deer weight

[purple heart]

When do you weight your deer? Before or after you remove the innards?

Here we remove the innards in the woods and when we bring the deer to
a check station to register it they weight it there.:)

[Twanger]

Most of the time we remove the innards in the field, even if if it means bagging them and hauling them out too.

I know of a few people around here who speak of deer weights "on the hoof" i.e.with the guts in. Most of the time it's when you've got a big animal anyway, and it's interesting to speculate how much it weighed on the hoof.

Having done a bit of weighing I've found that whitetail deer are roughly 1/3 guts, 1/3 meat, and 1/3 hide and bones.

There's no requirement to weigh them anymore in Maryland, nor even physically check them in. It used to be pretty standard on opening day of shotgun season to check your bigger deer in at Poole's Store and then get them weighed. Folk would be there drinking coffee and congratulating the lucky hunters. Sadly, this little bit of Americana is now just a fading memory of the gray-beards.

[DaveHawk]

Walt , would that be full or hungry deer. A big buck with good size antlers that dressed 220 my reach 300. ?

[purple heart]

Here we clean them in the woods and register them but there is no
clear definition of clean. if you're at a check in station you can tell the guys
that are in a buck pool. The paunch and intestines are about the only thing
that was removed. This has been known to cause hard feelings between the
guys in the pool.
Myself I never get big deer so I don't worry about joining a pool. When I gut
them it's from stem to stern.
A gut pile in the woods here doesn't last long with the crows, ravens, coons,
fisher cats, bob cats, and coyotes.:)

[GF.]

You mean to tell me that guys will actually cheat in a freakin' buck pool?

Nice....:rolleyes:

JMO, anybody who tried to weigh in a deer that wasn't down to hide, bones & meat would be an automatic DQ, with the esophagus cut as close to the first rib as reasonably practical. I wouldn't expect anyone to screw up a cape, but leaving heart & lungs in there? Bite me.

Whenever I discuss weights of deer, it's field dressed; if I have an estimate of the live weight, I'll make it clear that that's what I mean. Just seems like part of being honest, and I don't feel any need to stretch the truth....

[DaveP]

I've always COMPLETEY emptied them out, and call it field dressed: heck, I usually reach ALL the way up and cut the windpipe up as far as I can reach if it's a big enough deer to get my hands up that far!

We always referred to hog-dressed as leaving the heart and lights (lungs) in.

I have a chart somewhere, giving live/field/hog dressed wts, as well as lbs of edible meat from any given weight deer.

I also have a chart that gives weights based on circumference at heart (also one using actual heart circ!)

PA used to give out tape measure with all this on it decades ago, and Leonard Lee Rue also has published some using his own data from his years as a NJ "game keeper".

I've never cared about keeping score, either in regards to weights or antlers, but I have been curious about weights,esp live versus drerssed, and gone out of my way to weigh a few.

Back when you HAD to check them in, we had a business next door to a checking station. The running joke was for my wife to guess the weight before they went on the scale. She was SCARY close most every time.(years of fooling with livestock, I guess)

[GF.]

.(years of fooling with livestock, I guess)


But not the kind we used to joke about in Laramie, I'm sure.... :eek:



;)


Funny - I used to be pretty good at guessing 2-leggers, but I guess it just takes a while to recalibrate for 4 legs.

Wish I had a better way to weigh mine, though. One year I stood on a scale under a deer I had hung up and tried to support as much of the weight as I could, but I don;y know that I got very close... Came up with #140 as a live weight (I had bagged and dragged the gut pile, so that went on the scale in a separate session ;) )

Pretty sure she was bigger than that, though. The hide was slightly larger than the buck that I took that year, so she probably went around 115-120 dressed, since that's what the 1.5 YO bucks around here average.... Not like the 180-190 pounders that were pretty much the norm up in MN.....

[dave-t.]

I've weighed a couple, but they were so close to the chest measurement chart, that I don't bring out the scale any more.

[DaveHawk]

GF if you eat the heart and liver and leave them in that's one thing. If you only do it to gain more weight then yes it's cheating.

[venado]

Here is one version of those weight (live vs. dressed) diameter charts.

http://residents.bowhunting.net/awesomehunting/Miscellaneous/deerweight.jpg

[ncboman]

Deer I want to weigh get brought out as they fell, otherwise it's pointless from my perspective.

[GF.]

Chart doesn't go high enough for northern deer :D One really big dude, I could just touch my fingertips when I put my arms around the lower part of his neck, so that's getting into 60" plus....:eek:

He went 230-something........ properly dressed out.

Dave - JMO, whether you eat heart & liver or not has nothing to do with the question of whether the deer has been properly field dressed. I'm all in favor of eating those parts, though, wherever there is no health issue such as CWD concerns or heavy metal or.....You can call it part of the pounds of meat that you got off of the critter, but ya gotta leave it in the cooler at the weigh-in....

But on that chart... Do you think I could stretch a tape across the tanned hides I've got, or are those going to be too shrunken up to give an honest estimate?? I'm thinking that shrinkage would be an issue....

[Bushman]

GF, when you are estimating those two leggers, is that dressed or undressed weight? Then are you using the B&C scale (butt & chest) or the P&Y (poke & young) scale?

I never could figure out why someone wouldn't field dress a deer. Having spent my early working career in a packing house, those innards were in the casing department before the carcass reached the end of the line and was headed for the cooler. I've seen deer weights that figure 21 to 23% of the deers weight was removed by field dressing.

Ours up here are always field dressed. It's a pretty rare year that I'm not in at least one big buck contest. The area that I hunt has some big bucks and I learned this year that four B&C class animals have come out of there these last years. I pal around with some guys from MN. and a couple of years back one of them sent me the dressed weights of some of the big deer from their paper. 223#, 274#, 247#, 250# and a 250#. Add guts and those are 300 pounders.

[Bob S]

I use field dressed weights for my records.