Agreed that the best tools for butchering large game are a proper set of butchers' knives and bone saws. And those are (or should be) readily available in the UK and even here in Florida. But not maybe or maybe not so in a real hunting camp.
Here in Scotland we don't have hunting camps as such, we have estate lodges and larders, only a poacher would generally look to process game on the hill or in a camp, although there are circumstances where it's done legally. The vast majority of shot game is almost always recovered from the field/hill, argo-cat, quad (4 wheeler in the US), pony or sheer brute manpower, to the larder where it's finally dressed if need be, hung and in some cases butchered after hanging, or sold whole (which is how I buy mine so my butchering is conducted at home, although it's not unknown for me to have a haunch or two off a road kill, usually with just a pen knife).
Beasts that need drawing are initially dressed where they're shot, the liver heart and kidneys recovered, sometimes the stomach (poc a' bhuie, the yellow bag/sack) is used to carry the salvageable offal, sometimes for cooking too, more than once I've woken to find a full yellow bag hung from my front door handle, I don't care for the kidneys too much, or the bag.
All of that can be achieved with a sharp knife of any type really, the thin tip of a 110 or similar is ideally suited to getting at the grealach (guts), the tip of a bushcrafter would do just fine as well, provided it's sharp enough to cut neatly through the hide with the necessary degree of precision.
Knives generally;
For me a knife is just a knife, provided you don't cut yourself someone else break or generally cause trouble with it, I don't have an issue with any of it. Thats how I was educated, by my dad then reinforced as a boy scout (and teaching younger guys as part of becoming a chief scout
)
As a want to be adventurer and climber I always maintained a sharp knife, sometimes over enthusiastically so, but working as a share fisherman in my youth thrashed that out of me, stood in all weathers sometimes for 36+hrs at a time mending bust nets, nets impregnated with grit sand and mud, takes the glamour out of sharpening as the requirement is on occasion seemingly endless, and thousands of individual-precision-cuts-per-net-mending-torture-session (death by a thousand cuts) really dulls ones enthusiasm for all things knife, for life.
Well, I enjoy an hour or two these days with the guys on the pier but thats about craic not work. If I can avoid using a knife I do, because I'm lazy but have the curse of a seemingly hard wired work ethic, and I'm not even a protestant. Why blunt a knife if you don't need to? I've Japanese combi water stone 1000/6000, a quality oil stone 800/2000, a diamond lansky 4 grit set, a steel and most recently a pocket DC4. I can use them all well enough but would rather not, it's a chore for me not a vocation.
I still work with rope string accessory cord, even the dreaded "para cord"
in a professional capacity so I always have a serviceable knife available for those jobs that need it and to this day it's a carbon steel (folding) fisherman's mending knife, you can take the boy from the fishing but you can't take the fishing from the boy
It's this type of knife thats my bench mark that I measure all others by, it's what I know, my sixth finger.
Bushcraft isn't a means to an end for me, rather it's a collection of applicable skills, some relevant to what I do, some not so, like the different types of folks on here, it's a broad church.
Some bushy skills I've mastered well enough down the years, at others I'm a novice. I'm no Grizzly Adams or backwoods man, although I've had my share of adventures, and still do on occasion, but if I'm honest, really honest, I've never had a
genuine need for any knife other than my wee carbon folder, I have others and I was using my MH O1 carbon DP1 (adorned in maidean dubh' an donais: the black sticks of the devil, african blackwood so named by the kirk as thats the wood used to make bagpipes) in ernest dressing hazel staffs just this weekend, salvaging usable wood ahead of a visit by the hydro line clearing gang. But nothing that I couldn't have done at home or in location with my wee pen knife, with a little due care and diligence.
