How To Gut A Deer Video
Before you settle on that new hunting knife, there are a few things you should consider. What animals will you hunt? How will you dress and butcher the animal? Do you plan to have a mount made? How do you want to carry the knife and is size or weight a factor? All these things may not seem important at first glance, but get into the elk woods with a knife poorly suited to skinning, caping or deboning and they suddenly become apparent.
Small game and upland birds are often easily handled with the average pocket knife. There are, however, knives specifically designed for small game. Big game like deer, elk, bear, moose and caribou are just that ... BIG game. As the size and weight of the animal increase, the toughness of the hide increases. Body size and weight are decidedly an issue if you need to quarter or debone the animal to get it home or to a meat processor. That pocket knife you use on rabbits or quail might get the job done on a bear, but it isn't going to be easy or pleasant. Neither is field dressing a cottontail with a large, fixed-blade sheath knife. How To Gut A Deer Video
Let's look at the basic tasks we ask our knives to do
We'll stick with big game. After the kill, your first consideration will likely be field dressing or gutting. Any experienced hunter knows that, right? But is there a particular type knife that is better at gutting than some other? Can't you gut a deer or an elk with the same knife you'll use to skin it? Sure you can, but ...
Consider that a dedicated gut hook, or a knife with a built-in gut hook, will do a neater, cleaner job of field dressing than a skinning knife will, just as a skinning knife will skin that elk easier and more efficiently than a deboning knife ever could. And speaking of deboning ... try it with a dedicated gut hook sometime. And what if that elk you just shot is your "Trophy of a Lifetime"? You want a mount, don't you? At least a full head or a shoulder mount, huh? That means somebody will have to cape that elk properly so your taxidermist will have something to work with besides a ragged hide full of nicks and holes. A caping knife is in order.
The point here is that there are different type knives for different tasks. The right tool for the job, as the saying goes.
Now let's compare the types mentioned so far
Dedicated gut hooks
This knife (for our purposes we'll call it a knife) really has only one intended purpose ... to cut open the belly, or paunch, WITHOUT cutting into the entrails and making a huge, stinking, contaminating mess. The dull tip does not nick the gut as the inverted "U"-shaped cutting edge zips open the belly slick as a whistle! Kind of like one of those fancy letter openers. It's not much good for anything else, although I suppose it could pass as a pencil sharpener in a pinch. How To Gut A Deer Video
