Hunting for Meat or Sport?

Whitetail Deer Hunting for Food

How many of you have heard the statement, “I just hunt for meat.  You can’t eat horns”, followed by a Tim the Tool-Man Taylor grunt?  For the initial disclaimer, you can hunt for whatever reason, but if you’re going to make a argument against hunting for trophy whitetail deer, and only interested in food, you are a better person than me. 

“Deer Hunting for Meat”

Under this false premise, hunters are usually actually claiming that it is cheaper for you to:

Buy a gun
Buy bullets
Buy targets to practice shooting
Spend time sighting in your gun
Clean your gun
Buy hunting clothes
Buy hunting property or lease hunting ground
Spend gas money on scouting deer
Purchase trail cameras
Buy deer bait
buy or spend time setting up a blind
buy other equipment you have for hunting

Buy a deer license
Pay to get a deer processed
Give up space in your freezer for large amounts of deer meat

And the most expensive part of the “hunting for meat” argument is the actual time spent in the woods when you could be out working a job to pay for conventional store bought meat (opportunity cost).   To shoot meat on a Kentucky deer hunt would cost a hunter probably in the neighborhood of  $100 per pound or more? 

If you want to argue that deer tastes better than beef, then the rest of the world would have to disagree or else the free market would be demanding more whitetail on the menus.  Not to mention the fact deer are lein. So if the human taste buds preferred lein meat, we would not be such an obese culture.  We actually prefer fat.  Deer eat browse, bark and random plant life.  Cows are grain fed.

Now I might buy the argument that deer meat is healthier, but to minimize the efforts of those who deer hunt in Kentucky and bag a bruiser buck, is just a little cheap in my mind.  Whether using a Kentucky hunting guide or randomly going into an uncles corn field and shooting a doe, you’re doing something humans have done for hundreds-of-thousands of years.  You’re on this earth for just a second, so if you’re in the outdoors hunting or on the water fishing, you’re one of “my people” who get what it means to live.