Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game is a book you need to have if you are going to try to become self reliant.
The ability to process your own food is vital. I find that of all the food skills, butchering is one that is often overlooked.
It seems simple to cut up a large chunk of meat into smaller pieces, but this in an area of endeavor that the more you know the easier the process becomes.
I like the Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game because it is practical, has lots of very clear illustrations, and is short enough to to save time, but detailed enough to be of use.
This is one of my favorite butchering books, and as I develop Dual Homestead, I hope I get to use it when I butcher my own meat.
I did get some goats, so I am getting closer to the butchering process. I even am preparing to get a pig to raise to completion.
I did not do so good a job on my first butchering attempt. My poor chicken was cut up using a dill knife, so for future attempts I will use the advice in this book and use sharp tools.
One self-reliant project that I enjoy, but haven’t got around to videotaping is home sausage making. I believe that the ability to cure and store meat is a vital skill to anyone interested in producing a majority of their own food (vegans and veggies excepted).
I can deal with a lot of things, but a life without bacon and sausage are just not worth dealing with (IMHO). All preppers need to know how to How to Harvest Your Livestock and Wild Game
Luckily I found this little gem. The Complete Book of Butchering, Smoking, Curing, and Sausage Making is a well illustrated book on dispatching, skinning, and then butchering both common livestock, but also common game animals.
Not only does this book describe how to cut up a larger animal into usable (and well defined) cuts of meat, it also describes how to prep it for storage by curing and smoking it.
This book has been a very useful to me, its detailed enough to show me what to do, and modern enough to have great illustrations.
How to Harvest Your Livestock and Wild Game has been a great help to me as I learned to make sausage, bacon, and other cured meats.
There is perhaps no bigger or more important issue in America at present than youth violence.
Columbine, Sandy Hook, Aurora: We know them all too well, and for all the wrong reasons: kids, some as young as eleven years old, taking up arms and, with deadly, frightening accuracy, murdering anyone in their paths. What is going on?
According to the authors of Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, there is blame to be laid right at the feet of the makers of violent video games (called “murder trainers” by one expert), the TV networks, and the Hollywood movie studios–the people responsible for the fact that children witness literally thousands of violent images a day.
Authors Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano offer incontrovertible evidence, much of it based on recent major scientific studies and empirical research, that movies, TV, and video games are not just conditioning children to be violent–and unaware of the consequences of that violence–but are teaching the very mechanics of killing. Their book is a much-needed call to action for every parent, teacher, and citizen to help our children and stop the wave of killing and violence gripping America’s youth. And, most important, it is a blueprint for us all on how that can be achieved.
In Paducah, Kentucky, Michael Carneal, a fourteen-year-old boy who stole a gun from a neighbor’s house, brought it to school and fired eight shots at a student prayer group as they were breaking up. Prior to this event, he had never shot a real gun before. Of the eight shots he fired, he had eight hits on eight different kids. Five were head shots, the other three upper torso. The result was three dead, one paralyzed for life. The FBI says that the average, experienced, qualified law enforcement officer, in the average shootout, at an average range of seven yards, hits with less than one bullet in five. How does a child acquire such killing ability? What would lead him to go out and commit such a horrific act?
Colonel Grossman is a favorite author of mine, I have all of his books, and I think that every parent, teacher, politician, game designer, media head – heck everybody ought to read Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill.
One self-reliant project that I enjoy, but haven’t got around to videotaping is home 
