3 Ways to Identify Tainted Wild Game Meat

1. Keep an Eye on Advisories

It is almost impossible to identify tainted wild game meat if it has ingested certain chemicals. The best thing is to keep an eye on your state game commission's website and look for announcements about spills, advisories and general pollution problems. When your game commission makes an announcement about a chemical spill, most likely they say to stay away from game located in a certain flood plain. In recent years Dow, the company that makes certain chemicals and cleaning products, was a target of the Midland Michigan state health advisory board. The announcement was surrounding dangerous levels of dioxins, which are a by-product of the chemical production process. An animal that ingests too much of this stuff is tainted even before it's killed.

2. Watch the Clock

After you've scored the big kill, you want to make sure you watch the hours between kill and processing time. The best action is to field process the deer. Skin it right away and make sure to cool it. Leaving it to sit in it's own juices only increases the gamey taste, not to mention makes the meat more likely to spoil. Never leave the deer in the field to dress later; go tag and dress it as soon as you've made the kill. Carefully clean out the body cavity immediately after the kill as well--use disposable field dressing gloves you can find at any sporting goods store.

Now that you have properly field dressed your deer, cool it by hanging it up in the shade. If the temperature is around 30 to 40 degrees, you can safely hang the processed meat for a day or two. If you are not able to locate your kill right away, don't leave the field and return later to find it. Most likely, by then, too much time has passed, and you just cannot smell the meat to tell if it's gone bad.

3. Leave the Insides Out

Some people choose to eat organs like the heart, gizzard and liver. You might want to discard the liver, as it is the animal's primary filtering organ and may contain traces of the chemicals the animal has ingested. Plus, processing these parts in the field is more difficult unless you have added equipment such as a cooler and ice. Most hunters don't have these immediately on hand, so instead they do the processing later, after they go get the quad with all the deer processing gear. Leave these innards for the wild animals and enjoy untainted prime meat.