Mmm, goat

We butchered a goat on Friday. We had saved one to butcher from the ones that were born this year. I am not sure how big he was, maybe half grown. We had several people out to watch the game on Saturday so we decided to butcher him and cook him for dinner after the game. We ate him as fajitas. It was really good, even the people who had never had goat thought it was pretty good (or at least that is what they told me).
The main thing I wanted to share on here was how I butchered it. Margo didn't want to take gory pictures to put on here so I will just have to describe it. Usually I shoot it to kill it, then I skin it, gut it, and then cut it's head off and cut it up into pieces to cook. This time I decided to not gut it. Last year when I was deer hunting, a guy from another deer camp was talking about how they butcher deer and how they don't gut it and it totally made sense to me. You see, with deer or in this case goat, you don't eat the ribs (at least I don't). There is not enough meat on them to worry about. So, the main parts of the goat that you use for meat are the front shoulders, the two hind quarters. You don't have to gut them in order to get these parts. Sometimes you can get the backstraps and tenderloins if they are big enough but with small ones like this one there is not enough meat there to worry about. So, all I did with this one was kill it and skin it (and cut off it's legs while skinning). Then I cut off the front shoulders, cut off the back hindquarters. This is all the meat I would get off of it anyway and I did not have to gut it. It was really easy and a lot less messy this way. I definitely recommend giving it a try.