200 Pound Dressed Deer

[airedale]

Back in the late seventies my buddy's sporting goods store I worked in held a big buck contest, the winning criteria would be determined by dressed weight. If I remember right we had 19 entries, there were some beauties entered, most of the Deer entered came in the mid 180s including one giant Doe The deer that won was taken from the Cicero Swamp out by Syracuse and he weighed 193 lbs. You hear a lot about 200 lb Deer dressed but there are not many out there and we did not get a single one.

Al

[First-light]

Probably about 10 years ago my neighbors daughter shot a buck that weighed 219! It was a monster. Rack was nice but busted up. 

[mowin]

We weigh every deer we get.  A very nice example in our area is 150-160lbs, and not very common. 

Average doe is 105. 

My heaviest buck was 168, and doe was 146.  

[landtracdeerhunter]

This one went 247#. Large body that had trouble fitting in a 72" loader bucket.

[ANTLERS]

Took this New Hampshire buck 2 years ago, field dressed at 174lbs. I’ll never see anything that fat in Sullivan County

[Lawdwaz]

217lbs dressed, my biggest although I did kill one other at 205lbs.  
 

[Four Seasons]

189# And 206#. Most are 160-180lbs run down from rutting. 

[airedale]

184 pounds for me. Below is info off the net that gives a way of calculating live weights. Probably not 100% but will be fairly close.

Field Dressed Weight Calculation

You can use the field dressed weight (with lungs and all viscera removed), the hanging weight (field dressed deer without head, feet and hide), or the edible meat weight (total of boned meat) to calculate the live weight. The most accurate will be the field dressed weight. The hanging weight will vary depending on exactly where the head and legs are removed, and the edible meat weight can also vary greatly depending on how much meat is spoiled and exactly how it is boned and processed. (Weigh the meat before processing into sausage, jerky, etc.)

Field dressed: Multiply field dressed weight by 1.26 to determine live weight.

Hanging weight: Multiply hanging weight by 1.33 to determine live weight.

Edible meat weight: Multiply edible meat weight by 1.35 to determine live weight.

For instance: Your deer field dressed is 150 pounds. Multiply 150 by 1.26 and the estimated live weight is 189 pounds.

Under the best conditions, and if there is a minimum of waste, you can expect to get about 1/2 of the live weight in edible meat.

Edited March 5 by airedale

[landtracdeerhunter]

And remember wolc123 girth measurement. How could we ever forget that? LOL.

[bugsNbows]

Biggest NY deer I ever saw was my cousin’s 10 point. It was 192# dressed. He shot it in Prattsburg

[Grouse]

A couple of years back I bagged a doe that went 200 live weight.  I weighed it prior to field dressing it, but not afterwards.

[wolc123]

13 hours ago, landtracdeerhunter said:

And remember wolc123 girth measurement. How could we ever forget that? LOL.

That’s actually the PA chest girth chart method, first introduced on this sight by G-man.   As it turned out, that chart was a bit conservative, when it came to estimating the field dressed weight of a WNY deer.  
 

Several members here, myself included, checked it against scales (the one I used was a “legal for trade” butcher’s scale, while the others used those cheap Asian dial ones from Harbor freight, Bass Pro or whatever).

 

 All of them showed that the real weights were significantly heavier than that predicted by the PA chest girth chart.  I’m guessing that the reason for that, is because the further north in the whitetail deer’s range, the heavier their average body weight.  
 

The largest chest girth I ever measured on one was this stout 6 pointer, back in 2017, at 43-1/2”.  With a WNY correction applied to the PA chrart, the field dressed weight would have broke 200 lbs.  

I was never real big on weight because more than half of that field dressed weight consists of water, which has no nutritional value.  Also, the weight of a field dressed deer is highly dependent on how fast it is weighed after it is killed.  They start to dehydrate and lose water weight very fast .

My biggest concert is always meat volume, not weight.  The chest girth method allows for a more accurate estimate of that. I know about how many quarts of meat I need to feed my family, and how much my freezer holds, and how many bags to buy.  

 

[landtracdeerhunter]

10 hours ago, wolc123 said:

That’s actually the PA chest girth chart method, first introduced on this sight by G-man.   As it turned out, that chart was a bit conservative, when it came to estimating the field dressed weight of a WNY deer.  
 

Several members here, myself included, checked it against scales (the one I used was a “legal for trade” butcher’s scale, while the others used those cheap Asian dial ones from Harbor freight, Bass Pro or whatever).

 

 All of them showed that the real weights were significantly heavier than that predicted by the PA chest girth chart.  I’m guessing that the reason for that, is because the further north in the whitetail deer’s range, the heavier their average body weight.  
 

The largest chest girth I ever measured on one was this stout 6 pointer, back in 2017, at 43-1/2”.  With a WNY correction applied to the PA chrart, the field dressed weight would have broke 200 lbs.  

