What's the worst Wild Game food you ever ate?

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Coon is very good eating if fixed right, groundhog also.. when I used to trap I fed a guy and his 5 kids one winter with 5-6 raccoons big/small a week, he lost his job in a work force reduction and they were dead broke.. they ate the heck out of those coons.. never could bring myself to eat a muskrat or possum, muskrats smell like wild onions or garlic and the one possum I tried to cook filled the pan so full of grease you couldn't see the possum in there.. absolute worst meat I ever ate was from a giant old doe taken from a swamp in southern Indiana.. I smoked her hindquarter until the meat was falling off the bone and when I took a bite I almost threw up, tasted like swamp mud smells.
 
4 of us bowhunters were hunting Mulies and Elk in Colorado years ago. I spotted some elk late one evening off in the distance. Around the camp fire that night myself and one other of the hunters decided to get up early in the morning and pack in after the elk. Hunted 3 days and seen lots of sign and we found the elk beds that still smelled of elk but no sightings. Well we were down to the last day and decided to pack out the next morning but were down to a can of soup to eat. I got a shot at a spruce grouse and connected and we roasted the grouse over the campfire that evening with the 2 of us rotating and looking over the grouse like a couple of hungry dogs. Ate the spruce grouse and some pretty thin soup. The grouse had the taste and texture of a pine cone, we went to bed that night under the stars and hungry.
 
Mountain Lion. Tasted like cat piss smells. It was horrible.
Had muskrat once, tasted like a**, and chalky.
 
The worst game meat I've ever eaten was from the 1st big mature buck I shot, a 155" 16pt that still weighed 208 1/2lbs at the end of our rut in late Nov. He was all leaned out and not an ounce of fat on him from running does, and you could smell him long before walking up to where he dropped where I shot him standing over a bedded doe at first light. He looked like the bulldog from old Bugs Bunny cartoons, all huge head, neck, front shoulders and tiny hind end. Except he wore a big rack on his head, instead of a hat cocked at a jaunty angle :lol:

I'm glad he had a nice set of antlers, and although I never tried eating them I bet they'd be better eating and more tender than he was! I'm pretty sure the old felt insole in my hunting boots, marinated in Tinks #69, would taste better than that buck. He may have made edible sausage, but I wasn't into sausage making back them. Despite various preparation methods I couldn't find a way to cook that deer that made it palatable. Sadly the most of that deer became compost.

I attribute it simply to his size/age and condition at that point in the rut. From the way his antlers were worn down and various stickers broken off I'd say he was definitely the dominant buck in his area and had spent the last month and a half or more doing little eating but plenty of running, sparring, fighting, and romancing. He was just in poor condition at that time. I've shot larger deer at the beginning of the season, when they were rolling in fat, and they were the best eating deer I've ever shot.

We don't have a lot of deer, but we do have long, generous seasons when all weapons are considered. We can hunt deer from mid Sept starting with early bow while bucks are still in bachelor groups, and right up until the late/post rut in mid December ending with archery and muzzleloader. Next Saturday is the last day of our 2016 deer season.
 
ALW said:
The worst game meat I've ever eaten was from the 1st big mature buck I shot, a 155" 16pt that still weighed 208 1/2lbs at the end of our rut in late Nov. He was all leaned out and not an ounce of fat on him from running does, and you could smell him long before walking up to where he dropped where I shot him standing over a bedded doe at first light. He looked like the bulldog from old Bugs Bunny cartoons, all huge head, neck, front shoulders and tiny hind end. Except he wore a big rack on his head, instead of a hat cocked at a jaunty angle :lol:

I'm glad he had a nice set of antlers, and although I never tried eating them I bet they'd be better eating and more tender than he was! I'm pretty sure the old felt insole in my hunting boots, marinated in Tinks #69, would taste better than that buck. He may have made edible sausage, but I wasn't into sausage making back them. Despite various preparation methods I couldn't find a way to cook that deer that made it palatable. Sadly the most of that deer became compost.

I attribute it simply to his size/age and condition at that point in the rut. From the way his antlers were worn down and various stickers broken off I'd say he was definitely the dominant buck in his area and had spent the last month and a half or more doing little eating but plenty of running, sparring, fighting, and romancing. He was just in poor condition at that time. I've shot larger deer at the beginning of the season, when they were rolling in fat, and they were the best eating deer I've ever shot.

We don't have a lot of deer, but we do have long, generous seasons when all weapons are considered. We can hunt deer from mid Sept starting with early bow while bucks are still in bachelor groups, and right up until the late/post rut in mid December ending with archery and muzzleloader. Next Saturday is the last day of our 2016 deer season.


