How to Dress a Game Animal – Chloé Happe

September 25, 2025

How To Dress A Game Animal

To hunt is to be human. For sport, for sustenance. The neolithic man monitors and tracks the female doe’s movements for days so that he can pierce through her heart with a blade and watch her blood seep into the fresh white snow below her warm lifeless body — this warm lifeless body a paradox, for the spirit is gone and the body remains to pass life onto another Being — Man, her superior in physical and spiritual evolution.

Man hunts with his precise focus. The Doe eats the apple from the tree in the field, oblivious to her incoming peril.

Spiraling out into time, modern man has not completely lost his bloodlust, but modern man does not honor the harvest. Now, to hunt is a form of leisure, not an act of survival, of sacrifice, of bringing honor to death by consuming the light of the animal spirit you just extinguished with a draw of the bow or the pull of the trigger. To hunt an animal for food is the transference of animal spirit to human spirit. When the doe is killed by man, her spirit ascends the ladder of evolution. How lucky for her.

The butchering and preparation of game meat for human sustenance is slowly becoming lost to time. The warm doe is wasted by the lazy and indifferent hunter who is ignorant of the correct way to process his kill. The ripe doe must be bled out promptly or else she will spoil. The Chosen Doe lives and dies to honor the Man of Focus with her blood and her organs and her flesh and her meat and her spirit. In the open expanse of nature, Man and Doe find each other in a fated act to engage in this sacred act of energetic exchange.

I was not in hiding when he found me. I was a doe in an open field, grazing from the apple tree. I was a greedy doe, eating as many apples as I could find from the tree. He had been tracking my movement for some time now. He knew I would come to that apple tree every day at dusk to graze and graze and graze until I didn’t feel empty anymore. This thirst for the apple would be my fate. But for my hunter, it only makes the meat taste sweeter, more mellow. I was intuitively drawn to that apple tree so that he could find me there and take me out. At last, a sweet release from the desire to eat the apples. He freed me and now he gets to consume me and the apple tree both.

I was stuck and bled promptly as soon as I was dropped by the shot of my hunter. As soon as possible after I was killed I had my viscera, lungs, heart, and liver removed. The contents of my stomach and chest were emptied quickly to prevent spoiling. My stomach was full of apples.

The events proceeded as follows —

STEP ONE: He bled me out on the snow by cutting my throat with his Spyderco Tatanka. This specific hunting knife allows him to choke up on the knife for increased control. There is something about this knife that prevents more of my blood from getting all over his body as he slits me open. He honors a clean kill.

He turned my carcass with my head downhill so that it will bleed freely. He could have carried a block-and-tackle to hoist me up and bleed me out between two trees, but he packed light. He honors a light kill.

STEP TWO: He opened my body cavity while I was lying on the ground by hoisting his knife near the lower part of my breastbone, slitting my skin. He made a small opening, then inserted two fingers beneath my hide and the back of his knife to guard from piercing my stomach and intestines.

STEP THREE: He opens my carcass from throat to crotch. His blade slides through my skin like butter. My flesh never stood a chance against his steel, his tools and his machines pierce through me and take my life but in turn I give him my spirit. Man uses tools to extract Spirit.

STEP FOUR: When he cut to my genitals, he stopped and pulled them out. He cut out my rectum. He used his belt ax to split my breastbone, but he made sure to be precise and diligent as to prevent the hair on my breastbone from coming in contact with the meat. His focus must not be spoiled.

STEP FIVE: He cut loose the organs in my pelvic cavity. He reaches inside my carcass, down between the hip bones, and catches hold of my large intestine. He pulls it out and ties it off.

STEP SIX: Now he turns my carcass over with my head uphil. He cut my windpipe and gullet free at the throat. He held these in his hand and pulled backward, at the same time cutting free from my carcass the parts that were tending to hold.

STEP SEVEN: He removed the entrails to the base of my tail. He left my liver and my heart inside of my body cavity. This is where my spirit lives, he knows this and takes care of these organs for they give him not just life for the sake of living but vitality and strength.

STEP EIGHT: He opened my chest cavity by spreading it with a stick from the apple tree. He drained off the rest of my blood and wiped me with a clean cloth.

For some, your purpose will require complete bodily and spiritual sacrifice to the one who ventures out into the open expanse, finds you, and pulls his trigger.

I never saw it coming.