"BILLY BURGERS"

Our Billy Goat had become somewhat of a problem lately. He was butting our new buckling, our pregnant Nanny Goat and various fence parts; plus he smelled really bad. It was time for us to recoup our money out of him in meat.

It was a real interesting slaughter attempt. We used a 22 caliber rifle at first, but it bounced off of Bill's head. Not a good way to make friends with a goat. I had the boys go get me a bigger gun, my .308, it finished him off quickly.

Joshua offered to drag the goat up to the processing area. This wasn't an offer I was about to turn down. We made this a family project. The boys did most of the skinning, although as you can see below we had to read up on some of the finer points. We sometimes stopped and looked at each other wondering what we need to do next.

With a lot of patience and effort on the kids part we got the hide and guts off of the carcass.











Now with Billy out of the picture we can breed Nanny in a few months with our Nubian goat "Buckwheat".

We will keep you up-to-date with the progress of our growing goat milk efforts. Since we have never milked anything nor have we ever had goat kids, it should be really interesting.


Once all of the left over were gotten rid of we cut the goat into two halves. Samuel got rid of the goat guts in the back area of the property. Seems there has been a lot of interest by the local bird population in studying goat anatomy.
Even the dog seemed to get better acquainted with Billy after his demise. It is interesting to note that Nanny (in the background) seemed to be quite happy that Billy was gone so she enjoyed the grain he had been previously consuming.





We borrowed a cooler from some friends to age the meat. We placed about 4 cups of vinegar along with 10 cups of salt into the cooler and filled it with water and ice bottles. This was changed out twice. The end result yielded us meat free of Billy goat smell and taste.

The final product gave us around 25 lbs of Billy burger and four shoulder roasts. We are going to tan the hide with the hair on if we can get the Billy goat smell off of it, more on that in a future post.

This has been a real adventure for us. I am not particularly found of killing animals, but I have been very pleased with the end results. We have been very isolated from where our food comes from and the death and processing involved. The boys and Laura and I have a greater appreciation of the food the Lord provides to us now than ever before. We know that our livestock have been well treated, feed and processed in clean conditions.

Genesis 9:2 The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. 4 "But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.