1 - Killing
You shoot it in the head, preferably with a .22 cal. bullet right behind the ear. The animal needs to be tame/docile for you to be able to do this, because you will need to have it eating and head down. Then you can just walk up to it, since it knows you and is okay with having you walk up to it, and very specifically aim and fire the rifle. If all goes well the animal will drop senseless as the bullet causes a massive malfunction in its brain, but the heart will continue to beat. Then you move to the next step: bleeding. If the animal is not tame, as was the case with the ones I watched and worked on today, then you may need a high-powered rifle (we used a .270 cal) because you will be at more of a distance and you will have to introduce the slug to the steer's brain from a less than ideal angle. (The steers we killed today were virtually wild. They had, apparently, been that way since they were delivered. By wild I mean that, although they were in a fenced in pasture, they would not eat feed out of a human's hand, in fact if most humans would come near them, they would run away. This is not so bad except that, at about 1200 pounds, and with little discretion over what one runs into, or how hard one runs into (or over) it, at slaughtering time the animal becomes dangerous.)
2 - Bleeding
Once the steer is down you need, with a sharp knife, to slit its throat to have it bleed out. You have to do this immediately so that the still beating heart will pump the blood out. Amazingly, it does. For a 1200 pound steer this will take a few minutes. In the cool autumn air the animal steams out of its mouth, throat, and anus as this happens. It looks like it's smoking. It looks like its life is leaving - vapourizing right there before you.
3 - Skinning
To do this you first skin the rear legs beginning below the "knee" about a foot up from the hoof. You cut into the skin, get your knife blade under it, and make a slit, Then you girdle the leg and begin to separate the hide from the carcass. Once you have the two hind legs done, you'll need a tractor with a front end loader, or some other means to lift the carcass. You'll take steel grappling hooks, and hook the carcass through the cartilage and tendons on the legs that you've skinned, and then you'll lift the entire body by the hind legs, so that it is off of the ground, suspended. You'll need a ladder to continue the skinning, because you now you will work down from the hind legs, toward the anus (which are now considerably higher because they have been lifted by the tractor's front end loader), at which point, although the skinning process continues on down the carcass, the gutting process begins.
4 - Gutting
Beginning at the anus you separate the digestive tract from the outside and inside of the carcass. This requires knowledge of how a body is "built" and a some care, as you don't want to puncture any of the gut. It'll smell, and that acidy stomach sh** can taint the meat. So you cut out the anus (which will whisper sweet nothings to you) and begin to free the guts. You tie off the urethra to keep it from leaking. You'll need a saw (a large, coarse-bladed hacksaw works best) to cut through the pelvis so that you can separate the hind quarters and work your way down. You'll be doing this while standing on a ladder. Once you've freed the guts from the hindquarters, you'll move down to the neck where, once the hide is free you'll cut off the head. The most challenging part here is finding the spot at which to sever the vertabrae. It's not that difficult actually. Once the head is off, you'll clean out the tissue around the esophagus and trachea and then make a cut into the (already skinned) carcass along the breastbone (sternum). Once you have a cut from the bottom of the sternum right through the neck, you'll need the saw again, to cut the sternum and separate the front quarters (do this carefully as you, again, will want to keep from puncturing the guts, which are now down in the chest and throat of the carcass). When the breastbone is cut, you'll be able to pull apart the front quarters and continue to separate (using a knife) the guts from the ribcage. When the guts have been completely freed, they will just tumble out. There will be a lot of "material" - a lot!
5 - Quartering
Now you lift the carcass, still hooked (quite literally) to the tractor's front-end loader, and drive it near the place (garage, or some other building equipped to hand meat indoors - to keep the coyotes, etc. away from it) in which you will season and store it. In our case, this was a garage on the yard next door. Once the tractor and the carcass are near the "hanging" spot, you cut the carcass lengthwise, from the back, using a saw of some kind (we used a long blade on a reciprocating saw), sawing it down its backbone until it is in two sides. Then you cut those two sides into quarters at the gap between the second and third rib (from the hind end).
6 - Hanging
When you cut the bottom quarter free you must have two-ish ready and able people already holding it (embracing it really) and prepared to carry the weight of it (roughly 200 pounds) and walk it into the storage site wherein, via ropes or hooks, you hang the meat. We used ropes, which means that we punctured the quarter well below the cutting line and fed a rope through the hole, which was used, together with a hook, to hang the piece. The two carriers take the quarter into the building and someone on a ladder takes the rope and hook and attaches it to a hook/hanging system in the roof of the building.
Thus the quarter will hang for a time (at least 10 days) to season. After this amount of time the interested parties will reconvene cut (butcher) the carcasses and package the meat for freezing, and eventually for the barbeque or oven. A more detailed description of this process will come on November 11.
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