Killed a deer not fit to eat Pics added

[Okanagan]

Doggone. Killed a fat, outwardly healthy looking deer that tastes so bad I have decided to throw it away. 

I drew a doe permit for mule deer.  Three minutes after starting my first calling stand for a doe, one came my way at 50 yards through Christmas trees.  I watched her for four minutes, looking for a fawn because I hoped to tag a dry doe.  No fawn. She looked and acted fine.  Using my walking stick as a steady I shot her high to stay above brush, at the front of the near shoulder as she stopped quartered toward me, downhill at 30 yards.  She dropped on the spot.

Gutted in the foot of snow, dragged a ways and hung to skin clean and cool out at 33 degrees overnight, she is fat and big.  The first thing I noticed was that her fat is grey rather than white, though it turned white after cooling.   70 lbs. of mostly boned out meat, with shoulder blades and short hind leg bones left in.   

She had two patches of bright yellow colored fluid about a hand width each under the hide on the front of her brisket/lower chest, clear liquid, no cyst.  Lymph glands are normally much higher on the neck, and infection/pus is normally cloudy.  No swelling that I noticed.

She also had at least three long vertical scratches on at least one of her hind legs, almost healed, not deep but long 1/8 inch wide strips of hair gone to the skin.  The longest one ran from mid ham to her hoof, with two others from above hock to hoof. I didn't examine them much  and wish that I had.  Parallel scratches about 3/4 inch apart. It was high wind and snowing a blizzard squall and it was a lot of work for me to gut, drag her 350 yards to the road and then skin her with snow falling down my neck till I put up my rain hood.   Sun came out while I dragged, melting great gobs of snow to fall on me under the big trees where I hung her. 

I phoned a game dept. biologist and he ID'd the yellow patches as a seroma, sort of a technically different bruise, not harmful to humans at all to eat.  He said to cut away nearby meat because it would taste bad.  He thought that the scratches were likely a wolf attack, though it looked like cat claws to me.  He said wolves sometimes make scratches like that and attacking the hind quarters is way more wolf style than cat. 

The best cuts of chops from the outer strap taste bad.  I have tried twice, pan fried with bacon.  The first try was very poor taste, and my second try on the second day was so bad that I could barely finish the test chops and it left a taste in my mouth all day.  I had planned to hamburger all of it but it isn't fit for that.  It would do for the siege of Leningrad but I'm not that hungry. Doggone.

Added:  I had left my camera home but took a few pics with my cell phone, and don't have a clue how to get them from phone into my computer. Didn't take any photos of the seroma nor close up of the scratches.  Doggone again. 

[slagmaker]

Well doggone it.

I have shot rabbits that when dressing I found them to have puss under the skin. I wouldn't even feed them to my dogs. They ended up on the burn pile with a good fire a going.

I wonder if your deer had an infection from the scratches that it had just gotten over but still had lingering effects. I guess there is no way to know without some kind of expensive laboratory testing. Bummer on the meat

[FinsnFur]

Thats a let down and a bit disgusting. I dont think I would have made it to a second taste

[Hawks Feather]

I am with Jim.  I would have been a one-and-done.

When I was a kid venison was something very rare.  One of the family friends shot a deer in MI and gave my parents a roast - it was pretty good.  Then a neighbor across the street got one in the pine forests of PA and when Mom started cooking it the house started smelling like pine.  One of my parents took a sample bite and we all had peanut butter sandwiches for supper.

Jerry

[pitw]

I have never been a fan of mule deer as food.  It does suck to put in the effort and end up with poor quality.  Can you get the tag replaced?

[Okanagan]

I have never been a fan of mule deer as food.  It does suck to put in the effort and end up with poor quality.  Can you get the tag replaced?

Tried.  Got laughed at.

[Okanagan]

I wonder if your deer had an infection from the scratches that it had just gotten over but still had lingering effects. I guess there is no way to know without some kind of expensive laboratory testing. Bummer on the meat

Something like that is my guess.  I think it was a healthy animal that was mostly recovered from some kind of injury trauma and whose system was flooded/tainted with healing "juices" that hadn't yet cleared out.  My bet is that it was already healed enough that it would have produced a fawn next spring.

On the chest seroma, I wonder if it had run into something as it escaped or if a predator had penetrated the hide there.  Cougars like to jump on a deer's back, reach down in front of the neck/shoulder and sink in claws to hold on while they bite the back of the neck.   This was some kind of failed predator attack, now all but healed.  Wolves go for a hamstring on deer, said the biologist.

Bad timing on my part to shoot it.  I had passed five as I looked for a dry doe.  Two sets of doe/fawn and one huge old doe that I didn't ID as having no fawn till too late. 

[JohnP]

If I had to bet I'd bet on the lion attack, their claws are full of bacteria of all sorts and could've easily left her with an infection.   No doubt in my mind you did the right thing.  Out of curiosity are your deer tags over the counter or do you have to draw, one per year?

[Okanagan]

If I had to bet I'd bet on the lion attack, their claws are full of bacteria of all sorts and could've easily left her with an infection.   No doubt in my mind you did the right thing.  Out of curiosity are your deer tags over the counter or do you have to draw, one per year?

In the whole Province of British Columbia we have a limit of three deer per year with over the counter tags.  Some areas are open for does with the over the counter tags, some for bucks only.  The tag I drew was for a mule deer doe in a 4 point buck only area, and the timing coincided with an open moose season. 

To complicate things:  The Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwai) are an exception where the annual limit for over the counter tags is 15 deer of either sex.  That's 950 road miles plus an 8 hour ferry ride from me.  I should start a Go Fund Me account to pay for a hunt up there!

[Okanagan]

Kept googling how to download photos and finally got some pics of the deer in bad taste.  These were taken about an hour and a half after it was shot, as I arrived at the road.  Sun had come out and air temps were just above freezing.  The foreleg is the best drag handle I've discovered.



The neck looks a little swollen in the pic below, and I noticed that when I first walked up but it had an exceptionally heavy winter coat of hair and when straightened out it seemed normal at the time.  Again, the initial dealing with the deer was in a blizzard and after that I was distracted with picking the best route to drag, etc.   As with the scratches, I shoulda paid more attention to details. 



One small scratch shows on the lower hind leg in this pic, and I don't remember any scratches on that leg, so it had them on both hind legs.  Most of the scratches were on the inside and front of the leg.

[FinsnFur]

Bear Grylls woulda ate it.

[Okanagan]

Got a call from my friend on Vancouver Island who reported a similar yellow fluid under a deer's hide.  He killed a large fork horn blacktail a few days ago and took it home to skin.  It was super skinny (he said that it was feeding voraciously when he shot it).  It had a puncture wound low in its rump, apparently from a fight with another buck.  When skinned, he said that the front end of the carcase was light yellow.  The silver skin portions were specifically yellow, but otherwise it seemed normal and healthy.  We had talked about the bad tasting one I got, and he thought that he had one like it.  He and his wife cautiously taste tried a small portion, a good chop pan fried, and said that it tasted OK.  He was going to try some more today. 

After my experience, I'd likely toss it first and taste something else. 

[FinsnFur]

Same here