Sarah Palin's recently televised caribou hunt has raised questions about whether the former Alaskan governor may have violated state regulations by taking only some of the meat.

In an episode of Sarah Palin's Alaska, on the U.S. network TLC early last month, Palin embarked on a hunting trip with her father, Chuck, and a friend.

Sporting a green camouflage jacket, Palin is shown firing a rifle at a caribou, killing it.

But it's what happened after the fatal shot — when Palin and her father started butchering the caribou — that raised the eyebrows of Alaskan wildlife officials and even one expert hunter in northern Canada.

"Just from looking at that, there's still quite a bit of meat that's left behind there," said Fred Sangris, a member of Yellowknives Dene First Nation in the Northwest Territories.

Sangris, who has hunted caribou for more than 40 years, watched the Alaska episode and said it appears Palin and her father barely took any meat from the killed animal.

According to Alaska's hunting regulations, the "wanton waste of big-game meat is an extremely serious offence punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and one year in jail."

Caribou not gutted

"You have to be prepared, after you've bagged that animal, to haul it out, and you want to get all the meat that you possibly can," the former governor said on the show.

"We're going to take those hind quarters and the four legs with us, and as much backstrap meat and rib meat as we can."

However, Palin's father said he would not gut the freshly killed caribou.

"We're going to quarter it and take him home, so I don't gut him," he said on camera.

That decision surprised Riley Woodford, a spokesman with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Juneau.

"Why didn't he want to gut it, and why didn't he want the organs?" Woodford asked.

"That's even more perplexing, that someone who seems to know what they're doing would do that."

State regulations say hunters who kill caribou, moose, sheep, deer and other large game must salvage, among other things, "all the meat along the backbone between the front and hindquarters," including the backstrap and tenderloins.

Woodford said it is nearly impossible to access a caribou's tenderloins without gutting it first, but said there will be no investigation, since it's not known what happened after the cameras stopped rolling.

Meanwhile, Sangris said he hopes Palin will not waste any more meat the next time she goes hunting.

"A lot of meat that's left behind could have been used," Sangris said.