Friend Shot 1900 Lb Buffalo - Good Meat??

don't see the big deal about a *canned hunt*.

I've helped many family members round up their angus' to go to slaughter. usually they always keep two. doesn't matter that they've been on their farms for almost 2 years and rounded up by the same caretaker that feeds them every day. they are terrified, they know something is up being loaded into the trailer. I don't want to think how scared they are in the process once they reach the processor.

if I could find a mobile processor who would come and shoot the animal while munching on the grass right here in my pasture I'd buy a steer to raise tout sweet (pardon my misspelling). and if I had to buy a bison or buffalo to entice someone to do a canned hunt for me that would be ok too I have found that it is the terror they exhibit in rounding and transporting to the processor that I just can't abide. not the killing. if it were kind as well as humane.

The sides are hanging as we speak at our local processor at about 33 degrees. It will hang as such for 2-3 weeks (I prefer 3). There isn't any "rotting" going on at that Temp, but there is a whole lot of tenderizing going on.

BTW, this "canned hunt" occured on a ranch of over 15,000 acres and it took 2 days of stalking to get close enough to shoot it. It was shot with an antique Sharps rifle. Not the same as walking into a pasture and shooting one tied up to a stake.

If he is as good as some of you say, I might just have to get a Buffalo calf and raise it for the freezer.

Yup, it tastes like chicken, a giant, misshapen, curly-haired with-an-attitude chicken.

The tribe where I live keeps a herd on (I'm guessing here) 10 acres. For a buffalo, whose middle name is "roam," sure it's a cage and a fairly small cage.

And though they are "fed," their brains are not atrophied by hundreds of years of domestication. Animals escape and head to the hills every so often. (I secretly cheer for them.)

I'd eat the meat! You bet! I like deer better, but it could be because the man knows venison quite well and is less experienced at buffalo.

I thought the comment about the genetic pollution was very interesting and true. I work with an Indian tribe here with about 400 cows. There animals cama from all over the place. The have been working with Texas A&M on genetic testing. Initially they had almost 10% contaminated with beef genetics. Now after 4 years we have them certified 100% beef free. Very interesting animals to work with. Scary different from working a group of cattle.

On the canned issue.

I have no problem with anyone harvesting there dinner with a rifle. I have raised animals my whole life, and have butchered myself on occasion. A rifle is often the most convenient or only practical tool. What I have no time for at all is calling that act of harvesting a "hunt". Texas has taken this activity to a level we will hopefully never reach up here. The harvest described here certainly sounds more like a hunt than a kill, but that continum is a very difficult thing to quantify. IMHO many more animals are "hunted" here in pens less than 160 acres without a single tree than in larger enclosures.

My opinion was welded in place one morning a few years ago when one of those "hunting" shows had a story aout a bison hunt in ND. This yahoo goes out there with a 357 about 10 yards from a bull standing at a round bale feeder and shoots him 6 times, reloads and shoots another 6. Then stood around high fiving like this was an accomplishment.

Insanity.

Cal it a harvest or what you will, but dont demean the wonderful lifestyle of hunting by calling it that. the public wont support it in the long run, and I intend for my grandsons to be hunting long after I am gone.

Tom

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Lord, let me be half the man my dogs and my kids think I am, or a quarter of the man my wife wishes I was....

I detest the term "harvest". When we go out to procure game we hunt it and then we kill it. Yes kill. No wishy washy squishy euphemisms about "harvesting". You harvest grain. You kill an animal. It sounds as ridiculous as going out in the garden and killing the corn or killing a cabbage.

As for "canned" hunts it is one of those terms that get thrown around too much usually as a reason why hunting is bad and hunters are evil slobs. If you're pursuing your quarry in a fenced game ranch of a thousand acres is that still a canned hunt? If you're hunting on a fenced land so that the genetics of the deer herd are managed is that canned? If you're killing elk or bison on a fenced ranch is that a canned hunt? If you're hunting pheasants and quail that have been raised and released to stock an area is that a canned hunt? If you're hunting over a feeder is that a canned hunt? If you hunt over a food plot is that a canned hunt? Is hunting over a water hole a canned hunt? How about a corn field? An orchard? It never ends.

I've seen canned huts. Where an animal is hauled out in a cage and is shot or turned loose and then shot. That is what the public thinks of as a canned hunt. Hunting at a preserve of several hundred or thousands acres is hardly a canned hunt.

In any event you get into the same sort of game that many hunters get into when discussing methods. If you hunt with a semi-auto rifle you're not a real hunter. If you hunt with a rifle you're not a real hunter. If you don't hunt with a bow you're not a real hunter. If you hunt with a crossbow you're not a real hunter. If you hunt with a compound you're not a real hunter. It's like if you don't go out in a loin cloth and kill a bear with a sharpened stick somehow you're "not a real hunter".

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