I used to think butchering my own game was a pretty daunting task. Until I did one or two. Now we almost always cut up our own animals. It's pretty simple really, as mentioned previously, just remove all the meat from the bones.
We have 3 piles, steaks, stew meat, and hamburger. The neck gets saved to make mincemeat, if the front legs/shoulders are big enough, we cut some steaks out of them, but it usually goes toward
stew and hamburger. The backstraps and the tenderloins become steaks, as well as some of the bigger cuts out of the hindquarters. Sometimes we'll save the hindquarters for roasts, but it usually gets steaked up. Anything left that's big enough goes to stew, the rest into burger. Some of the burger is made into sausage.
Unless you're really particular about what your steaks look like, there's really no wrong way to do it.
Weather dictates how long we hang it. 40 degrees or less and we'll hang it at least 3 days as long as the weather holds at that temp. Often times I've cut up the critter the same day because it's too hot. I just got all the equipment to build a cooler..... for free!
So now we can hang our game in a controlled environment until we're ready to cut it up.
Have fun with it!
