Selling wild meat is forbidden across most if not all of the US. A holdover of our establishment of game laws was the blanket prohibition on market hunting.

Should be legal to butcher livestock you raise, and sell the meat, without any government interference. There wont be any more diseases show up from eating that meat than show up in meat from big packing houses that are inspected.

The big corporate processors, you know, the ones creating a "shortage" and talking about producers not being able to ship because they are shutting down plants, know this to be true. They just want to hang on to their monopoly of both price paid for livestock and price paid for the butchered meat.

Those big packing houses do need inspected. The guy feeding out 100 head of calves does not. The guy butchering what he raises wont sell much if his facility is not clean and his animals fat and healthy.

People might not want to do it this way but if you cut it up fresh, you can wet age or dry age the meat at home .

People might not want to do it this way but if you cut it up fresh, you can wet age or dry age the meat at home .

I spent my career working for government in food safety (restaurants) but my Ag counterparts saw the same thing with food processors. That being said, I can say nobody gets up in the morning and says, let’s see what I can do to make customers sick and destroy my business. But it happens all the time. Unbelievably insanitary conditions, people working while sick, bad temperature control, cross-contamination, rats, cockroaches, equipment not working as it should, buildings that have leaky roofs that have birds defecating in batch tanks, mislabeled, old product being offered with colored over-wraps and “funny” lighting to make it look fresh.

Then there’s the parent who likes to get unpasteurized milk right off the farm. If they make the decision to do so for themselves that’s fine, but they never bother to recognize their kids are a whole lot more vulnerable than they are. And the kids end up deathly sick with E. coli or brucellosis and any number of things. Too much of this has happened and it’s one of the reasons states generally ban this avenue of sales.

The regulations are there to protect the public. Now if the public doesn’t want to safely hold/process their food it opens a whole new can of worms. And they hold the retailers, wholesalers, truckers and producers accountable. Ask Lazarus—I’ll bet he’s seen his share of food product liability cases.

Here in KS it is legal as your back door to sell coon beaver or muskrat meat. Or anything else you trap somebody wants to eat. It is legal to dress the animal beyond just skinning it. Remove glands guts head etc. Tularemia, round worms, tape worms, salmonella, E coli, giardia, are all very real possibilities selling wild animals for consumption. Still it is legal.

To tell somebody they can't sell a hog the same way is to much authority to allow our government to have. If you buy a walk in cooler, a tractor with a front end loader, an electric carcass splitting saw, a band saw, and a meat grinder, want to sell beef or hog meat you raised to the public, how is that not your right?. People are still free to buy all the mystery meat they want at walmart.

The answer is simple. The livestock producer would double his money and still be able to sell cheaper than meat processed by tyson, excell, national beef, cargill etc. They contribute serious money to political campaigns. They tell everyone meat processed by anyone else is "unsafe". The trapper selling a few coons has no effect on them so somehow that little niche market is safe.