Last weekend the main reason we went on an alpine hunting/camping/hiking trip was to bring home meat. And to do that we had to find and harvest deer. We did have a hard time finding deer. There just were not as many bucks on the landscape in comparison to years past. On day 2 we hiked almost 5 hours without seeing a single male deer. But we had no problems harvesting the bucks we did find. We ended up bringing home the meat of 3 largish bucks and one small one. After we were all done processing and packaging the deer we ended up with about 175 pounds of packaged meat.
Out of curiosity I weighed and compared the back quarters of the small buck versus one of the bigger guys. The small quarter weighed 9 pounds and the big one 16. So we probably got about twice as much meat off each of the bigger bucks than we did off of the spike. When it comes to time spent butchering a deer, the size of the animal does not matter. A small buck takes just as long to process as a big boy. In fact, trimming the cuts of a big boy is actually easier because there is more to 'play with'. For this reason it really does pay to try and shoot bigger bucks.
That said - you can't always find bigger bucks and sometimes it is best to simply harvest what is offered.
Patrick
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