Can hunters' donations help deliver high-quality meat to Colorado food pantries? | Hacker News Reader

Can hunters' donations help deliver high-quality meat to Colorado food pantries?

collective.coloradotrust.org

18 pointsmooreds58 comments

I doubt it will matter. Here in Iowa, where deer are almost a pest, there are maybe 100 per section. There are several families per section, by and large.

A deer can feed a family of four for four days. That's all the calories there are in there. Now, you don't eat just meat. But say, 10% meat. So that's 40 days, that's 9 deer per family per year at least.

That means all the deer will be gone in a few years. If they let hunters shoot them all, which they don't.

I don't think it can matter. Folks have some romantic idea about hunting your own food, but that hasn't been practical for a century by now.

Are you saying that every family in in the the section is a hungry family of 4 in need of help from the food bank? Obviously you aren't going to meet 100% of everyone's protein needs from wild game. The point the article was making is that a little bit can go a long way, supplementing other resources. Those who are donating are giving selflessly to help others.

Spot on. I come from the Midwest, and the romantic notion of hunting/small time ag was definitely established a long time ago when game numbers and variety were astonishingly high compared to the modern era. Even then, we hunted most of that game to near extinction - sometimes intentionally so.

Last I checked deer numbers are has high as anytime in the past, maybe even more. There are less predators (they can eat humans so we don't want them around) and deer have figured out how to live around humans just fine. Deer numbers were way down in say 1960 (as you say they were hunted to near extinction) but with stronger hunting and environmental laws they have come back.

Of course hunter/gather lifestyles never supported large concentrations of humans like ag did.

Deer are an outlier. Most other game species (like buffalo, elk, bear, beaver, various birds and fish) have seen significantly reduced number and fitness relative to pre-1900 levels. “Game” in my previous comment was referring broadly to any animals hunted for food or other sustenance (e.g. pelts, oil, etc).

Right, most of what you list either hasn't figured out how to live with humans, or is a predator that will kill humans, so humans kill them (illegally!) or otherwise chase them out to protect their children.

> A deer can feed a family of four for four days. That's all

Citation super-duper needed! For a 150 pound deer, if you get 35% back as meat, that's ~55 lbs of meat. I don't know any families of four going through 11 pounds of meat a day, do you?

Most families dont eat 100% meat, and the post presented an all meat diet and a 10% diet.

Deer is a lean meat. ~750 kCal per pound. That is 4lbs to satisfy a grown man's caloric needs.

> But say, 10% meat. So that's 40 days, that's 9 deer per family per year at least

Maybe this was added after your comment, but that's ~1.25 lb / d for a family of four. A quarter pound hamburger every night, and snack sticks with lunch. Much more reasonable.

A deer is like 50 lbs of venison on average, which can make a huge difference for a family in need. My dad has given a deer to people on occasions such as when he harvested a moose and a deer in the same season.

And elk/moose have a lot more meat than a deer as well. I harvested a moose 3 years ago and still have some meat in the freezer to get through, so a donation program like that would have probably been a good outlet for me to use.

Well, as the deer die off there are more resources left for the remaining deer, and so it is easier for them to have kids and the birth rates might increase. So it could potentially converge to a predator-prey equilibrium

> as the deer die off there are more resources left for the remaining deer

American bison.

Which were intentionally hunted to near-extinction and the carcasses wasted as a method of suppressing Native Americans.

Compare to whitetail deer: most hunters are interested in big trophy bucks and only bother to shoot does because they're part of a game management system. Killing does is for population management, and a lot of hunters aren't doing it just for food, though the does have milder flavored meat. They don't want to kill one, drag it out of the woods, take it to a processor, pay for processing, and then go back and pick it up a few days later just for the meat. Hungry people, OTOH, might not care so much where they get meat if it's free or very low cost to them.

One problem that can occur - and why these programs can be challenging to run - is that there is no control over the time between killing the animal and having it given to the processor. In colder climates, this is not a big issue as many will field-dress the animal to reduce weight and allow it to cool naturally. In warmer climates, it might be well above freezing even during winter hunting seasons. Killing the animal, dragging the carcass to a point where it can be field-dressed, and transporting it to the processor could take hours, increasing the risk of contamination.

> a lot of hunters aren't doing it just for food, though the does have milder flavored meat.

I know both hunters. Some want the trophy, some want the meat. Those who want the meat prefer does if they can get them for the milder meat.

This is somewhat cultural though. I grew up in MN where limited amounts of doe permits were always given up - thus every hunter made sure they applied for the yearly lottery for doe permits and so a culture of hunters preferring doe meat when they could get it developed. Next door in Wisconsin they never gave doe permits and so hunters learned "don't shoot the doe, one buck surviving can breed it thus resulting in deer for next year's hunt". Now that population control is important MN had no problem giving out more doe permits, Wisconsin had to force the issue (no shooting bucks until you shoot a doe) as even when hunters were told they could shoot does they didn't.

