![]() “We see these very commonly in white-tailed deer, and there can just be a single one, or in some cases we find many of them throughout the body. “It looks like just a small, chronic, walled-off abscess,” Nicole said. Lindsay snapped this photo of the green fluid he released from an abscess hidden in a hindquarter. Nicole Nemeth, professor and scientist at the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study, a unit of the University of Georgia Vet School founded in 1957 to study mysterious die-offs of deer – which is how hemorrhagic disease (EHD and bluetongue) was discovered. ![]() I finished processing that hindquarter and labeled the freezer-paper packages with a big asterisk until I could find out if this meat was safe to eat. The surrounding muscle looked and smelled normal, but I trimmed a little more of it. I continued slicing and removed a capsule of tissue from a place between muscles where there shouldn’t be such a thing – an abscess, I assumed. I expected a bad odor, but it had no smell I could detect, which was odd. Did this mean I must discard the entire deer? But green of radioactive lime sherbet? Never. Red of muscle, white of bone and fat, these shades I know. ![]() As I peeled back the thick outer rind of rump fat and sliced with a sharp knife to separate membrane from meat, I released something evil – a thick, green goo oozed from a pocket somewhere between the top and bottom round. But in January 2022, while breaking down the hindquarter of a healthy 2½-year-old doe I killed the last week of Georgia’s deer season, I encountered something I’d never faced before. Over years of processing my own deer at home, I’ve learned my way around deer anatomy and seen a lot of odd and interesting things. NDA’s Kip Adams (left) gives a deer processing demonstration at an NDA Field to Fork hunt.
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