Butchering, breaking down and deboning - Do you wear gloves?

[SanityRemoved]

Anyone who has worked with cold meat knows the feeling. The ache, the numbness and eventually the thought that it may not be very safe to continue.

What do you do about it? Gloves? Combination of gloves? Can of spinach?

[kaleokahu]

Hi, SR:

Surgical gloves don't help much with with the cold, but they do help keep you hands dry if you warm up your hands in water. Anything bulkier than that is a PITA. Another tip: if you can keep your *wrists* warm, your hands stay warmer.

Aloha,
Kaleo

[Chemicalkinetics]

I don't. I also don't debone very cold meat. They are refrigerator cold the most. Nothing like freezer cold. I do what Dave do. When my hands get too cold, I run them in room temperature water. I am a bit lazy, but really I think the tradeoff between wearing gloves and not are even.

On one hand, gloves may give you a better grip and minimize cold. On the other hand, gloves take away my dexterity and my feeling.

[TeRReT]

Last time I did any sort of real butchery was 3 months ago, deboned 75 mostly thawed cornish hen. It wasn't as bad as when I was in school and the butchery class took place inside a classroom sized refrigerator, but my hands were a bit cool. I was ok, the other person that I was helping did nick his finger a little, but I don't know that it was from numbness from being cold, or numbness from the beer or just general lack of being able to see bloody carcass from bloody finger from the carcass.

I don't like gloves, I can't feel my way around the animal as well. I haven't really had any problem from butchery, what is worse for me is making sausages, mixing massive bowls of near frozen meat. Or even just mixing massive batches of ravioli filling and adding things then mixing again is terribly annoying.

As a note, I don't normally drink while butchering, and certainly not while at work, but when you're deep in the weeds and abandoned to butcher 75 miniature birds at 2am, beer is the only thing that gets you through it.

[Dave5440]

I started wearing surgical gloves for this very reason, I find it helps with the breaking down of the meat but if you mix say ground meat for burgers the ache is still there. I used to run hot water over my hands every min or so , but now that I have a KA it does all the mixing