Something else wrong. I like many have shot deer in late evening and had to retrieve the next day. In field with guts and skin over 13 hours at temps in 60's. Never gamy.
Further skin on in cool temps never an issue. Up north we hung our deer out side in
30's 40's for a week or more

Only had gamy animal once it was a buck shot in up state New York given to me by my uncle. Smelt terrible and tasted worse. Gamiest critter ever and don't know why!!

TFF Caribou

Beef is quick aged at 65 degrees for three days. It takes a LONG time for the meat on an animal the size of a cow to be cooled down to that temperature. When you double surface area, you quadruple volume. You actually want microbial action to occur. That’s what aging is. It makes the flavor more mellow and more complex, as well as tenderizes the meat. The only pathogenic microbes in the meat of a healthy animal are on the outside. That’s why you should sear a steak, and then eat it as rare as you want, but you must completely cook ground meat. How cold do you think public land hunters in areas with no vehicle access get their meat? Back pack hunters go days without getting their kill on ice all the time, and it doesn’t harm their meat at all. Most of the spoilage bacteria have very limited action below 70 degrees. It will take a 110degree animal a long time to cool below that temperature, so getting the guts out and increasing airflow is key. Very large animals(elk, moose, bison) can suffer a malady called bone sour, where the most internal portions of the meat(against the bone) on the thickest parts of the animal will spoil because they cannot be cooled quickly enough. The solution is to cut to the bone and prop the meat open with a stick to allow more airflow while you bone the rest of the meat out. It takes some very cold weather to get the hind quarters of an elk below 70 degrees in a day if you leave the quarters whole. Easy refrigeration has confused a lot of people about food safety. For many thousands of years before refrigeration meat went several days without spoiling, and it will continue to do so. The cooler you get it, the longer it will last. Most meat is aged below 40 degrees for many reasons. 1) few if any pathogenic bacteria grow below 41 degrees, however, they’re still there, only in the outside, and properly cooked, depending whole muscle vs ground, will still be safe whether stored abover or below 41 degrees. 2) Meat aged at 34 degrees will take 14-28 days to reach the same point of aging as meat aged at 40 degrees for 7-14 days, which gives the processor more time to finish processing a batch of carcasses that will all age for an identical time period before being placed on the shelf. However, high volume operations the same aging can occur in only 2-3 days at 60-65 degrees without risk of spoilage bacteria getting out of hand and will have the same shelf life upon reaching the shelf as meat that had aged for 14-28 days at 34 degrees before hitting the shelf. Quick aging reduces freezer space and inventory which can be very important for important for massive suppliers handling thousands of animals per day. You can quick age and store 3000 animals or you can age at 34 degrees and store 28,000 animals! That doesn’t even figure he price per square foot of maintaining 34 degrees vs 60-65 degrees. 3) just as with elk, moose and bison, it can be difficult to get the round of a beef animal below 70 degrees on a suitable time frame without some degree of processing unless your cooler is colder. To quick age at 60-65 degrees they must get those animals processed very quickly, not because 60 degree air isn’t cool enough, but because it takes a lot longer to bring the internal meat temperature below 70 degrees with 60 degree air than with 34 degree air.

My meat started tasting MUCH less “gamey” and became MUCH more tender when I started giving my deer a little time before getting them in the freezer. I gut and quarter as quickly as possible, then if it’s 60 degrees or cooler outside, I get in no particular hurry to ice( keeping the meat dry allows less penetration of bacteria on the outside). I keep ice in the cooler( assuring air temps below 40) but not tons of it for the next week before I begin processing. Then I start with back straps and finish with the chuck giving the chuck the longest aging time, usually a full two weeks. I would go longer if I had a larger space and could dry age. Wet aging ( sealed container like a ziplock, or even just meat sitting on meat preventing some surfaces from drying) should stick closer to the low end of the aging times, while dray aging can actually go well beyond.

There are restaurants that age for over a year, then cut all the nasty looking black meat off.

How many of those people take their meat to a processor? How many got their pos nasty deer back? Or got it back mixed in with a bunch of other meat?

It would have to be arctic tundra before I eat or feed anything to my family that sat with guts in it dead over night. I have had a few hogs etc. that were not found till the next morning and they smelled rotten already not going to happen in my camp.

Pope, we typically gut then take them to a walk in cooler, typically they chill in there for a few days before we head back home and drop them off at a processor, never once has one ever tasted this way so I’m guessing maybe I let it sit too long but I’ve also done that before and never had bad meat. The shot was also a little more behind the shoulder then I would have liked, maybe it hit some guts then leaving it sit for 3 hours I’m not cold weather ?

3 hours is not too long. Something else caused it. I am eating one right now that was gutted 3.5 hours later and put in walking with skin on. In S. Tex killing 8 deer in a morning is not unheard of and they are not gutted until hunt is over and we are back at the cooler. Hundreds of deer have tasted fine.

I hunt with one guy who guts anything a second after it is shot. At my lease I will have it gutted within an hour but I like to hang ir.

Quick aging is 2-3 days at 60-65 degrees. It lets the enzymes, bacteria and fungi responsible for the aging process to work a lot faster than they do between 34 and 40 degrees. There can be more “off” flavors because there will be strains of bacteria having slow activity at 60-65 degrees that have no activity at 34-40 degrees, but it will not be considered spoiled. Most bacteria associated with spoilage do not thrive below 70 degrees. You might prefer one aging process over another in a taste test, but you would not associate it with being spoiled. Most people prefer wet aged meat to dry aged because that’s how most meat is sold. To dry age you have to hang the whole side and process very close to the time of sale, but to wet age, you can process and let the meat continue to age in the package. The finest meat is going to be meat that was cooled at a specific rate and then dry aged for a long time a low temp. This is very expensive because you must maintain a large enough area to store an animal for that extended period(again, if you process 100 per day, then a 3 day age requires you to cool an area that will fit 300 animals, but a 28 day age requires you to cool a space that will hold 2800 animals!) , then dry aging evaporates out a lot of the weight that would have shown on the scale, after that a lot of the dried meat is trimmed away. The bargain basement meat markets often get their prices down in part by aging quickly at warmer temperatures. Keep in mind that they can really do any temperature in between, and the higher the temp, the shorter the storage time. Might you win more awards by aging your meat at 34 degrees than at 60? Yes. But the idea that not getting the animal on ice within an hour would make it taste so bad that you have trouble eating it is absurd.

I did a google search on this 3 day quick aging... it says the meat is kept under ultraviolet lamps to prevent microbial growth... yes so comparing that to his rotting deer in a field is bs.

I always try to have them gotted ASAP. I remember people in Wyoming telling me that antelope always tasted gamely....but I had mine gutted within 30 minutes and a bag of ice inside them. They tasted fine. Gut them within a half hour and take photos later.