In the first of what will hopefully be a series of workshops around the country, I'm teaching an introductory workshop in New York City on March 13th through Slow Food NYC. This is part of Slow Food NYC's ongoing 'Slow U' program.
This is not by any means my full two day course that I seem to be teaching here in Charlottesville once a month, rifle practice being discouraged in Manhattan. What I'm doing through Slow Food is just a 3 hour event intended to introduce the concept of locavore hunting, specifically for deer. The event will cover some natural history basics, explain the necessary tools and the pros and cons of different weapons and how to take up deer hunting if you live in a tiny apartment with a compact car. I will be bringing a whole venison hindquarter and a backstrap in order to demonstrate some basic home butchering techniques and a student from my last weekend class (who did some amazing things in the kitchen with the meat we had butchered) will be cooking various cuts up for everyone to try.
The location is Jimmy's 43, at 43 East 7th Street, NY, NY. Tickets are available here and all proceeds will benefit Slow Food NYC. The bar will be open and a good time had by all.
The last class was just so much fun that I'm doing it again. One more 'deer hunting for locavores' class is scheduled for the weekend of March 27-28. After that, we may or may not be running an April class as well.
The class will be held in Charlottesville, Virginia with field trips to points nearby.
On Saturday morning we will start out in the classroom covering natural history, anatomy, deer evolution and gun safety. That afternoon a shuttle van will take everyone out to a shooting range. At the range you'll all have the opportunity to try out a variety of deer rifles and cartridges in order to make an educated decision about what you'd want to hunt with. Another experienced hunter and marksman will assist me in teaching basic riflery skills to those with zero to minimal experience and our goal will be to help everyone find out what is the longest shot that they can safely manage on a target the size of a deer's vitals. A catered lunch will be provided at the range.
Sunday will be a similar mixture of classroom time and field trips. I've secured a deer for us from a farm about 2 hours away and arranged for someone to drive there to shoot it, load it into a truck on ice, and bring it to our field dressing location about 15 minutes outside of Charlottesville (a shuttle is provided). Everyone will have the opportunity to try their hand at helping with gutting, skinning and quartering.
Final butchering and some cooking will take place at a commercial kitchen only a few blocks from our classroom. You'll learn how to turn the deer that we dressed that day into meal-sized packages like something that would come from a grocery store. We'll be cooking as we go, making dinner and drinking wines that pair well with venison. The remaining meat will be donated to a local homeless shelter.
Enrollment is limited to 10 students. The fee for the complete course is $380. I regret that I've had to raise the price since the first course, but obtaining a fresh deer and transporting it immediately to our site has added significant cost and logistical complexity. There's just no other way to guarantee a deer for the class to work on.
The fine print:
A 25% deposit is required in order to reserve a spot ($95). This can be made via Paypal, or if you give me your word that you have put a check in the mail then I'll hold the space for you. That deposit is fully refundable for cancellations up to a week before the course starts. After Feb. 13th I will refund the deposit if the vacant spot is filled by someone else. Payment of the balance is due by the start of class on February 20th and can be made through Paypal or mailing a check, or you are welcome to bring the payment with you to the class in person. If an insufficient number of people have signed up by March 13th then I reserve the right to cancel the class with full refunds given.
If interested, please contact me at jack.landers@gmail.com
Photos used courtesy of John Athayde via Creative Commons.
John Athayde was good enough to not only take a great many pictures during our locavore hunting class last weekend, but he also put them up on Flickr under Creative Commons.
For this last class, I didn't want to risk ending up with road kill again for the field dressing demonstration. So we arranged to get a deer from the very kind and gracious Gail Rose at her Deauville Fallow Deer Farm near Front Royal, VA. This way it could be killed only a few hours before we needed it, put on ice, and driven immediately to the site by Paul Fritz (who is also our class range safety officer) and Bob Smith.
Yes, it was a fallow deer rather than a whitetail.
As it turns out, the anatomy is extremely similar in spite of their taxonomic distance from one another. The fallow deer lacks the full compliment of scent glands that the whitetail features. I expect that this difference occurs because fallow deer live in herds year round and have no trouble keeping track of one another. Whereas whitetails disperse for much of the year and keep tabs on each other through scent marking and the use of rubs and scrapes.
Fallow deer also turn out to have a slightly differently shaped rumen, thicker musculature where the muscles of the two hindquarters meet over the bottom of the pelvis, a slightly narrower pelvis, and a liver with lobes fused to the side of the rumen more fully than has a whitetail. These differences are fascinating to me. This is part of what I've come to enjoy about hunting for food. It's science that you can eat.
