Hunting

I started hunting before I started high school. I am in a fortunate position that my dad hunted so I was exposed to it for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid I remember my mom cooking venison-based meals and not thinking anything of it. The people I grew up around also hunted. As I grew older, I realized that hunting and eating game was not the norm though.

Hunting started as a family activity that became a main food source for me. My wife and I eat a fairly vegetable-heavy diet (especially compared to what I ate when I grew up), so most of the meat that we consume is venison except for the occasional chicken or sausage dish. When I graduated from university I started relying on venison mostly for cost reasons, but now I understand that eating venison is the healthier and arguably more environmentally conscious choice. The meat is lean and the animals run free.

Hunt seems to be a divisive issue and I understand that it is not for everyone. However, if you have the opportunity to harvest game meat, I highly recommend doing so. For me, hunting is a way to gather food for the year and it might be one of the more affordable meats once all is said and done. (It is worth noting that we process our deer, which keeps costs down.) Harvesting game is also a way to keep populations in check, and it is culturally important.

There is no denying that humans have changed the earth. We can't just "let things be wild again" because of the influence that we have had. That is where natural biologists rely on hunters to do some of their work. Letting populations explode would lead to more problems than it could potentially solve. The cultural importance of hunting might not be as obvious to most people in the world today, but stop for a minute and think about that. Humans relied on hunting for the vast majority of our time on this planet. The US's midwest has a strong whitetail hunting culture. In Argentina, hunting upland birds and red stag is popular. A majority of rural countries in Africa and Asia rely on hunting for sustenance. There is no denying hunting's spot in culture even today.

I hunt and process almost all the red meat that we consume throughout the year except for a few recipes. There is a lot more to the entire process than I want to write about now, but I will surely be writing more about the ins and outs in subsequent posts.

Looking to the future, I would like to start harvesting white meat, like duck or goose, to replace the chicken that we buy. I have eaten waterfowl and upland birds before but I do not have a standing hunting season as my family does for whitetail. Other than that, I do not plan on increasing or decreasing the amount that I hunt. I do not trophy hunt. The only game I take is the game that I know we will eat.