As a young boy and teenager, I grew up hunting Canada geese with my family a lot growing up. We’re Indigenous and it was common every spring to butcher about 100-120 geese every spring. We were able to kill much more but dad limited us to this amount because beyond that, it was just too hard and difficult to butcher this many animals and store them properly. We used the entire animal - meat for eating, bones for tools/crafts, feathers for stuffing blankets and pillows and wing feathers for crafts. The heads were eaten too and every bit of meat, sinew, brain, edible part eaten. Feet boiled into stew. Gizzard, heart, lungs roasted for quick eating while butchering everything else. Intestines were consumed only if people were starving which we never were so they were just thrown to our hunting dogs. And in terms of butchering, mom was a skilled with a knife and a bird, she knew the anatomy like the back of her hand and could separate the bones from the meat and leave a rack of whole attached bones with a whole single slab of meat and skin. Then continue slicing the meat slab until she turned it into a continuous single sheet of meat and skin about four or five feet long, then that was draped over a smoking fire for a day or two and we got smoked goose that could be stored for several months. The deboned carcass was smoked alongside and once that was smoked, everyone took their time and picked away all the meat from the bone. She taught me how to butcher in the same way but I was never as skilled as her and my sisters at it.
My point is … once you do it two or three times, butchering a bird is not that hard once you figure out the anatomy, use a good sharp knife and how to do it. Most importantly, use a very sharp knife because contrary to popular belief, you are more likely to cut yourself with a dull knife because you’ll struggle more to make your cuts and thus hurt yourself.
As a young boy and teenager, I grew up hunting Canada geese with my family a lot growing up. We’re Indigenous and it was common every spring to butcher about 100-120 geese every spring. We were able to kill much more but dad limited us to this amount because beyond that, it was just too hard and difficult to butcher this many animals and store them properly. We used the entire animal - meat for eating, bones for tools/crafts, feathers for stuffing blankets and pillows and wing feathers for crafts. The heads were eaten too and every bit of meat, sinew, brain, edible part eaten. Feet boiled into stew. Gizzard, heart, lungs roasted for quick eating while butchering everything else. Intestines were consumed only if people were starving which we never were so they were just thrown to our hunting dogs. And in terms of butchering, mom was a skilled with a knife and a bird, she knew the anatomy like the back of her hand and could separate the bones from the meat and leave a rack of whole attached bones with a whole single slab of meat and skin. Then continue slicing the meat slab until she turned it into a continuous single sheet of meat and skin about four or five feet long, then that was draped over a smoking fire for a day or two and we got smoked goose that could be stored for several months. The deboned carcass was smoked alongside and once that was smoked, everyone took their time and picked away all the meat from the bone. She taught me how to butcher in the same way but I was never as skilled as her and my sisters at it.
My point is … once you do it two or three times, butchering a bird is not that hard once you figure out the anatomy, use a good sharp knife and how to do it. Most importantly, use a very sharp knife because contrary to popular belief, you are more likely to cut yourself with a dull knife because you’ll struggle more to make your cuts and thus hurt yourself.