Just had a good season go a little off the tracks. Processor told me the deer I dropped off Tuesday was full of puss/infection . It looked good from outside but when they opened it up it was running out of the chest cavity. Have any tall had this happen , he said he sees it a few times a year and a biologist said it gets in the blood and ruins everything.

On another note this is one problem with the three buck rule . I've filled all my tags but only have 2 deer to show for it. I hate shooting a doe but it usually takes three deer to make it till next season .
I don't have problem with killing does but where I hunt with all the neighbors with kill lights and killing everyone they see we just don't have them like we once did.

Any external injuries ?? May have been shot sometime in the past.

None I saw

We have deer all the time that have hidden injuries and pockets of infection. The infection pockets can range from half dollar to soccer ball size. Usually, only the meat close to the infection is bad and needs discarded. Every now and then however you will get one that has the infection spread throughout the bloodstream. I'm no biologist, but no way in hell I would eat or give that deer back to a customer. I usually see 2-4 deer like that a season.

Biggest deer I ever killed was like that. He had been shot in the back leg by a .22 or a buckshot pellet. There was one tiny hole in his leg but he was rotted looking up to his backstraps

The last deer I killed this season had a completely healed, broken front left leg. I process my own and always check them completely from stem to stern. His lymph nodes were all enlarged. I usually have to look for them to cut them out, but you couldn't miss these. They were all about the size of a quarter. They were still flat, but large in diameter. I processed the meat and have it in the freezer.