Is this a problem that can be solved with enough chili powder? I'm not a terribly picky eater or familiar with wild game, just have a lot of confidence in gastro science.
There are also toxins to worry about. Many toxins bioaccumulate.
Wild animals spend most of their waking hours looking for and chewing food (and humans labored under the same constraint till they invented cooking); even when they can tell there is something wrong with some food, they usually cannot afford to reject it.
Toxins are present in a lot of farmed 100%-grass-fed meat, too. I stick mostly with 100%-grass-fed lamb raised in New Zealand or Australia and won't eat grass-fed buffalo anymore even if it were free.
Cooking does, but the best thing about the pig is that you can turn it into sausage, and improperly prepared sausage puts the consumer at risk for trichinosis.
A cobalt source for the home? That's plainly nuts.
In Europe they dealt very successfully with trichinosis by inspecting pig carcasses. But I have no idea if you can take a muscle sample from a porker you shot yourself to your local large-animal veterinarian to see if it's trichinotic. (In rural areas they just might that service - back then in my home village we had that pharmacist who was a devoted mushroom hunter, and people would run their mushrooms past him for identification if they weren't really sure.)
Obviously food irradiation is done at specialized processing facilities where hunters would send their kills, not at home. Here's a clue for you: it's already the case that most hunters don't process their own meat.
> That's plainly nuts.
You're the one who said it, so right back at you buddy. Stop pulling absurdities out of your ass and attributing them to other people to have something to disagree with.
Not sure if your average family-owned deer processor would want a gamma source with all the required safeguards in their facility. And they'd have to get it past the customers too, there's going to be resistance with at least some of them.
A friend from school, his parents owned a butcher shop where they killed and butchered their own hogs (not beef, beef would have been to large for the facility). If anyone had asked him what he wanted - irradiation or inspection plus proper treatment of the meat (boil, fry or hot-smoke) the reply would have been unequivocal and loud.
> specialized processing facilities where hunters would send their kills
Have you ever met a hunter? They do not send their kills to "specialized processing facilities" they send their kills to their buddy Jim who butchers it in his shed. Maybe they know a commerical butcher that will do it for them, and even then it's the butcher down the road. Specialized processing facilities, that's hilarious.
