About two weeks ago my Dad died from pancreatic cancer. He taught me how to dress, butcher, and cut meat. We started small with spruce hen, hares, and ducks that we got hunting on our farm. I also remember raising chickens and slaughtering them.
We raised several pigs over the years, usually two at a time. We would name things like: Porky and Petunia, Laverne and Shirley, or Heckler and Koch. I was handy to put their names on the packages of meat so we could know who we were eating.
This is a picture of my Dad splitting down a pig. We did it by hand, I've seen the fancy power saws and heard of people using chain saws but this got the job done and didn't waste meat. We did get one road kill pig, although this is probably not it.
My sister was walking home from a neighbors house, a mile away. and found a pig that had gotten loose, gotten hit and broke a leg, and then got stuck in our fence. It then wallowed a shallow still entangled in the fence. Dad called all the other farms around close and nobody claimed it, so he called the Troopers just to be safe. Then he put it out of it's misery and brought it home.
Back in the 80s Dad got us on the Roadkill list and the Troopers would call us to come get Moose that had been hit. Back then they let anybody sign up, but after a while they discovered that they had a huge list to deal with, a lot of inexperienced people wasting a lot of meat, and a whole moose would go to one family. So they have since changed the rules. Now a nonprofit charitable organization can be put on the list and they are expected to distribute the meat to the needy.
Once they required nonprofit status we signed up through our church.
Besides the moose we got hunting, we usually did one or two roadkill a year. From 2001 through 2006 I was averaging 6 a year. Over the years my Dad and I have probably recovered close to 100 moose, I have records on about 40.
Dad was real serious about not wasting meat and the idea of big animal like going to waste really galled him.
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