Gutting and not gutting small animals

[1894]

Clean the squirrel like in the video, BTW squaks hangs out over at www.rimfirecentral.com, then use the meat in any recipe that you like chicken in. My favorites are dumplings, pot pie, but fried with gravy, mashed potatos and bisquits is hard to beat.

Great cooking section there :thumbup:
Thanks for the link.

Phil

 

[Troop]

Gray squirrels are tasty! I don't mess around with gutting them. All I do is lop off the back legs at the "hip". Then, just chop off the feet, skin, and they're ready for the skillet. (They need a little salt.) :thumbup: All I use is the back legs; that's where most of the meat is.

 

[kr1]

Gray squirrels are tasty! I don't mess around with gutting them. All I do is lop off the back legs at the "hip". Then, just chop off the feet, skin, and they're ready for the skillet. (They need a little salt.) :thumbup: All I use is the back legs; that's where most of the meat is.

Back when I hunted I mostly hunted gray squirrels. I use to get a batch of them and put them in my freezer. When I had enough I would give them to my uncle (what a cook he was) and he would make a green olive, carrots, etc with olive oil and with the squirrels. It was fantastic.

KR

 

[Troop]

Back when I hunted I mostly hunted gray squirrels. I use to get a batch of them and put them in my freezer. When I had enough I would give them to my uncle (what a cook he was) and he would make a green olive, carrots, etc with olive oil and with the squirrels. It was fantastic.

KR

Mmmmm...Yumieee! All this talk is wanting me to grab my .22 for a little snack!

 

[DOC-CANADA]

I eat the hearts and livers of deer and ducks that I kill and have done it for many years without ill effect. I've not eaten it raw, but would in a survival situation. Somewhere in my dim memory, I remember explorers getting sick from eating livers, but I was remembering them to be Polar Bear livers. Been wrong before. Ask my ex wife.

Codger

I, too, heard it was Polar Bear livers. Also the livers of Ringed and Bearded Seals.

Doc

 

[Myal]

What kind of roos? Kangaroos?

As far as handling vermin, Hantavirus and also plague. Being able to burn the hair and just cook vermin unskinned and ungutted with as little contact as possible until after they are cooked is one of the reasons I am wondering about this. Also I would not eat any organs of animals. All flesh is edible on almost any animal but you can get yourself in serious trouble eating organs cooked or uncooked. Some animals carry large lethal amounts of dangerous items in their organs. An example, I believe it was Shackleton's expedition that ate the livers of the dogs that they brought to sledge with. That gave all of them a poisonious dose of Vitamin A. Hair and teeth fell out and open lesions on the skin. Not good in a survival situation. Uncooked the organs can have living parasites.

KR

Yeah , roos = kangaroos , the first time I saw them cooked whole was in a tribal camp , there was the two shanks of the hoppers and the front paws sticking up out of the ground , thru a bed of coals .

once the critter is cooked , its dug up , dusted off , usually gutted either before eating or just eaten around the guts . It varies from tribe to tribe and area to area tho .

its not for the weak hearted , and personaly I dont do it that way , I do shift the coals and bury a foil wrapped critter under my fire sometimes , but its a peeled and cleaned foil wrapped critter , I learned to kill peel and clean sheep and goats since I was 7 yr old , and it just feels wrong to me personaly to not be bleeding , peeling and cleaning something Im gunna eat .

but for many thousands of years before I appeared on the scene , burying a critter whole and cooking it guts and all was just the desert way .

I am aware of the toxicity of dogliver , and here we dont have plauge , but the animals have worms at times , at times thru the meat and joints , tho this is kinda obvious to tell before you kill the critter , but it makes skin and clean worth it the effort , just to be sure .

all my meat is well done , nothing rare or even meduim rare , if there is anything in it , its gunna be cooked by the time it hits my gut

 

[Citori]

Polar bear livers are too high in Vitamin A and will kill you if you eat them, cooked or not.

Other bears have a lot of B in their livers. They can be eaten in small quantities if properly prepared, but I wouldn't bother.

Bears in general are different from most other wild game because they carry so much fat. They pretty much have to be skinned, then have their fat skinned off, pretty soon after being killed. Otherwise they'll hold body heat long enough to spoil the meat.

 

[TDahlgren]

OK , so where does one find bike spokes and steel cable in the wilderness ?

just curious

Oh man, I can hardly begin to list the amount of junk I've found in 'wild' areas, but how about steel .50 caliber BMG links in the middle of Badlands NP for starters? No matter how wild it may be there's a damn good chance somebody else has been there before and left something behind.

 

[Kiah]

Reading Richard Grave's "Bushcraft" today, I noticed that he encouraged cooking game whole when using the buried in coals method.

 

[coote]

I've never done it, but I've seen references to packing a layer of wet clay around your critter, then putting the whole lot in the coals to cook.

I understand that gutting was regarded as unnecessary. When everything has been baked a while, you roll your clay ball from the coals, break it open and should find that it is ready to eat. I'm told that hedgehogs were cooked this way, and that the spines etc adhered to the clay. I guess the same would apply to bird feathers and maybe fish scales.

I have thrown whole fish into a bed of burned-down coals. They go black, but the skin peels off nicely to expose the succulent flesh.

I have heard about vitamin poisoning from eating liver...polar bear and seal I think.

I like a good feed of liver, but nowadays I seldom eat brushtailed possum liver or pig liver (from wild animals). People lay poison for possums, and pigs eat dead possums. I understand that if an animal is holding a sub-lethal dose of poison it is likely to be most highly concentrated in the liver.

When I know that meat is parasite-free, I will often eat it cooked rare (or not at all in the case of jerky). But if there is a danger of parasites, or some other problem, I will make sure it gets hot right through. So I eat rare venison, but my pork is always well done.