Organic Free-Range Deer

Now this is a very interesting story:

A decades-long national decline in the number of hunters has prompted states to tap into a new group of hunters – people who demand locally produced food, but don’t know the first thing about bagging a deer.

Books and blogs on the topic are numerous, and state wildlife departments are offering introductory deer hunting classes in urban areas to recruit newbies who want to kill their own local, sustainable and wild meat in what some say is an ecologically friendly way.

“It’s not easy and it’s not a surefire way to fill a freezer every year but it’s certainly more rewarding than even raising a cow behind your house and butchering it,” said Chris Saunders, hunter education coordinator for the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife. The department offered an introductory deer hunting course in Burlington this fall to recruit new hunters.

Well that’s one way to think about it. This is also very promising!

But hunting participation increased by 9 percent from 2006 to 2011, the latest U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s national five-year survey found, and wildlife officials around the country suspect that it’s local food connoisseurs – or locavores – partly helping to level it off.

Reasons for hunting vary – recreation, spending time with friends and family, finding a trophy buck. The number of those hunting for meat nearly doubled from 16 percent in 2006 to 35 percent in 2011, according to a national survey of 1,000 hunters published last year by Responsive Management and other outdoors agencies. The survey found that part of the increase was driven by the locavore movement.

Now I’m a shooter, not a hunter. Still I love the outdoors, I love game meat, I understand the value of population control, and I’ve found shooting at targets that move under their own power to be VERY challenging. That goes double when I’m concerned about cleanly taking the target without undo suffering, or difficult recovery of the meat.

Still I remember somebody did the breakdown of the cost of his freezer of deer meat one hunting season, only taking into account the expenses that were only good for THAT hunting season, and let me tell you that venison was approaching Wagyu beef in per-pound cost. I like deer, but frankly I’d take the beef if you asked me what I wanted for dinner.

Still you can’t get an animal more “Organic” or “Free Range” than an animal that was out in the woods just before slaughter, and for some there is a certain dollar amount attached to that.

I point out my own interests in hunting because I see this increase as being a side-effect of Gun Culture 2.0. Let’s face it, owning a gun for personal protection is smart, responsible, and safe…but it’s also boring as hell. I carry a gun CONSTANTLY but yet I’ve never had to clear leather when the timer was for real. Chances are I may never. So that’s why people who have invested in shooting often take up other pastimes in the shooting world. Be it collecting (I have my Soviet and Warsaw Pact collection, as well as my mouse guns that I never bought for carry), shooting, Competition, and HUNTING. Also this shows a bit of the popularity of the AR-pattern as a hunting platform. You may have bought that black rifle for protection of your home and family, but what else can you use it for?

Also interesting in a nation where urban sprawl and increased regulation hunting can still be on the rise.

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