"The greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances." - Martha Washington. //

Nice quotation. I like it. LW.

Thanks. Had to be quite a woman to be married to A#1.

You're right in a sense. Sure, cooking meat to a given temperature will destroy everything except prions. On the other hand, simply knowing that cooking to a given temperature will kill virus X or parasite Y isn't sufficent, due to cross contamination issues. Even wearing gloves doesn't guarantee you can't contract something from your given prey animal due to the possiblity of knicking yourself with a knife or bone in the process of skinning it.

Please don't eat animals you know to be rabid. It's not the same thing as giardia. It sort of goes back to that excellent aphorism regarding drinking dirty water if you absolutely have to. A doctor can fix giardia, he can't fix dead. With extremely few exceptions, he can't fix rabies, either.

I would have to agree with some of the others here.

If you are simply hunting there would be no reason to even attempt to eat any meat you suspect was bad or diseased. Move on and hope for better luck elsewhere. Report any diseased critters to the wildlife division folks, as they may want to bag them for testing. If this is not an option burry it deep or burn it. Don’t touch it except with a long stick. Do not attempt to re-use that trap either. Whatever you do don’t attempt eating it unless you are near certain/imminent death if you don't.

In a true survival situation you will be doing more harm than good to put yourself at this kind of risk. You may have a good critter in a different trap, or you could look for another food source instead.

Either way, I would have to be really f*****g hard up to attempt to eat something I suspect has rabies.


Just MHO

Yes, quite right, just hunting vs. survival, I won't eat what I don't kill after observing it's behavior before and condition of the carcass after the kill if it is just a hunting trip. However, in setting traps for survival, especially the mangling (killing) variety, you may not have such an opportunity, but must nonetheless capitalize on whatever you obtain, thus the warnings.

Even hunting has it's risks. Sometimes an animal that appears in good health may in fact be infected, and there's really no way to tell for certain out in the field, so you rolls your dice and you takes your chances. Wearing gloves and other protective items helps, but then again, I had a friend draw my knifeblade across my knuckle when I was field dressing my last elk, opening up a 1/2" incision right while I was in the middle of extracting the paunch from the beast. Anything less than metal or kevlar gloves would've done nothing to prevent the cut, so there I was, elk blood and gore up to my elbows, and my thumb bleeding all over. I duct taped the cut closed so I didn't bleed into the animal, finished the job, and when I got back to camp I washed out the cut and glued it shut with superglue. Later that week the superglue started to come off, and the scar healed up fairly tightly, which surprised me some.

Lucky me.

Lesson learned? Don't give your knife to a 60+ year old and let him do the cutting while you hold the carcass open.

The custom in medieval Europe was to hang the deceased food critter on a hook until it fell off: the putrefaction process tenderized the meat. The origin of the heavy sauces of French cuisine was related to covering up the flavors acquired. There is a distinction between food infection (like salmonella)-ingested bacteria cause an infection in the body; and food poisoning (like botulism)-the bacteria grow in the food, and deposit toxins, which cause symptoms when ingested. Boiling does a good job of killing the bacteria that cause food infection, but not so good a job of lysing the toxins, some of which, like prions, are stable at temperatures well above 100 Celsius.
Brussel sprouts are pretty safe. Soy beans, too. Indian tribes chased into the Adirondack mountains by the Iroquois ate inner-layer birch bark, boiled up like pasta. 'Adirondack' means 'bark-eater', the earliest North American pejorative ethnic term.

Nice job on the first aid-the good outcome is a tribute to your thorough cleansing of the wound, and to your immune system, which is apparently strong enough to kill squirrels in your front yard, let alone elk bacteria.