dan walker productions

By MARK HENCKEL (September ’98)

Field dressing big game animals is generally a technique that is passed along hunter-to-hunter in the field. Until you've got your first animal down, or see someone else field dress an animal, you don't learn much.

As a result, if you've never been there and done that, it can be an intimidating topic.

It's especially intimidating for a young hunter, adult first-time hunters or single parents whose children want to go hunting for the first time. And resources to help you along are relatively few and far between.

Enter a new video production from Idaho called "Field Dressing Big Game", a 27-minute film that walks and talks you through the field-dressing of an elk. Most of it's advice would work just as well with moose, deer, antelope and other big game.

While the tagging sequence of using a wire to attach an Idaho tag to the ear didn't impress me as much as my roll of electrical tape for wrapping the paper tag of Montana onto a leg or an antler, the rest of the video is solid, no-nonsense and, in a word, excellent.

Clint Rand, of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, takes you through the field dressing, skinning and quartering of a large animal using just a knife - and one with a short blade, at that.

Put together by Dan Walker Productions, the video has already been endorsed by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game and will be used in Hunter Education programs there. It likely will, and should, be used throughout Hunter Education programs everywhere.