I have tried to sustain myself by hunting and was in a sense successful, but learned a few things along the way.
The first one we noticed was that when you're living off of mainly moose and rabbit, you are not getting a lot of fat. You might get 5 weeks of meat, but only 1 week of fat off the animal. You can have meat coming out your ears but it doesnt matter because you have no fat source. We realised the folly of trying to emulate an inuit style diet, when you dont live where the inuit do, hunting animals covered in blubber. You 'can' do it, making up for the fat by hunting beavers and bears and fatty animals like that, but you dont get to choose what you eat. You can say 'ill just get a bear for my fat', but actually doing it is a different story. We found out that nature doesnt provide in the way that you might think. The main thing we really learned is that Diet is a Privilege. In the real world, sometimes you dont have a choice of what you get to eat. You can call yourself a carnivore all you want, but sometimes all you have is a bowl of rice.
I was just one person taking care of a full grown moose using a hunting knife and hatchet. Id start taking the skin off (to make it lighter) and then put a leg up on my shoulder so i could take the stomach out (which isnt easy when its laying in a hole or whatever other inconvenient place it chose to die.) and get all the stomach/intestines out of the way. Id put everything else that was inside in a bag, jar up as much blood as i could and drag it back. Then id take a leg at a time off (you just learn where to make the cuts and you can take the legs off easy with just a knife) and drag them back. Then my wife and I would go back and strip the rest of the meat off of the ribs/neck/spine, take out the tongue/eyes/brain and drag the last load back.
Then we would usually eat the organs first, and whatever we didnt eat the first say, three days, gets turned into jerky.
Fresh meat.. is shit. Its really terrible, it has no taste and is really chewy, it takes at least three days (depending on the temp) for the muscle meat to become edible. If we were eating the meat before then we would have to send it through our burger-maker, but the burgers were still lame compared to something a little older.
we would turn the 'shit meat' like the stuff with lots of sinue on the front legs into jerky, and kept the good meat, from say the hind legs or backstraps for eating. Any organs we didnt finish were dried, blood and eyes were dried, lungs were dried.
Anything that 'went gross' was just turned into jerky and it became amazing jerky.
After all the meat was off a leg we would crack it open and mix some spices into the bone marow and have wonderful buttery dip for our meat.
When its warmer out you have about a 3 day window of what you would call 'fresh meat' like what you would get from the butchers (so hung 28 days or whatever) and then you're eating high meat for the next 4 weeks (which you will come to prefer anyway, but variety is always nice)
Topic: Hunting anyone ? (Read 14542 times)