My neighbour wandered across the road last evening and after a general chat about property prices he asked if I liked pheasant.
I was a bit surprised as I thought he knew my wife had been hand feeding a few pheasants in our back garden all last year and this year as well.
Anyway my wife was coming up the road at the time so I repeated the question and she said she loved pheasants and enthused about them for a while and vanished into the house.
Next thing he presented me with a brace of dead pheasants and said they had been hanging for a week in his garage and were ready to cook.
I duly took them into the kitchen and my wife started screaming at me and going beserk - I wasn't sure what I had done wrong as they were obviously dead and looked a treat.
The outcone was that I watched a video on how to skin pheasants and presented her with some nice breasts and meat after a gruesome episode in the garage and she cooked them tonight in red wine with bacon. I think she really enjoyed them but I have had this lump in my stomach all night having looked them in the eye and butchered them.
Even the Stellas and wine didn't ease the ache - so maybe I would be a vegatarian if I had to kill and prepare my own meat.

HTFU

You didn't kill them though?

No they were shot a week ago by my hunting, fishing, fekking, car washing neighbour who is part of a shoot miles away from here.
Apparently he has more pheasants than he knows what to do with at the moment.
My problem is that I have the remains of 2 butchered carcasses in my outside bin until next week and if it ever gets above freezing they will stink.

Man up.

Or put them in his bin.

If I could find the photos in my shitty photo filing system I'd show you my two 6 year olds gutting and preparing a hare and a pheasant.

They know where their meat comes from.....dead animals.

They wanted to take the heads into 'show and tell' the next morning.

I thought better of it.

my work colleague is in a shooting syndicate and regularly offers us all a brace of pheasants, he's got a contact who has a plucking machine £1.50 a bird. Others I know just cut and pull the breasts out.

Get used to it? There's no shortage of 'em where you are!

I know where paisleypark is coming from. I used to shoot rabbit when I looked after an estate and going through the whole killing/skinning/gutting/butchering-then cooking-then eating process did make me feel different about the meal.

I found if I could distance the prep from the eating it helped, so I often froze the meat for a while or made a stew for the next day - eat some, freeze some. The exception for me is fish, though, as they're best eaten as fresh as possible.

That's good advice - I think it was the speed of the process - from butchering to table within hours.

Anyway apparently the shooting season is over for a while so I will have my excuses ready if anymore are offered.