For purposes of teaching a new hunter how to field dress a deer, the differences between the two species are so slight as to be irrelevant. Also, for the record, when butchered promptly and in the exact same manner I found that whitetail and fallow deer taste exactly the same.
I don't consider CNN a serious news source any longer, but they ran a piece on lions the other day that was so monumentally idiotic that I've got to respond to it. This video segment reports on an effort by what is described as a 'wildlife park' to preserve African white lions and eventually reintroduce white lions into the wild.
A little background for you on white lions. They are not a separate, endangered species. Every now and then one will show up in the wild as a genetic mutation. These lions are not the same thing as an albino, which would lack all pigment. Rather, white lions are leucistic. This means that they lack pigment in the hair and perhaps in the skin, but still have pigmentation of the eyes and other parts of their bodies. White variations of non-polar animals do not tend to thrive in the long run. It is not an especially advantageous adaptation, since it tends to make the animal more readily visible in situations where it might rather not be seen.
I did some brief research on the 'Al Ain Wildlife Park.' Funny, CNN failed to use its entire name. It is actually the 'Al Ain Wildlife Park and Resort.' Says their website: "Each neighborhood will contain amenities for residents including clubhouses, convenience shops, cafés, desert parks, trail systems, playgrounds and green spaces for outdoor entertainment in a natural desert setting."
Huh. This place isn't so much a wildlife preserve as it is a typically ostentatious United Arab Emirates real estate development. Come get your tennis, high-end shopping and white lions all in one exclusive location. Hell, they'll probably have a casino before this thing is done.
Among the many problems with this whole white lion thing is the fact that they have been so desirable as exotic pets, zoo inmates and prey for canned hunts that the breeding of them has been highly suspect for a long time. Heart defects and deformities or partial paralysis of the hind limbs are common among these animals. Fundamentally, when there is a very small population of animals with a weird recessive gene like this, you are going to have to do a lot of inbreeding to keep making animals that express that gene.
I traced back the ancestry of the Al Ain lions back as far as I could. These animals were brought from the Sanbona Wildlife Reserve in South Africa, owned by Mantis.
Mantis consists of World Famous Game Reserves and Boutique Hotels with a presence in South Africa, England, Scotland and Europe. It is a collection of some of the World’s finest resorts.
Mantis acquired two white lions that were the foundation of their breeding project in 2003 for what the Guardian says may have been 150,000 British pounds each. Those lions, Queen and Jabulani, had been raised as private household pets, and there the trail runs cold.
These appear to be fairly typical exotic pet trade lions. By Mantis and probably by previous stewards of the line, they have been occasionally interbred with whatever subspecies of standard lion was handy. The result is an animal that is completely worthless from a conservation perspective. Currently there are a number of distinct subspecies of African lion and most conservationists would agree that it is important to preserve these various subspecies. Therein lies one of the problems with lions that have been captive bred by humans for some generations. These lions are usually hybrids which are inappropriate for release into the wild in any location. In the case of white big cats, you are usually looking at either hybridization or inbreeding. Either way the animals have no place in the wild.
The major danger that wild lions face is loss of habitat (wire snares set by poachers, intending to take something with a more docile disposition is probably the runner up). If there is a patch of native habitat suitable for lions to live in, then we need to be populating that habitat with the subspecies of lion indigenous to the area. Not with a bunch of inbred side-show pets.
Yet we have this grandstanding nonsense from CNN about how this is some great program to eventually 'restore' white lions to the wild. No, CNN. Perhaps you should have spent 10 minutes or so with Google before running what amounts to an infomercial for a luxury resort in the UAE.
I hate this sort of nonsense masquerading as conservation.
One time I was the top story on the main page of the New York Times. I've written and published two books (with more on the way). I convinced the state of New York to give culled geese to homeless shelters instead of throwing them in land fills. I hosted a TV pilot. Sometimes I do commentaries for public radio. I work seasonally as a hunting guide. I spent 2 weeks hunting wild boar in Texas on foot in the dark armed only with a knife. Sometimes I build rifles. I'm big in Canada. Someone made a whole movie about me that will be out in late 2012. I'm an ok framing carpenter, I can build a brick wall, butcher a pig, brew beer, bake cookies, fix a lawnmower and change a diaper.
I am often available for unusual jobs in interesting places. Inquiries welcome.
In the first of what will hopefully be a series of workshops around the country, I'm teaching an introductory workshop in New York City on March 13th through Slow Food NYC. This is part of Slow Food NYC's ongoing 'Slow U' program.
