Master Butcher, Meat Cutting Guide, Skeletal Chart

The skeletal chart below will show you all the cut lines where you can separate the bones by either cutting through a joint or through cartilage. There are only very few cuts that have to be made with a saw while other saw cut lines are more for convenience and to hasten the process.
It is imperative to boning out and cutting meat to learn the anatomy of an animals skeletal structure and how muscles are set together to build the body. The more you know about anatomy the easier you will find it to process an animal carcass. I find the knowledge of anatomy very important and thus I have included throughout these pages different charts that cover the skeletal and muscle structures. In fact, I would encourage you to examine the bones as you bone them out from the meat. Examine how the bone fits into the appropriate joint and how and where the muscles are attached to them with tendons. For example, if you bone out a shoulder, try to lay the bones out as they were within the shoulder. Exercises like this quickly will give you a better understanding of what you will be doing and it all will help you to understand the ease of boning out meat and cutting meat into portions.

	By studying the chart you will quickly see that there is no reason to use an ax or bone cleaver to separate bones. It takes a little practice to become acquainted with all the joints on a carcass which are hidden from our view. Here is a little tip how you can find the joints with relative ease. With one hand grab onto one side of a large meat cut of the carcass, i.e the leg. With the other hand press on the point where you expect a joint to be. Then with the grabbing hand- move or rotate or rock the meat back and forth. You actually can feel the joint moving under the palm of your hand and on the legs you actually can see the joint moving through the skin. There, where it moves, you make the cut. The spinal column is put together from single vertebrae bones and these are held together with cartilage, the vertebrae discs. You easily can cut through these vertebra discs without any effort since they are very soft. The same is true for the sternum bone which can be removed by cutting through the cartilage which connects the sternum to the rib cage.
	The spinal column is made up of differently shaped vertebrae. There are three groups, the Lumbar vertebrae, the Thoracic vertebrae, and the Cervical vertebrae. In the chart on the left I have included the three different shapes of these bones and a cross section cut of them.
	It is an old truth that people can better understand if they can make comparisons from something they know. Therefore I have included here a human leg skeletal layout compared to that of a pig. You quickly will realize that pigs, like all hoofed animals, actually walk on their toes. Indeed all hoofed animals have five toes. Two of them make up the main hoof and two more are on the back of the foot higher up, the so called "dew claws". The fifth toe is nothing more than a tiny hub on the bone, which you can see when you bone out a foot.