Where venison, hungry people, and insurance executives meet
The A-Hed (“middle column”) in today’s Wall Street Journal is worth the price of admission. It made me think and chuckle.
Iowa has kicked off a program called Help Us Stop Hunger (HUSH) which basically looks to kill two birds with one stone. It seems the Hawkeye State is overrun with tasty, corn-fed deer and auto collision claims now result in tens of millions of dollars in annual payouts for deer-car fisticuffs. So the good people in Des Moines cooked up a delicious solution.
In 2003, the state legislature authorized additional doe permits and added a $1 surcharge to deer tags. It uses the revenue from the surcharge to pay the cost of a private plant to process donated deer into venison. Everybody wins: Hunters get to have some more sport in the field and hungry people get more animal protein in their diet. The program appealed to me as a human being, a hunter, a taxpayer and a financial analyst. It also made me think about my own views on hunting and venison.
At home in Arizona things are a little bit different. We are not suffering with excess deer per se. An Arizona hunter, as a rule, may shoot only one buck per year, and getting a deer tag is competitive in many cases. As a married man, I tend to think of actually shooting a deer as the most excitement I can have out-of-doors. Cleaning a deer is not particularly fun, but once the animal is in an ice chest, I am in a party mood until the last steak is eaten. Hunting, butchering, and eating venison are rare treats for me in a life which sometimes seems dominated by too little manual labor, too many grey cube walls, and too little connection to God’s natural creation.
This year I hunted Coues whitetail in the Galiuro Mountains of southeastern Arizona. It was a stellar hunt, although I did not tag a deer. The freshman hunter in camp, Asher, did. I was elated by his success and we had a great butchering party on (appropriately, though coincidentally) October 31st, Reformation Day. The memory of the good humor, good food, and good fellowship of this butchering are still fresh in my mind. I derive so much satisfaction from processing deer into venison, and I get the opportunity so rarely, I know that I will not be donating any deer anytime soon.
The article, however, made me ponder how I think about hunting. The way I hunt in Arizona is pretty high calorie. Typically, I load down my 1977 Ford pickup with a substantial amount of gear and head out to some remote spot. The act of packing and preparing for the trip takes about ten hours on the front end and another four on the back. We drive to some desolate though beautiful location and build a camp with a tarp shelter and table; we set up our tents.
When we hunt, we leave camp in the dark and hike over ankle-rolling rocks and up nasty inclines. Sweaty and hot, we arrive at our glassing spot to set up the tripod and binoculars and spend a few hours looking for the elusive grey specs which are Coues deer in blonde grass at five hundred yards. During this time, we become very cold. On a typical day, we see about a dozen does and no bucks. On our most recent hunt, in five days of hunting, we saw the spike buck, which Asher killed, and two small multi-tined bucks which did not present shot opportunities.
All this to say, deer hunting, Arizona style, is hard work with only modest returns. I consider the act of butchering my own deer and then eating it to be the consummation of a massive expenditure of time, work, and expense. It is all worth it, but the venison is a special meat to be savored by my family and my guests. It represents a tasty connection to my too-short time in the field and a delicious reminder of the linkage between work and reward. Deer hunting is an end-to-end experience for me and I’m content to keep it that way, though I commend the eagle-eyed Iowans bringing bucks to the local food bank for their generosity and marksmanship.
Good hunting!