And all the food donated to my local pantry isn't enough to meet current demand either. Does that mean it doesn't matter and everyone should stop donating to them? Since we can't currently meet 100% of demand, why should we bother to contribute anything toward hitting that goal? That's what it looks like you're saying here.

The key word is "Help". Are donated calories good for needy families? Almost surely yes. Are deer (and other wildlife) essentially zero maintenance? Also yes. And will people _pay_ to hunt them, then donate the food for free? I do!

There's no downside here - so yes, I believe it can 'help'.

700kc/lb is probably right, but I got ~50 lbs off my last deer ~= 35,000. Still order of magnitude, you're right.

However, there's no need to just hunt where you live. I travel to two different remote parts of my state where deer problems are worst - again, at my own expense because I enjoy it. That "Free transportation of calories" shouldn't be ignored either.

Exactly correct. It just can't scale to the level need without just being literal deer farms. A poor family with access to hunting may be able to feed themselves here and there but not systemically. Even hunters forget that when you kill a doe, you are killing 4-8 future deer, not just the one today.

Roughly 250k are harvested each year in Michigan, and the state practically begs hunters to take does to prevent those 4-8 future deer. That's a significant volume of meat, but there's 2 problems.

1) Many hunters are already what most on HN would think of as rural poor. That meat isn't going wasted. The food pantry would just be an extra step.

2) Processing a deer in the garage is common, but definitely a learned skill and time consuming. Professional processing is available, but results in $/lb higher than most industrial proteins available.

There needs to be a process for food pantries so have people who will come to your garage to process your deer for the share of the meat. Many poor would be able to come to your garage on a Monday night (you get home Sunday night and process them on Monday) for a share of the harvest. Processing deer goes better with extra hands and some of the work is very easy to teach.

I'm not sure how many poor are really able to take a Monday night to learn how to butcher a deer, but...

This is the wrong way to think about it. With reasonable game management, killing a doe has no impact on future deer because the population is at carrying capacity. In that case, killing a doe means one less deer starves over winter.

Where I live, government biologist have recommended several times to issue doe tags to increase the population and been rejected. Over the winter, old infertile does outcompete the young deer who starve.

Yet the topic was all about non-reasonable game management. What would be required to feed people routinely. It was in fact the entire purpose of the conversation to 'think about it' like that.

The post I responded to stated "Even hunters forget that when you kill a doe, you are killing 4-8 future deer, not just the one today." as if this was a general truth, outside the context of your thought experiment.

The article is about if some game (specifically unwanted meat) can help feed some people.

If the conversation is about if we can feed the entire US population on wild deer, then of course not. The numbers dont work. The numbers don't work out because there isn't enough carrying capacity, not because it is impossible to kill a doe without lowering yield per sector.

> Even hunters forget that when you kill a doe, you are killing 4-8 future deer,

Hunters ... Do not forget this.

This is why, for instance, many states have antlerless weekends. Florida Zone B (where I grew up and which I'm familiar with) only allows you to shoot does (antlerless deer) during general gun season December 27-29 this year.

> A deer can feed a family of four for four days. That's all the calories there are in there.

This is so wildly inaccurate that I can't believe you'd make this claim.

You think a 90-150 lb animal has something like 10 lbs of meat on it?

30-60 lbs is much more accurate. Here's a chart from the PA Game Commission: https://www.pgc.pa.gov/Wildlife/WildlifeSpecies/White-tailed...

Why even post if you have no idea what you're talking about? Do you think everyone at the food bank is on the carnivore diet?

Try to read the rest of the comment before shooting off.

It was clearly represented as a caloric measure. Then instantly worked into a reasonable diet of 10% meet, using much the same numbers you just did.

Everything I wrote was completely accurate. Please work harder to post reasonable, non-slanderous helpful comments.

Assuming a deer with 43,000 calories, your math approximates to nearly 2700 calories/person/day, which seems like an awful lot for a family of 4.

And the attitude in your comment toward the program seems to be "Why bother?" But this program:

- connects people together

- provides hormone/antibiotic-free meat

- is low cost

What's wrong with that?

The pedantic negativity on HN towards good things, in comments like yours, is a real bummer.

>A deer can feed a family of four for four days

Stopped reading here. You get like 50-60 pounds of meat per deer. A family of four is not eating that in four days.

