Editor’s Note: This article contains graphic images of animals being field-dressed and prepared after hunting.
On a Writer’s hunt last year, Charles Allen, the owner of Knives of Alaska, told me that he had invented a rib cage spreader, and we tested it on that hunt. After the hunt he had a few tweaks he wanted to make to end up with the perfect chest spreader. Last week we were on another hunt and he handed me the perfected version that he had named the Knives of Alaska Rib Cage Spreader. He said it’d work perfectly on antelope, deer, and hog-sized animals.
Knives of Alaska Rib Cage Spreader
I can only assume that it would also work on black bears, but I usually don’t gut my bears. I just skin them out, peel out the backstraps, bone out the hams and the forequarters, and use the meat to make sausage. I don’t gut them or worry about saving the tenderloins.
This week’s hunt was the perfect one to test the spreader since we shot deer and hogs, and I wanted to bone them out to make sausage. Until now, hunters always had to break off a stick and place it between the split rib cage to allow the heat to escape and cool down the chest cavity. But you never can seem to find the perfect stick, or if you do, it is rotten and cracks in half. Or it slides around and doesn’t stay in place, or maybe it sticks through the thin meat between the ribs. In short, you never seem to find the perfect stick. But if you don’t spread open the rib cage, the meat can spoil, especially if the temperatures are a little warm. And even if you’re headed to a processor, you’ll want to do this to help it start chilling faster.
Even if you have a hanging cooler to hang your game in, I’d recommend using a Knives of Alaska Rib Cage Spreader so as to allow the cold air to freely flow into the chest cavity. And it doesn’t hurt to slice the membrane between the muscles on the hindquarter to allow the heat to escape faster due to the thick muscle structure in the hindquarter.
The Knives of Alaska Rib Cage Spreader is 5 inches long, which seems to be the perfect size for use on antelope, hogs, and deer. It somewhat resembles the shape of an open-end wrench. On each end, instead of a concave shape to fit around a nut, it is a little more open and has grooves on the surface to grasp the bone/meat surface so as to hold it in place.
I don’t know the weight, but it can’t be more than 2-3 ounces. It is flat and will easily fit into your coat pocket or backpack, and as stated above, it is so light that you’ll forget that you’re even carrying it. If you’re hunting in a big cam,p then you probably ought to have a handful of them to handle all of the animals in your camp. Of course, 1-2 days after it has prechilled, you can remove it and use it on the next animal.
After using the Knives of Alaska Rib Cage Spreader on this hunt I fell in love with it. No more digging around in the dark hunting for a stick to snap in half to spread the chest cavity on my deer. No sir, just slip the spreader out of the side pocket on my backpack and slap it into the chest cavity and haul my deer back to camp.
And to throw in one more little caveat that I never would have thought of. Right at dusk one evening, Ron Spomer shot a nice boar. I told Charles if he wanted to go grab the side by side I’d gut the hog right fast so we didn’t have to load it up and cross the creek in the dark. As he was taking off for the side by side, he said to slap in the Knives of Alaska Rib Cage Spreader. He’d already split the sternum with the little KOA Bobcat hatchet, and he said if I stuck the spreader in the sternum, it made it a lot easier to cut out the diaphragm muscles, which then revealed the chest cavity and made it super easy to remove the heart, lungs, and trachea. Unique thought, and it did work well.
The MSRP on the Knives of Alaska Rib Cage Spreader is $9.99. I’d suggest that you check out this little accessory.
About Tom Claycomb
Tom Claycomb has been an avid hunter/fisherman throughout his life as well as an outdoors writer with outdoor columns in the magazine Hunt Alaska, Bass Pro Shops, Bowhunter.net and freelances for numerous magazines and newspapers. “To properly skin your animal you will need a sharp knife. I have an e-article on Amazon Kindle titled Knife Sharpening for $.99 if you’re having trouble.”
