For the meat: The drive to hunt is shifting from sport to high-quality food
If you’re a non-hunter you may have wondered what drives so many acquaintances and co-workers to don an orange coat every December and head out into cold, snow or rain in the hope of bringing home a deer. Don’t be surprised if you can’t solve that riddle. Why people hunt in a modern industrialized society is a difficult question to answer. Even hunters themselves struggle to express what draws them to their woodsy pursuit.
But recent research indicates that for a growing segment of hunters the strongest drive to hunt is still — or rather again — the oldest motivation of all — meat.
Responsive Management, a natural resource research firm based in Harrisonburg, VA conducted two random telephone surveys of adult hunters nationwide, over a seven-year interval, about their primary reasons for hunting. The researchers ran an initial survey in 2006, followed by another in 2013. In both studies, respondents were asked to identify their single most important reason for hunting in the year prior to the survey.
Hunters interviewed in 2013 cited “for the meat” as the motivator that drew them into the woods more than any other response. Interestingly, the meat-motivation was the only cited reason to increase significantly since the 2006 survey.
Those citing meat as their prime motivator increased from 22 percent in 2006 to 35 percent in the more recent interviews.
Other hunting motivations selected included “To be with family and friends,” (21 percent in 2013); “To be close to nature,” (9 percent); “For recreation/sport,” (31 percent); and “For a trophy,” (1 percent). All those responses, except “for a trophy,” which garnered 0 percent of responses in 2006, showed a decline from the 2006 test.
Other research backs up the two surveys, indicating that meat is an increasingly important motivation for Americans to hunt.
Hunting participation has been in a slow and general decline in America for about two decades. But the most recently published (2011) National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation conducted at five-year intervals by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service detected a modest increase in hunting participation nationwide between 2006 and 2011. That growth, however, was not uniform across all 50 states.
Responsive Management then surveyed hunters in seven states that showed an increase in the number of resident hunters between 2006 and 2011 to learn what might explain growing participation there.
When hunters in those states–Alabama, Alaska, Indiana, Idaho, Mississippi, New York and South Dakota were read a list of factors that influenced them to go hunting, 68 percent responded that bringing home a source of “local, natural or ‘green'” meat was a primary reason to hunt.
Responsive Management’s researchers identified three trends as having influenced this shift toward obtaining meat as a primary motivator to hunt. Those trends are the lingering effects of the 2008 recession, the mounting demand for locally-produced, additive-free and environmentally-responsible meat, and the increasing proportion of women among the ranks of hunters nationwide.
The researchers pegged the lingering recession as the strongest pressure motivating hunting for meat but acknowledged that the other two trends are growing in prominence and are likely to exert their influence long-term.
“As households throughout the country started to feel the effects of significant financial pressures several years ago, more Americans likely turned to hunting as a way of obtaining relatively inexpensive venison and other meat to put food on the family table,” wrote the Responsive Management study authors.
Many hunters, say the researchers, including some new hunters that may not have been recruited to hunting through the traditional family or community avenues, are hunting for meat now because of the “locavor (a consumer of locally-produced food)” or “green” food movement. They note instructional classes titled “Deer Hunting for Locavores” offered now in places such as Charlottesville, VA; Denver and Boulder, CO; Burlington, VT; and Portland, OR. The classes, taught by chefs, teach participants how to butcher and cook deer and other game animals. “Such growing interest seems to be helping reinforce the motivation of hunting for meat,” the authors wrote.
Finally, a growing proportion of women in hunting’s ranks are driving the motivation to hunt primarily for meat.
Women, Responsive Management says, account for a higher percentage of “new” hunters (14 percent women) than “established” hunters (9 percent), and women are more likely to hunt primarily for the food it can yield than are men. Among the hunters interviewed in the 2006 and 2013 surveys, 55 percent of women cited “for the meat” as their primary reason to hunt, compared to 27 percent of male hunters.
From a food perspective the most important wild game animal in America is the white-tailed deer. The whitetail’s range is wider than other deer species and whitetails are the big game most conveniently available to American hunters, including Pennsylvanians. But its abundance and wide availability do not mean the whitetail yields commonplace table fare.
“I eat grass-fed beef and locally raised lamb. But if restricted to just one meat, it would be a bottomlands whitetail doe,” said Tom Dickson, editor of Montana Outdoors magazine, hunter and amateur venison chef.
“A trimmed, raw venison steak in the hand smells as fresh as a cool fall morning. When cooked, it becomes delicately textured and finely flavored. I’m not alone in my praise. Chefs throughout the world extol venison’s culinary virtues.”