Countdown to Firearms Season

Deer season for hunters using modern firearms in Stafford County, Virginia, opens on the 13th of November. I am hopeful that we can put at least one well fed doe in the freezer this season. Turkey season is open right now and there is an abundance of wild turkey around here. Not being properly equipped for wild turkey season, in my own opinion, keeps me from spending any time waiting for a turkey to cross my sights. It is archery season now but I do not own a bow and have never tried bow hunting. I have nothing against bow hunting, but I prefer not to launch an arrow, stick it into a deer and then have to follow a blood trail hoping that it does not leave my little patch of woods and cross onto someone else's property before it drops dead. I prefer to stick to my plan to ambush a deer with my .12ga slug gun and not have to worry about the deer running much at all. I went on-line and bought a DVD on how to butcher deer for maximum meat. I also bought a really good 5" boning knife. I recommend a website called "Ask The Meatman" for anyone serious about learning more about butchering deer, beef, and pork. They have great videos, they sell knives, have recipes and basically everything you need to know about processing your own meat. I think the average American has completely lost a connection to where meat comes from. The closest we come to understanding is possibly seeing a cut chart on the wall of our grocery store butcher counter showing a cow with lines that map out the cuts of meat. Plenty of deer hunters take their deer to a processor/butcher who cut it and wrap it for them. I want a better understanding of the process and I want to control how my meat animals are raised, how they are treated during their lives and how they are killed and butchered for my family's consumption. It only takes a few minutes on YouTube to get a good understanding of how our grocery store meat is raised, (over) inoculated, treated like something less than a fellow created being during their lives, often over crowded, hardly ever given anything approaching a natural life, and then terrorized in their final moments of life, killed by uncaring, low paid employees of industrial meat processing plants and butchered in less than sanitary conditions that barely meet the low standards of the US Drug and Food Administration. Our answer is to raise our own poultry, ensure they have good lives, are treated humanely throughout their lives, not given unnecessary drugs or poor feed and then killed in a humane way and processed in a sanitary way by me, not "some guy" who couldn't care less about the health of my family. There are a number of farms around here that offer pasture raised beef that is slaughtered and processed on the farm by the farmer. That tends to be what we prefer.