TxStarr]

You would be amazed how much stuff you throw away when you cut up an animal. And don't forget that bones weigh a lot. Unless you got the backbone, neck, and ribs back, there should be shoulders and hams (unless the hams were cut into steaks), and tenderloin. Depending on how big the animal was, that is a lot of bone coming out of the meat.

We have always done our own (except for cows, those we paid money to get them done!!) and I have always been amazed at how small a space in the freezer a full grown deer will take up when it is processed. Or a 400 pound hog.

Will started out working for a processing plant and he says you would not believe the people who would ask that very same question. I will state emphatically that the people who run the processing here do not take meat home with them and they do not give you someone else's animal. They are very particular about keeping the animals separated and making sure the right meat goes home with the right person. It is their livelihood and they wouldn't stay in business if they were cheating people.

But, on the other hand, we do have a friend who took a hog to a processing plant in another town and one of the helpers accidentally gave it to the wrong person. They did his next two hogs for free and were very apologetic. It did not replace the meat but they did what they could to make it right.

[Va Hunter]

We had one guy ,here locally, that no matter how big or how small the deer was, you'd get back the exact same amount of meat.


I took 2 deer to him one nite and picked up the packaged meat 4 days later. One of the deer was a nubbin buck and the other was a mature 8 pointer. When I questioned the same size piles of meat, the answer I got was that the larger one was "shot up" and they had to discard a lot of meat from the shoulders. When I told him that the deer had been neck shot ,he just kinda stammered and then started to get testy. Rather than really getting into it, I took what I had been given and left. There were incidents of folks requesting hides and antlers back for mounting that only got antlers. Some comments were left with our local office of Game and Fish and he was closed down shortly there after.

[northern_archer]

musky xl
I've heard of that around my area with some of the smaller butchers. i know when i get sausage done i deboned it and then weigh it on my own scale before go to the butcher to get done then i know what i'm getting back and it's normally a little bit more then what I took in due to the fact my bucher use a formula of 2lbs of pork to 1 lbs of deer.