Facing meat shortages, some Americans turn to hunting during pandemic

It's also a good excuse to learn to hunt. Every single experienced hunter had their first hunt at some time.

My family has hunted for generations and I have hunted for nearly a decade now. You are right, there is an elevated risk of accidents. But the experience of hunting is nothing like raising chickens. Staying out in the woods for days, becoming more and more tuned to the animals and environment around you. Feeling the adrenaline when you hear a huge animal tromping through the woods, just to look over and see a couple squirrels playing. There's nothing like it.

If this pandemic draws more people out to try hunting, and in so doing, they have similar experiences to those I've had, then I'm fine with it.

Public land in states with highly limited seasons, few legal hunting areas and high barriers to entry is always a shitshow because you have a bunch of people who haven't been in the woods since last year scrambling to shoot the five stupid bucks that are walking around on opening day in the tiny area you can legally hunt. If the state doesn't like the outcome they should change their laws to stop incentivizing it either by relaxing requirements on where you can hunt or adding more barriers to entry to get the number of people down (of course the latter approach doesn't help control the excessive deer populations that a lot of states have problems with).

I had the same thought. That guy sounds like it's as simple as walking into the woods and shooting an elk. I don't think he has any idea how difficult it can be.

That’s what’s always held me back from hunting; there is a huge amount that has to be learned in a really short period of time. It seems to me that you should probably know what to do before you shoot the animal, and not plan to figure it out later.

It seems that hunting is a skill best passed down directly from seasoned hunter to new hunter.

Deer hunting is still very popular in the midwest, although it's fading fast with the younger generations.

Every year I can walk through my neighborhood and see deer hanging in the garages. A deer is much smaller than an elk, you can dress it and then take it to a processor or cut it up on your own.

Had this pandemic happened during hunting season, states would have probably banned hunting anyway.

Or go with a friend who is an expert hunter, and learn from him/her.

People could also stock up on dried beans if they are worried about future food shortages.

around where i live most people almost certainly know someone who can help them out with all that stuff for a cut of the bounty...

You can take a kill to a butcher. You can drag an elk out with a ATV or other means than relying on your own strength, but some can do that as well. You don't need a truck necessarily, an elk can be quartered or de-boned in the field. A bone saw is helpful, but it isn't necessary.

Millions of Americans hunt for deer and elk without a lot of the gear you list.

Hunting isn't some sacred thing that can only be accessed through special means, even though plenty of hunters frame it as such. You can pass a hunter's safety course in less than a week, while learning the basics as you go.

However, I agree with the idea that using legal hunting as a means to survive during a national food shortage is grandiose.

As one who does hunt in the suburbs of NY: Most hunting in the NYC area is done with bows, and some with shotguns. Almost all is done from elevated stands or occasionally cliffs.

The maximum effective range of a bow is 40 yards (above that, and the deer jumps away before the arrow gets there). Shotguns are a little bit higher, but even so, I have never heard of a bowhunter shooting another bowhunter in the area -- one time a novice bowhunter illegally hunting in a park shot a dog, but that's about it.

When you shoot a deer, you do not chase it. You wait for it to expire and then look for it. This is taught in the bowhunting safety course.

The real difficulty is that even in areas where they are overpopulated, there are at most one group of deer per 60 acres, and a bowhunter can barely cover 1/4th acre. Deer do not like to move around, don't follow the same routes every day, and are quite cautious and sensitive to odors and noise. They also spend most of their day in areas such as thickets where a bowhunter cannot get close to them without scaring them off.

So unless the deer happens to walk by the hunter, not smell him, not get startled by his movements drawing a bow, and is facing the proper direction to offer a shot, the hunter will go home empty handed.

> This pandemic is really bringing out the folly of concentration at the expense of all other business considerations.

I think that's just the hackers's infatuation with decentralization speaking here.

Using decentralization to prepare for a disaster that happens once every 100 years costs so much, you'll be uncompetitive 99% of the time, which means you'll likely be out of business by the time disaster strikes.

Furthermore, when it does strike, you'll probably have prepared in the wrong way because you didn't foresee everything, like the disaster affecting every decentralized place at once, as it would in a global pandemic.

Keep in mind that the meat supply hasn't been severely impacted yet, might never be, but even if it was, there would still be a grain supply that hasn't been impacted at all.

Lastly, the average American has enough fat on their body to sustain them for at least a month of eating nothing at all.

