Hello.
Here in Alabama, there is an abundance of “deer processors” places where you can take a deer to have someone else cut meat out of it.
I haven’t seen any tagging discussion about this online, but I don’t think there is appropriate tagging for this kind of facility.
They don’t sell cuts of meat, and they don’t keep meat on hand like a conventional butcher.
Does this warrant its own tagging?
Sounds close to a slaughterhouse.
It doesn’t seem like there is a tag slaughterhouses. There is the generic landuse=industrial + industrial=slaughterhouse Tag:industrial=slaughterhouse - OpenStreetMap Wiki, but that’s for the generic area, not a specific business.
man_made=works + product=meat + animal=deer may be the least wrong option. Tag:man_made=works - OpenStreetMap Wiki
The key difference is that whole herds of live animals are brought to a slaughterhouse, while a hunter brings a single deer carcass at a time (or maybe a few) to a processing facility. Some may be large and might make sense to tag as industrial=* (or man_made=works). Others are small home based businesses that only operate around hunting season. These might more feel more appropriate under the craft=* key.
A deer processor can be accurately described as a “butcher”, but not a “butcher shop” because they don’t sell the meat. They just provide a service to hunters and give the meat back to them. So shop=butcher is wrong for this, but perhaps craft=butcher? It does have a little bit of use so far.
I like your idea, I’ve seen game processors that do feral hog as well, so a generic tag like craft=butcher seems appropriate.
Would craft=meat_processor (processing?) possibly work better, to prevent any confusion with “butchers”?
FWIW the 39 craft=butcher are here. Most are in Germany. A couple of the ones outside of Germany have indicated “not a shop” (also here). Some of the ones inside Germany also look “larger than just a shop”.
Notwithstanding that, a deliberately different tag (e.g. as suggested above) would avoid any confusion.
In my local neck of the woods the hunters process the game close to where they shot it. They do that themselves, or if they are of the kind “wealthy shooters buying a shoot” have rented hands to do that. Anything else will require a butcher and quick moving of the body.
UPDATE to clarify: Hunters just remove the intestines, cutting the meat most always with a butcher.
(OT on slaughterhouses) I suspect that many just aren’t mapped at all, because they often don’t advertise their presence much (thought locals will of course know that they are there). FWIW in the UK there’s a list here (under OGL) and the nearest one to me (actually part of the Food Standards Agency) is in the unmapped pink space here.