The Wildlife Ranch

20-Jan-13
Shane P

Terrible experience! Went on an Elk “hunt.” Prices were up to $1500 for management bulls and from $1500 for “trophies.” When you get there, only spikes are “managements.” I opted for the management bull as a “meat hunt.” This is a 100% canned hunt, in the sense they release the one small Elk herd from a small pen into a larger pen. You drive right up on the animal, he looks at you curiously while chewing his cud, you chase away the others elk, and then you shoot him. That was bit of a let down….. but what really depressing is then they want to charge you $40 to gut it, then $80 to skin it, then they want $700 to grind it all into hamburger meat. I finally said no way on the $700 meat grinding and left to make arrangements at another meat processor. When I get back, the guide asked me what I thought a fair price would be to do the processing. I said $400, thinking it would surely be rejected…..I was wrong. That little voice in the back of my head went off saying, “you still getting slammed” but they had me at that point. Well, to make a long story short, I come back after 4 weeks to pick up 48 lbs of elk hamburger meat from a 800 lbs bull elk. That’s about 12% of the field dress weight-I guess they did a real shotty job cutting meat off the bone!