>Stopped reading here.

too bad. you missed the completely reasonable justification where they break that down

I have recent experience with this -- I picked up my son's processed deer yesterday morning. There was a chest freezer at the checkout area advertising Hunters Feeding The Hungry (a similar org that moves donated game meat to local food pantries) and I donated a package of ground venison almost without thinking. I don't think anyone has grand notions of meeting 100% of families' protein needs via wild game.

I grew up eating a substantial amount of venison, along with fish and squirrel.

Hopefully there is some method of tracking the deer through the system so that meat from animals with Chronic Wasting Disease, a prion disease, doesn't make it into the food supply. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has some guidelines [0] here, I wonder how closely they are followed when meat is donated by the hunters to a program like this.

[0] https://cpw.state.co.us/hunting/chronic-wasting-disease

Seems like they are setting up for an outbreak of human CWD if there is no testing to limit the opportunity for this infected meat to make it into the human food chain. To date though, CWD is not confirmed to be spread from deer, elk, moose to humans.

The Colorado Department of Public Health (who by the way are AWESOME) have a sub page on specifically this:

https://cdphe.colorado.gov/animal-related-diseases/prion-dis... (it links to the page you provided)

As noted on the webpage you linked, there is a very clear set of rules and processes related to testing hunting-harvested animals in known areas of concern as well as testing of road kill to manage surveillance:

"In 2024, CPW will require mandatory submission of CWD test samples (heads) from all deer harvested during rifle seasons from specific hunt codes to better evaluate the prevalence of CWD in herds. Hunting is the single most effective tool wildlife managers have to monitor and manage the spread of the disease. By submitting harvested animals for CWD sampling, Colorado’s hunters provide critical information about where and how the disease is impacting deer, elk, and moose herds in the state."

I think those diseases are more problematic in agriculture where you are processing larger numbers of animals, packing them closer in space, and intensifying everything.

It wasn't animal density that led to the spread of prions previously (vCJD, "mad cow disease"), it was feeding contaminated meat and bone meal to cattle.

Road-kill can provide meat year round.

Not as romantic a feel good story of course.

But a dead deer is still dead dear.

YMMV.

One time I happened across a suspiciously roadkilled moose. I was there before the flies were. I would have had no qualms about eating it but alas I was driving a rental and while I could have butchered it with a box cutter I would have had nothing to do with the meat.

FYI the reason you don't generally want to eat roadkill is that the trauma and blood clotting does something bad to the meat quality. I don't know the exact details but that's what I've been told.

Last year we saw a roadkill buck on the side of the road with a huge rack when my wife was driving me to work. My wife contacted a hunter friend, by the time they got it somebody had cut off the rack, but we got the rest of the carcass and butchered it. See

https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lckxwbxfm22r

you can have meat ruined in the area impacted (by a car or bullet) but we had very little of that and got a huge amount of very good meat that we ate for months. (Our guess is that the value of the meat in a roadkill is on the order of fixing the damage from an accident)

Inevitably, the chunk of meat that was impacted by the vehicle is less deer meat and more deer jello. The less battered parts of the deer can be fine, though.

Make sure you contact the DNR before doing this. They generally will give you are permit for the deer, but they do a little paperwork to make sure you are not doing illegal hunting. (this is an unlikely problem: hitting a deer with a car does more damage than the deer is worth - but they still need to verify just to ensure this doesn't become a problem)

In the US, laws vary by state. For example Texas prohibits the removal of roadkill and roadside deer carcasses abound in the Hill Country.

Eating road kill has always been said in jest where I'm from for the obvious reasons. I had never really heard of it being said any where approaching serious until RFK Jr. Now, it seems to be fashionable.

I would not say fashionable so much as practical. In rural parts, venison is a normal thing. If you suddenly happen across a $20 on the ground, you pick it up and put it in your pocket.

Several years ago, a friend of mine hit a deer with her car. Deer was still alive. She managed to flag down a cop who executed it on the side of the road. Cop then asked if she wanted the carcass, otherwise he was going to take it home for himself.

Reminds me of the time that a dairy cow got loose in Dryden NY and was menacing the high school and a police officer, showing a lack of good judgement, emptied his pistol into it with insufficient effect and had to call a farmer to finish the animal off with a shotgun.

I had a neighbor whose dogs had cornered an opossum in the back yard. The small town police officer that responded decided that since no animal control could respond, he would take care of it. He fired from < 10' away 3 times to put this small animal down. It was then that I became aware of just how untrained with weapons cops really are.

I had never really head of it being said any where approaching serious

Everyone does not live like you. People “where you are from” eat roadkill. Some with a roadkill license. Some without.

https://www.wideopencountry.com/all-the-states-where-you-can...