But meat is sooo good, and there's nothing else even close, that I'm willing to pay more for it. I'd rather see the supply chain issues worked on, even if it just means more expensive meat. Going meatless is like cutting of the nose to spite the face.

>> A single deer would feed a family of four for, what, a week?

Depends on the size but you can get 40-60lbs of venison from a whitetail deer.

I don't think anybody is proposing to replace the entire existing food supply chain with nothing but hunted deer.

There is no reason however, to think that hunting can't supplement a family's food stocks if other sources start to become thin. And there's a lot more to hunt than deer.

There's also more in play than hunting. A family might feed themselves through a combination of any or all of: hunting, trapping, fishing, foraging for wild edibles, home gardening, AND buying from whatever is available on the market.

One interesting thing about this is that those living close to the coasts may be in better shape in one or two regards. Most notably, seafood is one area where "direct to the consumer" sales is a real thing, and there isn't a lot of processing involved. At least where I grew up on the NC coast. It's common for seafood houses to sell oysters, clams, shrimp, etc. directly to consumers.

On the other hand if you follow the NHS guidelines (70g/day) 20-30kg of meat from a deer would last a family of four ~80-120 days. Not that bad

You can get 60 lbs of meat off a medium sized sized deer, and more if you go for bones, certain organs (e.g lungs, testicles) that are less commonly eaten.

It takes about 2-6 deer to provide meat for a family of four for a year. So, a single deer is about two months of meat. (a deer is 50-125lbs of meat... depending on species and size)

You must be refering to those tiny deer back east. Here in the west we have mule deer, which dress out to over a hundred pounds. You're looking at over 70 pounds of meat. If your family of four eats two and a half pounds of meat a day, every day, they may not be actual humans. An elk will net around 250 pounds of boneless meat.

Ireland & Canada too, probably elsewhere: https://www.just-food.com/news/coronavirus-live-news-covid-1...

> This has also not been a significant issue in other countries hit by Covid-19, that I'm aware of. What is it about the USA's meat processors that have made them vunerable?

We still underestimate how amazingly contagious this disease is.

You would certainly expect that these places should have strict hygiene standards, but investigative journalists have found time and time again that slaughterhouses in the USA are filthy places where human and animal disease alike are concentrated by the time pressure to go faster, to make meat cheaper and cheaper.

Fast Food Nation (https://www.litcharts.com/lit/fast-food-nation/chapter-9-wha...) profiled this in the early aughts.

Countless other investigative journalists have tried, even against the "ag-gag" laws we have in farming states, to uncover even more in recent times:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/02/meat-plant-wor...

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2010/05/14/probing_the_...

The consolidation of the meat industry has given them extraordinary lobbying power. They now have broad authority to regulate themselves:

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-administrations-new-hog-slaug...

Alberta's two largest current outbreaks are in meat processing facilities. I believe it requires extremely close quarters for long hours.

It's not necessarily being spread within the plants themselves - I've seen claims that due to poor pay etc, a lot of the work is done by immigrants crammed multiple people to a room in shared housing, and we know from Singapore that's a really effective way of creating a major coronavirus outbreak.

Most shortages are caused by logistics, not supply.

I've had similar thoughts, the reality for me is that, should it come to needing to fish/hunt for food, old methods aren't going to work. People are going to fence in/trap big game, they are going to net/troll/spike water even in ponds. If the rules of subsistence change enough that hunting becomes required, accessing land in camo and a 4x4 will be outdated. My 2 cents.

Yup. This is a classic case of something making the news because it is atypical.

I found it funny that the article stops just short of implying that hunting is driving gun sales when despite the obvious 800lb gorilla (Covid driving the sales of any/all emergency preparedness products).

I didn't even know gun rentals outside a range (pay money to shoot stuff you can't afford to own) or B2B (e.g. security or armored car company leases handguns from a gun shop) context were a thing but it makes sense in states where the only thing you'd need a full sized rifle cartridge for is assigned tags via a lottery so every season you have plenty of hunters who suddenly have a tag that they might not be equipped to fill.

Wrong time of the year to eat wild rabbits. Wait until a few weeks after the first hard frost, else you run a risk of contracting tularemia.

Unfortunately, I missed the small window to get a hunting license in my state this year, it closed in Feb, before CV-19 was much of a thing. Fortunately, no license is needed here to hunt rabbits. From what I hear, the same is true for feral hogs, which are becoming a bit of a problem in some parts. Next year, I am definitely putting in for an elk tag. I got a 4x4 largely so I can get into the areas where they hide.