For Labor Day - Fresh Meat

If you are squeamish about normal homesteading activities, like butchering, you might want to close your browser now and avoid today's post. I understand it can be a difficult topic to read about, especially when you aren't expecting it, hence my disclaimer.

People are so disconnected from their food in today's society. If we couldn't buy our meat in neat little packages from the store, I dare say a huge majority of us would become vegetarians. Not to mention many people wouldn't know the first thing about growing their own vegetables!

A long time ago, I decided if I am going to eat meat, then it's hypocritical of me to not learn to process our own homegrown meat. I'm not fond of butchering, but I am glad that we learned this important self-sufficiency task. It's not fun, but once the kill is done, it's not much different from cutting up a fresh chicken from the store.

There are no pictures in this post, and the content is not really very graphic, I just know that most folks don't want to read or know about butchering, so here's your warning.

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You've been warned. Proceed at your own risk.

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You lost your chance. Continue on, you brave soul.

We decided to butcher one of our goats to barbecue on Labor Day. We decided to get the processing done on Saturday as it's kind of stressful.

I was amazed at how much fat this young goat contained. We have never processed one this young. He was three months old, and was still living with his dam (and trying to breed her as they become sexually active as young as 8 weeks of age)! We have heard that milk fed animals taste different (think veal). Except I've heard that veal is produced under inhumane conditions (small cages where they can barely move around and kept in the dark).

The amount of fat contained in this buckling intrigued me, and I decided to try rendering fat.

Kev did the kill this time. I don't like that part. We learned that the goats "choke out" easily, just by accident. The first time scared me really badly. I was doing hoof trims, this was before we got our nice metal milking stand. I had the doe tied up to the fence and was working on her back feet and she started leaning against me very heavily. I looked over at her, annoyed, and saw that she was leaning against me, because she had fainted. The reason why is because she'd been leaning really hard against her collar and she cut off the flow of blood to her brain which caused her to pass out. I was so scared that she was dead and freaked out pretty good. But once I unhooked her collar from the fence and she fell to the ground and blood began flowing into her brain, she was okay, just a little disoriented.

A few times I've had the goats pulling on their collars so hard when I'm trying to put them back into the pen after milking that they have almost choked themselves out. They almost fall down but then they shudder like they are having a seizure. It's scary, because I'm afraid to hang onto them, and then they figure that out, and won't go where I want them to go.

Anyway, Kev got the idea to try putting a goat down in this way, as it seems to be humane since the animal faints due the loss of blood to the brain. He says it was much easier than trying to use the gun.

I'm usually present at the kill, but this time I told dh and Kev that I wanted them to call me when they had the kid hung. They got the young goat bled and hung; and I skinned, gutted and quartered it. Once the kill is done, I'm okay.

I harvested the liver, the heart, the kidneys, and by special request from one of our church brethren, the Rocky Mountain Oysters. Usually we castrate our young males, but we had a special request, so I was asked to not band this youngster.

I attempted to render the fat. I will link to the before photo so it won't be right there IN YOUR FACE. It's not really that bad, think liposuction. Oooooohhhh, no better? Sorry, sorry.

Here's the after photo:
Until next time.