Gary Reeder
most of the villages in Africa have no electricity
Wednesday, April 15, 2020, 15:00

so no freezers etc. So they have wood racks that they hang strips of meat on out in the sun for a few days.They also don't have spices and such, so the meat is sun dried and ready to eat. On one safari I shot a big Impala and when we got it back to camp i heard the trackers yapping at John, our PH and he told them OK. So they hung up the Impala, split it open and cut pieces of the liver off and passed it around like candy. They were smiling with their mouths full of raw liver, with blood running down their faces. They offered me a big hunk of it and before I could say no, John told me I would insult them if I refused it, so I ate a big hunk of the raw liver. One of my guys with me filmed it.

On another hunt the African Game Rangers (like our Fish & Game people) came into camp and asked us to cull out some animals in an area about an hour drive away that had been closed to hunting for 65 years. They wanted us to cull out about 60 Impala and 60 Blesbok. Old animals with broken horns,cripples, barren cows, or just old animals. But we had to shoot them in the head as the meat and hides went to the villagers.
The area to be hunted was about an hour from our camp so we got there about 7 the next morning. There were already 10 to 15 women from the village there with their baskets and bags.

As we started shooting the animals, there were a couple of African men in old trucks behind us gathering up the animals and taking them back to a meat processing plant (just a concrete block house with racks to hang up the animals to gut them). When we came back to the concrete block house after about an hour of shooting the men had put the gut piles on a flat bed truck. The gut piles came out in one big lump, with everything attached. They put the gut piles on the flat bed and while we were there they had filled the flat bed up with gut piles, so they motioned the women to go ahead and get a gut pile. The village women ran up and starting picking up gut piles, sorta like your wife would pick out heads of lettuce in a grocery store. When they saw one they liked they put it in their baskets, put it on their head and walked back to their village, which was 4 or 5 miles from where we were. One of the trackers with us said they lived in round huts and sometimes there would be 2 families living in a round hut about 25 feet around. For cooking they had steel mesh laying on rocks over a fire and they would put the gut pile on the steel mesh and let it cook. When it was good and black the whole family would sit down around the fire and eat the meal. And they ate everything, including what was in the stomach. I filmed that to show people that bitch about hunters that nothing was wasted.

Late that afternoon when we got back to our original camp one of the game rangers said we were the first hunters in that original area for a year or two, so the villagers had had no meat for that long and if there were no hunters in the area again for a year or two they wouldn't have any meat at all until there were hunters there.