With all you percentage takers out there. I would like to know how many have weighed a field dressed deer much less weighed the packaged meat. You wouldnt believe how far off poeple can guess weight. I do think some guesses on steves deer were up in the 160's. The last doe I weighed was 142 lbs I got 57 lb of packaged meat. No bones. No heart or liver.
Right on TJ. No one ever guesses low on their deer It seems. One other thing too, no one shoots a 150 bear anymore either. It's always 300 pounders.
I have weighed both a bunch of times to check the %. I like to weigh my deer because it's easy to be off by guessing. My dad shot a big 8 pointer one year that I swore would have gone 180. He was a battle scared old buck that had a broken main beam. To my suprise he weighted 140! I always get between 35-40 %. That is actually a big window if you do the numbers. TJ, yours comes out to 40%. My last years rifle buck weighed 179 and I got 64 lbs on meat. That comes out to 35%. I did lose a little meat from the bullet wound and I don't usually mess around with the meat on the lower legs on those older bucks. If that meat would add up to 4 lbs my % would have been 38%. I would guess that corn fed deer might have better %'s.
I'd say about 30-35 pounds off a an avg deer, sometimes a little more. Not really sure about total time, we are usually butchering a few a time and having some drinks, telling stories. A lot of times we'll just cube most of the meat to be defrosted later and all ground up all at once for jerky, along with a lot of pork for summer and breakfast sausage we make.I'm pretty lucky to have a cousin with a walk-in and all the butchering/processing equipment, I would hate to be paying a processor everytime. Its fun to do it on your own anyway imo.
