After the shot
It’s down. Now the work starts.
Finding the animal is the part everyone talks about. Getting it off the hill without ruining the meat, and knowing who is legally allowed to eat it, is the part nobody explains — and it is where a first deer most often goes wrong.
The first ten minutes
Almost everything that goes badly wrong happens here, and it happens because people are excited and in a hurry.
Reload before you do anything else
It is the first thing an experienced hunter does and the last thing a new one thinks of. An animal that is down is not necessarily finished, and the moment you have decided it is over is the moment you stop watching it.
Watch it from where you are
Give it a few minutes before you walk in. A deer that is hit and still will often be dead where it lies; one that is hit and moving is better left to stiffen than pushed. Walking straight in is how a wounded animal gets up and runs a kilometre into country you cannot follow it into.
Approach from behind and above, and check the eye
Come in from the back end, never the feet, and never between an animal and a drop. Touch the open eye with the muzzle or a stick before you touch the animal with your hands: a live animal blinks. A pig or a stag that comes back to life under you is how people get hurt badly, a long way from a road.
Note where you are before you start work
Mark the spot on your phone or GPS now, while you are standing on it. Two hours later, in the dark, carrying half of it, everything looks the same — and a second trip you cannot navigate to is a second trip you do not make.
Getting the heat out
This is the whole of meat quality. Not the shot, not the butchery — how fast the carcass cools, and whether it stays dry while it does. A deer that was gutted straight away and hung in the shade will be better eating than a better animal left an hour in the sun.
Gut it now, not at the truck
The gut cavity is where the heat is, and heat is what spoils meat. Open it up and get the guts out as soon as it is safe to do so. Every twenty minutes you spend admiring it is twenty minutes the carcass is holding its own temperature in.
Get air through it
Prop the cavity open with a stick, hang it if you can, and get it off the ground and out of the sun. A carcass cools from the outside in, so anything that traps heat — lying on warm ground, a closed pack, a plastic bag — works against you. Skin it if you are staying the night with it.
Wipe it, do not wash it
Water spreads whatever is on the surface across the rest of the meat and then keeps it wet, which is exactly the condition bacteria want. Wipe with a clean cloth or grass, trim the dirty bits off, and leave the hose alone until it is at the butcher.
Assume flies, from about October
Blowflies find a warm carcass in minutes on a still day. Game bags matter more than they look like they do, and a carcass left in the open while you go back for a pack is a carcass you may not want by the time you return.
No bag? Pack the cavity with fern
Fill the open cavity with fresh green fern or punga fronds. It screens the exposed meat from blowflies and holds the cavity open so air still moves through it, which is the same job the stick was doing. Cut it fresh and cut it clean — a handful raked off the ground beside the gut pile brings its own dirt and its own flies, and is worse than leaving it empty. Be honest about what it is: fern keeps flies off, it does not seal them out, and it buys you time rather than replacing the walk home.
Carrying it out
Decide early whether it comes out whole
On a farm with a ute at the fence, whole is fine. Anywhere else it is quarters or boned-out meat, and the decision is easier made standing over the animal than half an hour into dragging one.
What it actually weighs
A red hind is roughly 60–90 kg on the hoof and yields somewhere around 25–30 kg of boneless meat; a decent stag considerably more. Tahr and chamois live where you are not carrying a frame anywhere, so the meat comes off the bone on the hill. Twenty-five kilos is a serious pack in steep country and thirty-five is a bad idea in the dark.
Two trips beat one bad one
Most people overload the first carry, get slow and clumsy on the descent, and do the dangerous part tired. If it is two trips, make it two trips — or take the back legs and the backsteaks and be honest that the rest is staying.
Cool it again at the vehicle
Meat that travelled in a warm pack against your back needs air the moment it comes off. Do not throw it straight into a sealed chilly bin warm; let it breathe first, then chill it.
Who is allowed to eat it
New Zealand Food Safety are clear about this and the wording is worth reading rather than a summary of it.
“You can cook and serve your recreational catch to your family and household and your hunting or fishing party.”New Zealand Food Safety (MPI)
So: you, the people you live with, and the people you hunted with. A recreational animal is not a thing you can put behind a bar, sell at a gate, or supply to a restaurant, however good it is.
Getting it butchered
You do not have to do it yourself. MPI keep a public register of listed homekill and recreational catch service providers — butchers permitted to cut and process a wild animal for the hunter who shot it. Using one does not change who may eat it; the meat is still yours and still cannot be sold.
The register of listed providers MPI: the rules for hunters
Ring ahead. Many are small operations, most want the animal skinned and cooled, and in the roar the good ones fill up.
Can you sell it?
“Homekill and recreational catch product for human or animal consumption must not be sold or traded.”
The maximum fine is $75,000 for individuals, and $300,000 for corporations.
That is worth being blunt about because the question comes up constantly, usually from somebody being generous rather than commercial. It covers trading as well as selling — swapping a hind quarter for a box of beer is the same thing in law.
If you genuinely want to sell wild meat, it is a different regime and not a loophole. Both ends have to be certified: the hunter has to pass an MPI-administered food safety test, be formally listed, and work to an operations manual agreed with the processor — and the processor dressing the animal must be certified too. On public conservation land, commercial recovery is a WARO concession rather than something you opt into.
MPI: commercial hunters and listed suppliers
When not to eat it
- Anything from a 1080 block or its buffer. You cannot tell from the carcass and cooking does not destroy it. For deer, chamois, goats and pigs the buffer runs 2 km beyond the block. Check the map.
- An animal that looked wrong before you shot it. Staggering, blind, emaciated, or standing about when it should have run.
- Lesions in the chest or lymph nodes. Pale or yellowish lumps around the lungs and throat can be bovine TB, which is still being driven out of wild deer, pigs and possums. Do not eat it, and tell OSPRI — what you found is useful to the programme and free to report.
- Anything you are unsure about. The animal is worth less than a week of being ill, and there is always another one.
Where the official word lives
We have quoted the parts that matter and left the rest where it belongs. These are the sources, not a summary of them.
- MPI: the rules for hunters Who may eat it, what a service provider may do, and what is prohibited.
- The register of listed providers Every butcher in the country permitted to process your animal. Kept current by MPI, which is why we link it rather than copy it.
- MPI: rules for wild food The food-safety side, including what makes wild meat different from farmed.
- MPI: the whole regime The overview, if you want to see how the whole regime fits together.