My Dad one year (when I was a kid) shot a monster buck near Tomahawk Wisconsin. it was an old black swamp buck and looked to be in full rut. He came home with that thing, it looked like a horse. He was so proud of that big monster buck. We butchered it like we had many deer before that. I remember the first time Mom was cooking steaks from it. It stunk up the house so bad .... we still laugh about that today. Dad tried a roast and again, just a real marsh/swamp stink. He took the whole deer to a butcher shop that customized in sausage, salami, etc and had them make it into venison stick, salami, sausage, and other such meats. Then it was real good eating. But we sure could not eat venison from that buck like we did other deer. And my family was a venison eater. We ate a lot of venison. Dad never could figure why the meat from that Deer stunk so bad when it was cooked.
 
OK a year since my last post on this thread. I'm still sticking with the Octopus and squid legs, can't get past the memory to try again. However hit a new low. I love seafood of most any sort fixed most any way. Well neighbor gave me some "corned" Norfolk spot. I like salt fish but I think these were rotten. Tried them soaked and poached and some fried, then not soaked and poached or fried, didn't matter = BAD fish. Threw them away. I have had corned spot and they were good, don't know what was wrong with these. W
 
Worst game animal I ever ate was at a wild game dinner at a local church. They had elk, venison, bear an buffalo. The buffalo was in hamburgers an tasted to me like the rear end of the buf...uck!! I am a meat hunter an can eat most things, but I just didn't like the taste of that buffalo burger. :puke:
 
I wasn't in on this but a local archery shop hosted a crow hunt a couple years back. The crows taken were dressed out to get the breasts, then they had a marinade of some sort that the meat went into over-night. The next day the birds were grilled over charcoal. As I understand it there was plenty of meat left and when asked about a repeat hunt the next year the shop owner mumbled something about "not him" going to do it. I heard from a couple people who were at the banquet that crow was far from tasty.

Personally I shot an antelope in Wyoming many years ago that was sound asleep when I glassed him. I got within 150 yards of him when he raised his head, then he lost most of it. Clean kill, had not been run, was the worst red meat I have ever in my life tried to eat. When people call them goats, its for a reason.
 
I've tried everything from groundhog to frog legs, pigeons to crawdads. so, when my dog brought home a half-grown 'possom that he'd caught I figgered to add it to my list. asked my granny how to fix it. she said to parboil it, put it in a bakin' pan, pack stuffin' in & around it & bake it a couple hours.

I boiled it 'til the meat about fell off the bones, carefully lifted it out of the pot and into a bakin' pan, packed it with stuffin' & baked it a couple hours.

when I got it out of the oven & cracked the stuffin' shell off and grabbed a leg. it really wasn't bad tastin' but, even after all that boilin' & bakin' that had to be the greasiest thing I ever ate. kinda like dippin' beef fat in lard & eatin' it.

on the bright side, if I ever get another one I figger to get enough grease to keep me in lube the rest of my life. :lol:
 
LOL, I don't think I could stomach a possum :puke: My hats off to ya bubba.50!! Large Blacktail, And Mule deer bucks in the Rutt are RANK, probably the worst eating ive ever had, Idahoron told me about a Salt and Ice soak that i will DEFINITELY be trying if i ever shoot another big stinkin Mule deer buck, The salt draws the blood out of the meat. Maybe try this salt trick with another possum if the dog drags another 1 in? I'd probably kill it first tho :lol:
 
I had raccoon once when I was a kid, the old gent that lived across the street from us had cooked it, I don't recall that it tasted bad but it was greasy and as tough and stringy as a baseball glove.
I've only had Caribou once, a friend got some sausage from someone he knew that went up North, I couldn't handle more than a bite, it was the nastiest gamey thing I've ever tried.
A friend of mine and I killed a bunch of carp with our bows and found a recipe for smoking them. They tasted like smoked mud.
My brother and I made snapping turtle soup when we were in high school, it was edible but it certainly wasn't habit forming.
 
this is just my opinion but, there's only one way to cook a carp.

get a pine board an inch or two bigger than the fish all the way 'round.

lay carp on the board.

cover it in fresh recycled grass from a large cow.

bake several hours at 350 degrees.

remove from oven, crack off the cow squeezin's, discard the squeezin's and the carp & eat the board. :yeah:
 
bubba.50 said:
this is just my opinion but, there's only one way to cook a carp.

get a pine board an inch or two bigger than the fish all the way 'round.

lay carp on the board.

cover it in fresh recycled grass from a large cow.

bake several hours at 350 degrees.

remove from oven, crack off the cow squeezin's, discard the squeezin's and the carp & eat the board. :yeah:

The weird thing is that we had made a lot of it, so I wound up giving some of it to an older German couple that were friends of my parents and they absolutely loved it. They ended up with all of it.
 
I've expressed my distaste for carp numerous times only to hear "aw you just ain't ever had any that was fixed right." I guess that's true 'cause I've eaten it fixed every way I know of for fish to be fixed and it's all had the appeal of somethin' that fell outta the back end of a hog to me. :puke:
 
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