With a little help from my friends– Carlos, Brad, Jim. I am not doing big game these days except in a group, hard in NM if you don’t pay top dollar. Which is why I may move my meat hunts north if health permits…
All animals here provided feasts including long- gone lion– see Don Thomas and/ or David Quammen.
And after thought I added locally grown free range pigs, Mark’s, still on the hoof, out in front, and a suckling from a previous Thanksgiving. Big game season for me is FOOD first…
Jack calls the last “Contemporary Norman Rockwell”.
You ate mountain lion??? Ewww. Stringy, strong tasting?
Read the essay "Eat of This Flesh" in David Quammen's
Wild Thoughts from Wild Places , (which also has his last Outside essay,"Superdove on 46th Street", about my pigeons in part), where he sits down to a dinner of various Chinese stir frys with Dr E Donall Thomas, writer, MD and bowhunter in Lewistown MT. Back then Don made his longbows, trained his hounds and ate lion– we had already feasted with him and so knew where to send David when he objected to lion hunting.
But it is not too rare an occasion. Lion meat & apparently most or all cat meat is almost white, lean, densely grained, looks like veal. Trappers also eat lynx, and the Chinese…
Hunters who eat it may just take the loin and a ham or two but it "eats good" if you are adventurous.