Welcome to the Butcher Shop

Searching for the elk sausage he processed the night before, Rick Smith opens  one of the six freezers in the back of his Eugene home. Though he butchers meat at Costco during the day, Smith’s true interest is in processing wild game, which he does for his friends in the hunting community as a side job.

A Tour of the Carcass Cave

As he walks through the freezer he jokingly calls the carcass cave, Rick Smith shows  hunter Ted Reiss the progress on an elk he brought in the weekend before for processing. Reiss, a professional forester, shot the 700 pound elk on a hunting trip in Idaho, where the elk population has exploded so dramatically that the state has called for hunters to go thin out herds.

Hunting Through the Freezer

With four coolers worth of elk sausage already loaded up, Rick Smith sorts through the freezer for the last few bags of freshly-ground meat. With over thirty years of meat processing experience and a large clientele of local hunters, Smith’s freezers are full of different types of game belonging to a wide variety of clients, making it challenging to keep all the orders organized.

The Goods

Using wild game-specific bags to clearly mark the meat he has processed, Rick Smith loads up the fifth and final cooler of hunter Ted Reiss’s order. The elk Reiss brought in yielded 170 pounds of meat, but Smith mixed the lean elk meat with fifty pounds of pork fat, an ingredient he added after suffering through many years of what he calls “sawdust-dry sausages.”

Worth Every Cent

After loading a truck bed full of elk sausage, Rick Smith brings Ted Reiss into his workshop to pay the $280 processing cost of the meat. Though he runs a private meat processing shop, Smith is not just Reiss’s butcher, the two also hunt together, spending long weekends in Western Idaho thinning out overpopulated deer and elk herds.