Ask a friend (or friendly website). There's no general system for it. Here's the explanation for the phenomenon (quoted from dictionary.com, but I've seen it elsewhere): "That beef comes from cows is known to most, but the close relationship between the words beef and cow is hardly household knowledge. Cow comes via Middle English cu from an Old English word which is descended from an Indo-European root also meaning “cow.” This root has descendants in most of the branches of the Indo-European language family. Among those descendants is the Latin word for “cow,” whose stem form eventually became the Old French word buef, also meaning “cow.” The French nobles who ruled England after the Norman Conquest of course used French words to refer to the meats they were served, so the animal called cu by the Anglo-Saxon peasants was called buef by the French nobles when it was brought to them cooked at dinner. Thus arose the distinction between the words for animals and their meat that is also found in the English word-pairs swine/pork, sheep/mutton, and deer/venison. What is interesting about cow/beef is that we are in fact dealing with one and the same word, etymologically speaking." (I've altered the quote slightly to omit phonetic symbols which I can neither paste nor display using HTML. Note that "cu," which I left in because it's important, should have a macron over the u.) As mentioned at the end of that quote, the three examples you give refer to the meat of a deer, calf, and sheep, respectively.