I know several people in my local hunting community who eat roadkill. I'd be a bit wary of it myself unless I saw the animal get hit, but it's definitely not just a joke to some folks, with or without RFK Jr.

It's different if you hit the animal vs just coming across the carcass. That detail is, probably conveniently, left out of most tales of roadkill stories.

I wouldn't say mainstream trendy, but I know several people who make six figures but wont turn down fresh roadkill deer.

I wouldn't either.

RFK has entered the chat.

"it’s organic and without hormones"

But is it without prion diseases? The situation reported in some states is concerning.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240219-zombie-deer-dise...

If someone can figure out how to scale up deboning Asian Carp and turning them into fish sticks [1], then there are many infested waterways that would feed many, and the ground up remains make great plant fertilizer and animal feed. They're easy to catch at volume in the infested areas.

Hopefully, AI advances will help make it economically easy to kill in the wild invasive Burmese pythons at scale with robots, though unfortunately, they contain excessive mercury and lead [2] and are more unsuitable for eating than tuna. I have no idea what could be done with their carcasses. Still boggles my mind to this day that we polluted our planet with coal smoke to the extent that it is dangerous to eat some fish too frequently, a science fiction/fantasy notion to our ancestors a mere 1-2 generations ago, and we still outstrip by 2X volcanic eruptions and undersea vents pumping out mercury into the atmosphere.

Colorado has controlled its feral pig population, but the infestation is out of control in the southern US and could do with someone figuring out an economical way to scale up killing them in the wild. Frozen to -10 degrees F at the innermost parts for five minutes, kills the parasites that infest them, and many people are accustomed to eating pork can handle the gamier feral version.

Lionfish in the Caribbean are invasive, but also difficult to economically kill at scale in the wild. Tastes like buttery grouper.

There are lots of invasive species in the wild that need to be harvested, but the cost per kg is way higher than current conventional sources of protein, and hunter/fisher-sourced channels, while appreciated for the gesture, still lack the scale we seek to foundationally address the income precarity that pervades our civilization.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaZHPToxb3Y

[2] https://www.naplesnews.com/story/news/2024/08/16/florida-pyt...

A lot of the last-minute tags are whitetail on the eastern plains:

https://cpw.widencollective.com/assets/share/asset/cgyw7aihp...

People need to get on board with tofu.

I get your intentions but things are a bit more complicated.

In some places, mid to big animals are a pest, they destroy cultures (even the ones for direct human consumption), public places and wild environments, threatening the biodiversity.

So humans need to take action.

We can kill those animals and dump them in hole/burn them, or we can provide (almost) free food to people with difficulties to buy food.

There isn't the environmental downside of cattle (quite the opposite, actually...) and regarding the ethical part... that's complicated. Overpopulation and environment destruction means bad life condition for those pests and for the other species, so the number reduction aims to find a nicer balance for all the species. But being tracked and killed is definitely not fun.

This is a good way to put it. Because we humans tend to eliminate the large predators that we need to control some populations, we have a bunch of potential protein that would otherwise go to waste, why not mix it in?

There's room for tofu and meat in a diet, and if you're hurting financially things like this program, married with other cheap protein sources, is not only a great way to go but what a morale booster.

When I was a kid and we were broke a friend of ours gave my mom some rabbit. Alone it's not fatty enough to keep you alive but she mixed it up well with other stuff and we felt like we were having a feast.

Regarding the environmental downside of cattle, I couldn't agree more. We know several plains farmers who don't keep cattle but, after harvest let deer come onto their land to eat the leftover stuff in the ground and poop it back out as fertilizer. Once that's cleared out they shoot the deer and sell the meat. Yeah it isn't as profitable as a CAFO, but it's a hell of a lot less work, actually helps the land, and it tastes pretty good too.

And yeah I'd hate to be tracked and killed as you say. But then I picture being born in a prison and growing up to mid-childhood with the express purpose of being killed, and I know which one I'd pick.

I eat a fair bit of tofu, as a vegetarian for decades. It might be considered a meat substitute from a nutritional POV but it is not a good substitute from a culinary POV. You need to adjust how you plan your meals and how you build flavor, and many people just aren’t ready to do that.

I had a vegan phase so I'm familiar with stuff like tofu, tempeh, boca burgers, etc. I don't understand the excitement around Impossible burgers. I eat meat now but I also eat a lot of things I learned to eat as a vegetarian. I wouldn't say tofu is better or worse than chicken.

I rarely eat any of that fake meat stuff, and the stuff I like is not the hyper realistic stuff with weird fake blood.

Like chicken? Sure, to the extent that it is often bland and flavorless.

We freeze and thaw tofu a lot, which helps the texture.

Have been for longer than it's been popular in the states, you can still rip meat from my cold dead hands.

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