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Comment by eitally | Hacker News Reader

If you live in the eastern US (I guess anywhere but within major metro centers) it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly, but likely more for long time residents than others. My brother in law is a veterinarian and he got a "deer population control" hunting license last year that allowed him to take up to 40 deer. Our collective freezers are chock full of venison. Luckily, someone had a brilliant idea to create a meat donation charity (Hunters for the Hungry), which has distributed millions of pounds of venison to the needy over the past couple decades. Here's an information clearinghouse for anyone interested: http://huntingprograms.nra.org/hunters-for-the-hungry-inform...)

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There's a pretty interesting article about the efforts in GA to manage the deer population: https://www.gon.com/article.php?id=2518 . Hunting is still pretty popular in the southeast, so there's a constant balance between destroying the deer population and the deer population destroying the environment.

I know of tech companies in the southeast that have team events in which they'll go out hunting for the day. I imagine that's less common in Silicon Valley :-)

That's awesome. My first thought on reading about conservation officers "harvesting" deer was wondering where all that meat is going, and had a horrible feeling that they were just leaving it to rot somewhere. I'm very glad to hear that some hungry people are seeing benefit from it.

In fact, it would be great if some part of our nation's beef-heavy diet could be replaced with venison - I'd definitely choose that route, as long as eating deer meat instead of cow meat had a positive environmental impact. Cow farts are destroying the earth.

I live in the eastern US away from any major metro center and I see some deer around, sometimes a lot and sometimes not, but it's really not "obvious" that they're overpopulated. I wouldn't have any way to draw that conclusion without hearing it from someone in the field who actually knows what constitutes overpopulation for that kind of species. There are also tons of squirrels everywhere but nobody draws the conclusion that they're overpopulated.

I knew someone growing up who simply could not eat venison for this reason. For him, it was a reminder of poverty; it was the only meat that his dad could get, and they ate it every day because they could barely afford mac and cheese.

I found this really interesting, as I always thought of venison as one of those foods you pretty much only got at a really high-end restaurant or from a (rare) friend who hunted. Different culture.

That's awesome.

Wow, that's a great idea, thanks a lot for sharing

(and I never thought I'd click a NRA link, specially on HN)

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