Butchering Small Game and Birds: Rabbits, Hares, Poultry and Wild Birds

Butchering Small Game and Birds is essential reading for those who have embraced self-sufficiency, and who regard small game and birds, both domestic and wild, as an essential part of their diet. The volume covers rabbits, hares, quail, chicken and turkey as well as game birds and provides comprehensive guidance relating to all aspects of the craft of butchery. Topics covered include: equipment and how to use and maintain knives correctly; how to humanely dispatch the animal or bird for butchering with speed, precision and almost no suffering [this is of paramount importance]; and butchery techniques including basic small game and bird anatomy, meat inspection and hygiene and dealing with aged birds and animals. There are further techniques such as paunching, removal of offal, extraction of shot, skinning, plucking, drawing and dressing birds, washing carcases, jointing rabbits and hares and trussing covered as well as the preservation of meat, preparing meat for the freezer and hanging and curing of skins is covered following the philosophy that every part of an animal or bird that is usable is used.

John Bezzant has been a smallholder for over twenty years and a hunter for even longer. He has a vast amount of experience of butchering both domestically reared fowl and stock, and small game and birds taken from the wild. John has held smallholdings in England and Wales and is currently based on a very rugged five-acre smallholding in Scotland, where he tends milk goats, raises chickens and takes meat from the wild.