Homemade Sausage Making

I've been at war with beavers lately trying to eradicate the vermin by all possible means. I'm using all sorts of traps and things but have gotten pretty good with snaring. The other day I was setting a snare when I had an epiphany and thought these might be a good way to catch wild pigs.

As you know, we have a pig problem here but what makes killing them hard is they tend to be more nocturnal which makes them more of a target of opportunity. But since I know the trails the pigs use I thought it would be simple enough to just snare them. With snares I can rig a killing snare or a live catch snare. Am thinking of setting some live catch snares on the trails so I will be able to check the sets in the morning and if I catch a pig I can dispatch them and then process them within minutes of them being killed. I think this would be a windfall of meat with very little effort.

My concern though is whether this practice might harm the meat. Typically, when an animal is live snared it will thrash around for a few minutes till it realizes it cannot escape. At this point the animal calms down and just lays there till I arrive. I've killed a crazy cow once which turned out being a dark cutter because of the crazy cow used so much of its ATP energy which generates postmortem lactic acid which brings the pH of the meat down. In the case of a stressed animal there is not enough available glycogen for postmortem glycolysis to generate the lactic acid so the pH of the meat will be higher than normal and you have dark cutting meat.

I guess the only way to find the answer to this is just do it but I was what you guys thought of this and if I did end up with dark cutting meat how this might be addressed in processing - or would it really matter.

Found an article with a video you may want to watch

http://chicolockersausage.com/2013/11/0 ... rple-meat/

I've bought dark cut meat before without knowing what I bought. It was fine, but it definitely acted like they described: even when cooked, it was still purple. Tasty though. I think the main problem would be appearance, but in a cured sausage, everything would look the same I'd think.

I think your right and the appearance would be the big thing. Dark cutting beef is a bloody mess isn't it?

I was talking to a meat monger a few days about this only in fish. Seems large salmon are affected by this same thing and he was telling me it takes as much as 12 hours for the meat to recover from a long fight.

This got me to wondering about how long it might take a pig to recover. I'd think since wild pigs are crazy as a bat they may trigger easy. But maybe they are smart enough to know when to give up and lay down and wait for the butcher. I don't know.

While I don't think I'd see much problem with smoked or cooked products I do think this would affect fermented meats since at death the lack of the lactic acid which would normally be excreted during the postmortem glycolysis to make the ATP energy would be lacking and the resulting pH of the meat would not be reduced as is normally the case. In other words, the beginning pH would be higher and more prone to spoilage and more sugar would be required to lower the pH to the desired level.

I would think this could be easily remedied by checking the pH of the meat and adjusting the sugars to compensate. But I don't know. I hope its not going to be a problem because if this snaring thing works I'll have an endless supply of pork.

How about a trap pen.we have feral horses here and the guys bait them in to a corral with a trip door. Could you make a few pens with page wire and bait them in. Go check in the morning and shoot the ones in the pen? The other thing that might work is soft jaw wolf traps. Not sure if a pig foot would slip out though. You hook the trap chain to a drag log about 6' long. put them on the trails the pigs use. Check out this link.
http://www.wideopenspaces.com/wolf-trap ... l-need-go/
Wolf traps are expensive though. You could use cable snares without a lock or limit the lock. I don't know if a pig in a snare would be any more stressed than in a leg hold?

I have two box traps. One I need to fix and the one pictured has been on loan for four years now. I don't think I'll see it again. Thing is heavy. As you can see from the deer in the trap I had every right to complain to my seed salesman because I specifically asked for pig corn and not deer corn. lol



The reason I'm thinking of using a snare is they are so easy to set up and I can place them near the roads and don't have to worry about them walking off like a cage trap might. I'm planning on putting deer stops on the snare so deer shouldn't be an issue since this will be a head catch and the worst that can happen would be a deer might get its foot in it but the stop should allow it to free itself.

Once I get some materials together I plan on trying the snare. It just seems like the perfect thing for this situation. And they are cheap to make and I can set up several sets in no time. The timing should be perfect to since it won't be long before the farmers will be planting the fields and the pigs like to come out and follow the rows and root up the seed as it begins to germinate so I will know where they are - or where they will be heading.

If they don't stress out much and taint the meat this should be easy trapping I think.