Why Do They Slit the Thoats of Dead Deer?

The thoat slitting thing is a fascinating topic to me. I never did it, but I sure heard about it. Throat slitting only works to bleed an animal if the animal is still alive and its heart is pumping. Everyone not closely connected with deer hunting wants to know "Did you slit their thoats?" I even had one lady standing by my freezer waiting to get a gift of venison ask me this and then turn around and leave when I said I did not.

I'm not Meshack Browing; the last thing you'll catch me at is jumping on the back of a live deer and slitting its throat. This is why "hunting" knives are so long-- a leftover from 200 years ago when deer hunting involved "putting a ball into them," tracking the blood trail, and then killing them in personal combat with a knife. Yikes.

The other thing that this whole throat slitting thing touches on is the idea of Kosher. Most folks outside of the Jewish faith have no idea what Kosher is, why it is, or how it is practiced. One night I was at a convention out of town. It was the last weekend of Ohio Shotgun Season. In solidarity with the season, I wore my orange hat to our hospitality suite and swore to wear it until sundown on Saturday night. There was a Jewish guy there from Salt Lake City, wearing his yamikah. I quipped that we seemed to be in the same boat-- each wearing our funny hats in a cultural/religious observance. That brought on a long and fruitful conversation.

He was amazed that hunters ritually slit deer throats. I theorized that it was partially a leftover from a misunderstanding of Kosher and cleanliness. He explained that "clean" in the Kosher sense did not have all that much to do with hygiene per se. It was an observance of ritual, and that "clean" should be more thought of as "dedicated to God." He also said that a deer killed with a rifle bullet or arrow through the chest could never be considered Kosher. Although, when you think of it, a double lung shot does pretty much the same thing-- massive bleeding where the heart is working to pump every last drop of blood out of the animal's system.

It's funny, but my German grandmother always made sure to hit a Jewish butcher shop. From back in the old days, Kosher and "clean" were synonymous, but it was a completely different angle: the Kosher butchers operated more hygenically than the scrofulous non-Jewish ones, because they had a rabbi looking over their shoulder and could not sweep the floor and put it back in the grinder.

It was long a conversation with Yakob. Happy hour was winding down, and we decided to trade hats for the evening. By the time we met back up around 10 PM, I had been mistaken for a famous local rabbi, and Yakob had managed to get lucky with a lady from Cleveland. He said it was the hat. He wanted to keep it, but I was holding his yamikah that his dead sister had knitted him. I finally got him to cough up my hat, with the promise that he could get another one just like it at Walmart.