I was never real big on weight because more than half of that field dressed weight consists of water, which has no nutritional value.  Also, the weight of a field dressed deer is highly dependent on how fast it is weighed after it is killed.  They start to dehydrate and lose water weight very fast .

My biggest concert is always meat volume, not weight.  The chest girth method allows for a more accurate estimate of that. I know about how many quarts of meat I need to feed my family, and how much my freezer holds, and how many bags to buy.  

 

I always weigh the finish product, to get an idea how many pounds I truly have before freezing.  I need another freezer, LOL 

[wildcat junkie]

219# dressed, 46"+ heart girth. 4 1/2 YO

I'm about 285 in the picture.

 

 

205# dressed. Rifle has a 26" barrel.

I'm way over 300# in the picture.

Edited March 6 by wildcat junkie

[First-light]

6 hours ago, wildcat junkie said:

219# dressed, 46"+ heart girth. 4 1/2 YO

I'm about 285 in the picture.

 

 

205# dressed. Rifle has a 26" barrel.

I'm way over 300# in the picture.

I don't see it in the first two picts. No way over 200# Third one no idea. Just saying. Then again taking pictures of bucks antlers can always throw you off on how big. I apologize if they were weighed. Not stirring up deer poop here. 

 

 

[Lawdwaz]

2 hours ago, First-light said:

I don't see it in the first two picts. No way over 200# Third one no idea. Just saying. Then again taking pictures of bucks antlers can always throw you off on how big. I apologize if they were weighed. Not stirring up deer poop here. 

 

 

Pretty difficult to judge a deer from a photo.     Since the poster said that's what they weighed, you have to assume they were weighed on a decent scale and not assumed to weigh what he stated.   

Needless to say the accuracy between different scales can vary.....

[airedale]

The 5-Heaviest Whitetail Deer Ever Killed - On record - FEATHERNETT OUTDOORS

[wildcat junkie]

On 3/6/2024 at 5:19 PM, First-light said:

I don't see it in the first two picts. No way over 200# Third one no idea. Just saying. Then again taking pictures of bucks antlers can always throw you off on how big. I apologize if they were weighed. Not stirring up deer poop here. 

 

 

First picture is a buck that weighed 219# on my scale. Heart girth was just over 46". Here is the estimated live weight of a 46" girth weight whitetail buck.

 

That correlates to 233# dressed.

 

The second and third picture are of the same deer. The deer in the second picture is not bloated. Picture taken after walking 240 yds to the deer that dropped in its tracks.

 

Edited March 10 by wildcat junkie

[landtracdeerhunter]

On 3/5/2024 at 10:04 PM, wolc123 said:

That’s actually the PA chest girth chart method, first introduced on this sight by G-man.   As it turned out, that chart was a bit conservative, when it came to estimating the field dressed weight of a WNY deer.  
 

Several members here, myself included, checked it against scales (the one I used was a “legal for trade” butcher’s scale, while the others used those cheap Asian dial ones from Harbor freight, Bass Pro or whatever).

 

 All of them showed that the real weights were significantly heavier than that predicted by the PA chest girth chart.  I’m guessing that the reason for that, is because the further north in the whitetail deer’s range, the heavier their average body weight.  
 

The largest chest girth I ever measured on one was this stout 6 pointer, back in 2017, at 43-1/2”.  With a WNY correction applied to the PA chrart, the field dressed weight would have broke 200 lbs.  

I was never real big on weight because more than half of that field dressed weight consists of water, which has no nutritional value.  Also, the weight of a field dressed deer is highly dependent on how fast it is weighed after it is killed.  They start to dehydrate and lose water weight very fast .

My biggest concert is always meat volume, not weight.  The chest girth method allows for a more accurate estimate of that. I know about how many quarts of meat I need to feed my family, and how much my freezer holds, and how many bags to buy.  

 

So the Pa. Chest girth weight chart takes in consideration the amount of water, the carcass holds?  

 

[wolc123]

5 hours ago, landtracdeerhunter said:

So the Pa. Chest girth weight chart takes in consideration the amount of water, the carcass holds?  

 

Sort of, because deer meat is packaged by volume not weight (ie quart and gallon sized bags are units of volume).  The chest girth method uses a perimeter measurement around the deer and that is more directly relatable to volume, compared to the weight measurement.  
 

The chest girth measurement doesn’t change that much, as a deer carcass dries out, nor does the number of quart  bags required to package up the edible meat.  The scale weight reduces sharply as the carcass dries out though.  
 

Folks get confused about this, because the grocery store sell meat priced by the pound.  In reality, the scale weight of the carcass don’t mean that much, because more than half of that weight is made up of water, and that percentage drops off sharply, the longer one takes to get the carcass on a scale.