Scrounging Firewood (and other stuff)

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Way to go Packers!
They pulled it off! Lions are cursed on Thanksgiving!

I greatly respect the Packers organization especially for the ownership method. I was a huge Brett Favre fan and sort of had to follow him from team to team. Obviously he has made some mistakes in his post FB career which I certainly will not defend.

I couldn't stand Rodgers, Matthews, or coach Mccarthy. I said once they were all gone I could silently root for them again, and I am.

Even though I am from MN, I never much cared for the Vikings, and their current owner is an IDIOT. They will never win a ring with him meddling in the teams affairs.

When I moved out east I became a Patriots fan and now I am still a fan despite their struggles.
Whatever, they ain't goin nowhere this year.
No they aren't but it's good to see a young QB seemingly find his way.
 
I'm no expert on feral hogs, but domestic boars always stink bad (inside and out).
When we have to get rid of a breeding boar it either gets buried or becomes dogfood.

They say if you cut them first, most of the stink goes away.....so with wild hogs people just need to shoot off the oysters first and let em off-gas for a few months before harvesting em....lol.
Stink! Reminds me of a ripe outhouse when someone tries to kill the stench with toilet lyme. Just makes lyme smelling **** lol!
For my 40th, Cowgirl got me/us a trip to a tiny island in Far North Queensland - wild country way up in the tropics. Won't say which island. Awesome fishing etc and considerably above our pay grade, but a special occasion. Towards the end of the week there, found out that the owner of the island had a mate with a helicopter business in FNQ and for a price would organise a trip shooting wild pigs from the chopper. Also the typical Oz rules around firearms don't seem to apply up in that part of the world. I saw some of the footage of blokes pinging pigs from a helicopter - looked amazing!
Everyone says I should do chopper hunting, I said sure thing but only if they are paying! I do want to take the meat from what I shoot but unfortunately sometimes they are inedible from rut, lice infestation (meat is still good but you'll get lice trying to skin it), etc.
I have eaten many a wild hog. A big boar will smell like pissing on a fire while cooking. In areas where hogs are a nuisance, and hogs are killed by dozens or hundreds each year, the big boars usually become buzzard bait. The sows or piglets are what are harvested for eating. Even harvesting sows, a lot of the meat is thrown away. You remove the back strap and the hind quarters and dump the rest on the buzzard pile. Not practicle if you only kill one or two hogs a year, but when you kill a couple hundred wild pigs a year, you tend to take the choice cuts and throw away the rest. Wild hogs dont contain the same amout of fat as a pen raised hog and that fat is where the stink is kept. Trim the fat off the meat and you get rid of the stink. Same for a bear, trim away the fat if you are going to eat it. Pen raised hogs are usually cut when very young if being raised for the meat, and breeder boars are cut as soon as the sows are bred if you want to fatten to be eaten. Since most of the wild hogs we get endup as sausage, you add fat back to the meat as you grind it. This fat is usually purchased from a butcher or grocery store. My local Ingles cuts pork on Tuesdays and I will buy up 5lbs or so to keep in the freezer for when I make sausage. You cant tell the difference in taste of a wild hog and a tame one doing it this way. Doing it this way, I dont notice the stink. I usually do 25lbs at a time, but have done as much as 600lbs in a day. It takes a lot of people to do 600lbs in a day. Men deboning, women mixing the seasoning and the kids carrying pails of meat to the grinder. We use a 5hp 220v Hobart commercial grinder for that quantity of meat.
I now have 5 hogs to my name. The first small sow was the best pork I have ever eaten. The smaller boars were very tasty but so dry that they needed to be turned into sausage-we mixed them 50/50 with domestic pork grind and they were great. The big boar last year was rank and had to be thrown but his euro skull is on my coffee table. This sow would have been great but was loaded up with lice, first time I have encountered that.

I absolutely love hog hunting and as long as funds allow plan to do it at least once yearly going forward. I do need to alter my rifle though---the barrel is too long for a short range gun, it is a pain to maneuver in a blind.
 
From what I've heard from my Arkansas hunting buddies is a boar run by dogs or otherwise riled up will have worse tasting/smelling meat than one that gets dropped in his tracks. Deer are no different, a buck in rut or run by dogs tastes more "gamey" than one just minding it's own business and BAM! Lol. Testosterone will affect game taste for sure. I've had some luck brining meat before further processing. Quartered deer or finished cuts soaked overnight in water vinegar and salt before freezing helps reduce the "gameyness"
 
From what I've heard from my Arkansas hunting buddies is a boar run by dogs or otherwise riled up will have worse tasting/smelling meat than one that gets dropped in his tracks. Deer are no different, a buck in rut or run by dogs tastes more "gamey" than one just minding it's own business and BAM! Lol. Testosterone will affect game taste for sure. I've had some luck brining meat before further processing. Quartered deer or finished cuts soaked overnight in water vinegar and salt before freezing helps reduce the "gameyness"
I can vouch that soaking in milk will make them more tender as well.
 
From what I've heard from my Arkansas hunting buddies is a boar run by dogs or otherwise riled up will have worse tasting/smelling meat than one that gets dropped in his tracks. Deer are no different, a buck in rut or run by dogs tastes more "gamey" than one just minding it's own business and BAM! Lol. Testosterone will affect game taste for sure. I've had some luck brining meat before further processing. Quartered deer or finished cuts soaked overnight in water vinegar and salt before freezing helps reduce the "gameyness"
I’ve only experienced gamey venison once in all my years of hunting . Was a doe that I had to leave in the woods overnight as it was too dark to track . So it wasn’t gutted and cooled fast enough stupid thing was I stopped tracking and it was about 10 feet away from where I turned back .Since I hunt on my property the deer is field dressed and the cavity iced within 20 minutes .IMG_7352.jpeg
 
looks very neat but also like one whale of a lot of extra work.
It is very easy to move these back and forth instead of moving small amount to the house. At least that is why I use them. I keep 8 full all the time and just rotate their usage. Mine are pretty much in the shade also. There is always a breeze and that dries the wood.
 
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This came up in my memories. 8 years ago. My farmer neighbor had a whole fence line pushed down and asked me to cut the root ball off. Over a dozen large trees 18" to 36" Dia. I cut them to 12' lengths and limbed. He loaded them up and dumped them over the fence into my backyard with his ginormous loader tractor. Heated my house for a couple years and firewood sales paid for another saw, an old splitter and a boat! Miss the sled.... maybe sell some wood and buy another one...
 

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