I'm about to move houses, and in late April will go on my first couple of stalks with Sikamalc (if my legs don't fall off, as mentioned previously...), and have been giving quite a lot of thought to the logistics of turning a roe deer into meat in my semi-detached London flat. This has been resolved for me as my wife told me in no uncertain terms earlier this evening that there was no way in hell that I was butchering a dirty great deer at home. Well, she does give me pretty much all the leeway I want generally, so I suppose that it's only fair that I try not to cover the new house in blood.
There appears to be a size problem: she can tolerate my dealing with rabbits, woodcock, ducks and so on in the kitchen because it's pretty unobtrusive, and within under an hour everything's cleaned up and there's just meat in the freezer. But admittedly, a 20kg roe is more involved, visible and probably smellable. Essentially, this particular point is not up for discussion.
Now I know that if I don't bring a deer home, it's going to a game dealer so it's ethically sound, but damn it, I've always made a point of eating what I killed, although I've never killed something that yielded 12kgs of meat, so that's a fair consideration. I can't be alone in this sort of situation. I've done DSC1, so technically, I could hand a carcase for a butcher for him to do the work, and buy some of the meat back from him. This would involve a fair amount of previous relationship building I think.
I still have an option on muntjac though having described them as "the size of a really big hare". I didn't think that "sort of like a labrador" would work as well...
What do people in comparable situations do, apart from having sensible urban hobbies instead?
There appears to be a size problem: she can tolerate my dealing with rabbits, woodcock, ducks and so on in the kitchen because it's pretty unobtrusive, and within under an hour everything's cleaned up and there's just meat in the freezer. But admittedly, a 20kg roe is more involved, visible and probably smellable. Essentially, this particular point is not up for discussion.
Now I know that if I don't bring a deer home, it's going to a game dealer so it's ethically sound, but damn it, I've always made a point of eating what I killed, although I've never killed something that yielded 12kgs of meat, so that's a fair consideration. I can't be alone in this sort of situation. I've done DSC1, so technically, I could hand a carcase for a butcher for him to do the work, and buy some of the meat back from him. This would involve a fair amount of previous relationship building I think.
I still have an option on muntjac though having described them as "the size of a really big hare". I didn't think that "sort of like a labrador" would work as well...
What do people in comparable situations do, apart from having sensible urban hobbies instead?