Caping a Whitetail Buck

I'm gonna go over caping a whitetail buck for taxidermy. I know in the past, for myself, I've been on YouTube and different places looking up how to do this. If you kill a nice buck and you decide you want to want to shoulder mount him and put him on the wall, you want him to have his own cape. You want it to be as authentically your deer as possible. So it's important that you cape them out correctly so that your taxidermist can finish the job and give you the trophy that you want to hang on your wall.

Around The Middle

The first thing I do is gut the deer down, get him split, get him hung. Then I'm going to get in about halfway between where his legs come together and the end of him - about halfway down his body and about the center of his gut. I'm gonna split him to there and then I'm going to do a ring straight around his body. I'm basically going to cut and spin him straight around his body. So we'll have a cut to there. You can be as fine as you want here. But really, you're this far back because you're trying to give your taxidermist plenty of hide for that shoulder. So you don't have to be extremely fine. You just want to ring him and get as much of this so the taxidermist can use to stretch over the form.

The Legs

The next thing you're going to do is you're going to ring these legs. Because we're going to end up going up a tine into that cut. So you're going to find the joint in the

leg. The next thing you're going to do - and you want a really sharp knife for this because this is your most important cut. You're going to cut right down the brown and white line, all the way into the armpit, and then you're going to go straight up to your cut where you rang him.

You’re going to do that on both sides.

And so basically you'll have cuts like this and here. And this will fold down in the middle and the back will come off. The most important thing when you're caping your whitetail buck is to make sure you stay on the white. Don't cut into the white and don't cut into his chest area. Get into his armpit and then go up to here.

The Neck

Now we've done this part, you're working down, and then when you get to here. You just kind of got to go slow and you want to get it as far down the neck as you can so that you can cut him off at the neck. Now that I got it down the neck, you're gonna cut in through that neck meat, make a clean cut all the way to the neck bone, and then we'll saw that off.

Cleaning Up

When I'm done, I always like to take some water, if you like your taxidermist, and clean it up a little bit for him. So I just stretch it out here. And then I'm going to fold it up, roll it up, sit down in a bag, and you've successfully caped your whitetail buck. Now you can take it over to your taxidermist and get your trophy mounted.

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