I have noticed over the last few years that there are a lot of people out there who did not grow up hunting or shooting, but have expressed some interest in taking up deer hunting. After all, it is ethically the next best thing to being a vegetarian. 'Slow food' proponents and locavores are both groups of people who should logically have an interest in doing this.
With those people in mind, I am considering putting together a small semi-formal class on deer hunting from a 'slow food' and locavore perspective. This would be for adults who are total newbies to hunting and firearms. We'd be doing a series of workshops on topics such as deer behavior, ecology, firearms safety, hunting techniques, field dressing and butchering. Ideally, each student would get paired with an experienced hunter for an actual hunt towards the end of the class.
Men and women alike are welcome, as are people of all political persuasions.
Each year, thousands of whitetail deer are harvested in Albemarle County by local hunters. For the cost of a box of ammunition you can take up to 6 deer per year on a basic hunting license, yielding 35-50 pounds of low-fat meat per deer. Compare this to the price of meat at the grocery store and do your own math. By shooting, dressing and butchering your own meat you can guarantee that you are eating free-range, grass-fed, hormone free food that has never been near a source of e. coli. Just think of it as very slow food, doing with meat what you may already have done with vegetables in the backyard. The food miles can be as low as zero, depending on exactly where you live.
If anyone in the Charlottesville/Albemarle County area is interested, email me at Jack [dot] Landers [@] gmail [dot] com.
6 comments:
Jack, my concern has never been the ethical concern about the treatment of animals. Indeed, it is necessary for the health of the herds to thin them so they don't overbreed.
My concern has always been safety. I hear too man stories about people being shot down by drunken, underaged, or under experienced hunters.
What are your thoughts on the safety of deer hunting?
J.C.
Once I started looking at the actual numbers, the rates of death and injury are shockingly low. You can see some of my research about half way down in this article I wrote a few weeks ago:
http://rule-303.blogspot.com/2009/07/ny-times-clueless-on-nd-elk-hunt.html
Each year, nationally, about 12,600,000 people will go hunting. And each year there will be about 100 hunting-related deaths, including participants and non-participants. Most of those deaths are caused by falling out of tree-stands, or older and out-of-condition hunters pushing themselves too hard and having heart attacks out where there's no fast ambulance response.
Hunter safety education has been mandatory for licensing for years. Younger hunters represent a surprisingly low proportion of the accident rate - its more older and experienced hunters who start taking safety for granted.
The bottom line is that the reality turns out to be very far from the old Hollywood stereotype of hunters. Hunting is pretty safe for participants and non-participants alike.
I agree with Jack re safety of hunters. May I add that in California where murder-by-hunting began to be a trend the problem was solved by making a mandatory year in prison for any gun related "accidental" hunting death. It stopped the trend in its tracks!
I teach folks how to cook and use the venison that they have or were given. My favorite is Norwegian dry sausage.
A deer seems so much more hard earned and rewarding in winter they are so much easier to see but the sightings seem to be fewer making it such a wonderful surprise to see them. I went 4 times this winter and i saw 2 deer but those deer certainly made my heart jump and the sit worth it i didn't get one but it made me feel better to know that i had a such close sightings in all of the seasons i am allowed to hunt. South carolina hog hunting
I practice deer hunting since I was a young boy, and actually I'm trying to teach my little son how to do it as well as possible. I think this is one of the greatest sports hunting in the world, and a fabulolus way to take a break of noise of the city.
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