so if it has gotten that large can we increase the amount of hunting permits? also someone tell me how this dang continent has so much elk and deer yet most our meat options are either beef or chicken, why isn’t venison more common?
disease? We get venison sticks from a CLEAN deer company...but I would not take venison from locals any longer.
Mule deer don’t seem to be much more plentiful compared to 20 or 30 years ago, at least in southern and central Arizona. I haven’t hunted deer for the last three seasons, but I commonly see a few when I’m out hunting quail.
Because it has to be farmed to be sold and deer are not profitable animals to be farmed.
One of our neighbors does canned deer hunts and raises deer for that reason. The cheapest hunt is $3,000 last I knew.
Let's say you got a 70 pound deer. And let's say about half of that was meat. That is about $86 a pound. And that is not even adding in processing costs.
Now that is a farmed deer and a lot of the money is for the "experience" of hunting so let's say professionally farmed venison is a quarter of that. That is still about 21 dollars a pound pre-processing.
It is not commercially viable except for the very high end market.
My nephew shot a buck. He was excited and took a picture before he tagged it. Yup, an DNR officer saw it on FB, and yup, he got a ticket. That is why. Who wants to play cat and mouse over a deer and get a ticket?