THE SPORTS DESK
Ken Perrotte’s Outdoors Column: Best trust your suspicions
AUDIENCES recoiled into their seats during the scene in the 1979 hit movie “Alien” where one of the space ship’s crew members began convulsing uncontrollably after visiting a derelict ship harboring unknown danger.
As teammates tried to help him, the afflicted man’s stomach suddenly erupted in a splash of blood. An alien, developed from a parasitic egg, pops out like a grotesque jack-in-the-box and quickly escapes.
For the past two weeks, I’ve been waiting for an alien (or some other unknown creature) to pop from me.
I unwisely ate venison that looked a little suspicious, later learning it was likely loaded with the sarcocystis parasite. Even though the meat was cooked, there’s still a nagging worry something might be amiss.
It began in late afternoon on Dec. 29, as a cold front was moving in. This deer season has been challenging. Many deer in the areas I hunt succumbed in late summer to hemorrhagic disease. When one lone deer appeared at dusk in the field, I closely examined it through my 12-gauge slug gun’s scope.
It was a buck, possibly a nice, mature one. I estimated the range at about 100 yards, and then waited until the deer turned and offered a partial quartering shot. At the shot, the deer dropped where it stood. The heavy slug nicked the bottom of the spinal cord just where the deer’s neck met the shoulders.
He was a heavy-racked 6-pointer. The antler bases measured nearly 5 inches circumference.
Later analysis of his lower jaw revealed the buck was at least 4 years old. I field dressed the deer and opted to wait until morning to begin skinning and meat processing chores.
NOT QUITE RIGHT
The deer hung from the gambrel by its hind legs as I carefully began removing the hide. A couple of issues stood out.
First, the deer was clearly a hemorrhagic disease survivor. Each hoof had the cracked, damaged look that shows up after they began sloughing away due to the fever-intensive disease.
Second, the deer weighed only 110 pounds, field-dressed—light for mature bucks around here. He had absolutely no fat on him, but was still in full rut, with a very swollen neck and inky, stinky tarsal glands on his back legs.
Beyond that, the meat looked a little odd. There were hundreds of fine, milky grayish-white lines less than a quarter-inch long and about as wide as an extremely fine pencil mark. They aligned with the muscle grain.
“This is weird,” I said. Grabbing my 35mm camera, I took multiple close-up photos and then emailed a couple to wildlife biologists. “Help, what do you think?” I asked.
One early theory was that the deer may have been involved in a hunt club dog chase earlier in the day. This can result in muscles stressed to the maximum in terms of build-up of lactic acid and possible broken blood capillaries.
That made perfect sense to me. I used to play a lot of baseball, primarily pitching. Icing down my arm after a game was standard practice. With each pitch, tiny capillaries break in the muscles of a pitcher’s arm.
I boned out the meat and brought it into the house. It wasn’t quite as firm as some deer I’ve processed, but I wouldn’t call it mushy.
It didn’t smell as though it was rotting or otherwise inedible. But, just to be sure, I sliced a couple half-inch pieces of backstraps and tenderloins, heated a teaspoon of olive oil in the skillet and fried the pieces unseasoned.
They tasted fine. The next day, two pounds of front shoulder meat went into a savory, long-simmered chili that made fine football-watching fare.
Then the email reply arrived from Matthew Knox, deer program manager for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. He was one of the people I emailed with the photos.
Knox had consulted with Dr. Megan S. Kirchgessner, VDGIF’s wildlife veterinarian. He wrote: “Our best guess without looking at these lesions under a microscope is a protozoan parasitecalled ‘Sarcocystitis.’”
While he said the meat could probably be eaten if cooked to well done, or greater than 165 degrees Fahrenheit, he recommended not eating it.
Knox attached photos and text from a book about wildlife diseases and parasites. One of the images was meat from an infected rabbit. It looked exactly like the deer meat.
NOW WHAT?
Kirchgessner followed up to explain: “Sarcocystitis can indeed be passed from white-tails to humans. It is not usually transmitted during field dressing or butchering, but instead when the meat is undercooked and consumed. Sarcocystitis usually affects the GI tract of humans and does not travel into the muscle as in deer.”
I asked, half jokingly, if I should visit a vet to get wormed or something. She recommended contacting my family doctor.
The good news, I’m told, is that symptoms can begin about 40 hours after eating the meat. It’s been more than a week now, so maybe the threat has passed, literally.
There is a lesson here for all who eat wild game. A common practice is to dine on fresh tenderloins and backstraps soon after a deer is killed. Medium rare is a favored style.
Knox says: “Bad idea.”
Actually, he is more vehement. “Never, ever, never eat rare, fresh deer meat!” he said.
The safest practice is to freeze the meat, ideally down to zero degrees for a week or two. This will kill parasites, such as sarcocysts and the equally bad or worse ones that cause toxoplasmosis.
He also warned against deer jerky, calling it “Russian Roulette,” explaining that most dehydrators don’t get meat anywhere near the temperature level required to kill bad organisms.
“Make jerky after the deer has been frozen for a week or two,” he said.
Good advice. Kills the aliens.
Ken Perrotte can be reached at The Free Lance–Star, 616 Amelia Street, Fredericksburg, Va. 22401, by fax at 373-8455 or e–mail at outdoors@freelancestar.com.
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