Since March 2020, Vermont Fish and Wildlife game warden Abby Serra has helped run the program Venison for Vermonters.
When wild animals — largely deer — are killed on the road or illegally hunted, Serra and others butcher and process them. The meat is then donated to people who are food insecure. To date, more than 3,000 pounds of wild game meat has been donated to local food shelves across the state.
Vermont Public’s morning news producer Nathaniel Wilson recently met up with Serra in Rutland County. He arrived to find a skinned and gutted deer ready for processing. Note: this story contains graphic descriptions and sounds of butchering.
This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Abby Serra: I'm game warden, first off, and I'm a game warden in the Rutland area. Whenever I first started, I had a lot of roadkill deer. Typically, as wardens, we give those animals away whole to people that can process them.
Not everybody can process these animals. There's only a few, certain people that have the means to do that or a place to put that animal. And so I wanted to basically be able to give this meat to people that maybe didn't have that skill set. So, I started processing some of the animals myself and giving them to people.
And when I say road kill, a lot of people think of like, you know, a smashed deer on the side of the road festering in the sun. That's not it at all. So, we only get fresh animals, animals that are similar to what you would get if you were hunting and shot your own animal, ones that we put down ourselves or that were very recently dead.
But after I skin it, the first thing I'll do is just take off the front shoulders. And you just cut down there like that, and you can take that right off. So, we'll do this other one here. And you can just cut right through.
The second thing we'll do is take off the back straps. So, just make a cut straight down the spine like that, all the way down to the neck, and then straight across. And you can see this animal was hit by the car right here, so there's a lot of blood, and it's a broken piece of bone here. So, whenever we have damage like that, once we go inside, I'll cut those pieces off. So, you don't really want to ever have any blood in the meat. It won't cause any harm. It's just that it makes it more gamey tasting.
And then the next thing I'll do is unhook one leg and let it hang and then take this leg off the pelvis. Make a cut down through here, right to the socket, and then around. And then that leg will come right off the pelvis. We'll set that in there, and then we'll take the other leg off.
We'll grab this up, and we will go into the kitchen where we'll actually finish up.
OK, so this is where I do the finished cutting. I really haven't cut anything yet. I mean, it looked like I was cutting out there, but I was literally just quartering the animal up. And you really got to have, you know, some of the equipment, like, you'll see, I have a grinder and things like that. It doesn't really take a lot of equipment, though. I mean, all I've used so far is a knife, a very small, little knife.
I have had people that have called in wanting to help, but we only enlist the help of processors that have actual facilities. We're not going to have people cutting up meat in their basements for the program, obviously. Even though we do appreciate everybody that wants to help.
So, I give to food shelves. I also sometimes will give private donations to people that I know need it. But typically, yes, food shelves in the area or outside the area, food shelves that need the meat and need some good quality protein for their clientele.
Right now, I'm just making 1 pound — or approximately, because I don't have a scale — but 1 pound balls, and those are what I'll wrap. It's easier to wrap them whenever it's in a ball, because it's kind of a loose — hamburger is a loose meat, very squishy.
What we have here, we have our shoulder roasts right here, these two, our shoulder roasts. We have sirloin tips here, which I left in roast form. You can also cut those into steaks if you want. And this is all steak meat here that's been staked. And then this is steak meat here that has not been staked. So we have— this is top and bottom round here, all this. And then this is our back strap here, which I cut into sections so you can see that's pretty typical back strap there.
My job is a game warden, like I'm a game warden, and this is not my job, essentially. It's part of my job. I've made it part of my job, but my main goal is to enforce Fish and Wildlife regulations. So, making time is difficult for sure.
You know, I have had people call me up before and be like, "Hey, you know, I'd like to try some venison." That's not really what the program is for, although I do encourage people to get out there and hunt if they want to try venison. But it's, the point of it is to feed people that actually, you know, are food insecure.
My hope is that we can eventually create a nonprofit, so that we can accept donations, so that we could actually hire processors. And that would allow the program to expand into other areas of the state where maybe we don't have processors that are willing to do it for free.
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