Meat prices continue to rise again, partly due to rising overall price levels, aka inflation, and partly due to rising energy and fertilizer prices. Yes, many Americans will increase their use of lentils in response, but another alternative to price increases is to explore the potential of wild game protein.
Every year, thousands of deer tags go unsold or unfinished. While this may sound like a blessing to Bambi, it usually means that instead of being killed by a hunter, the deer dies of disease, starvation or trying to cross the street in search of food as an expensive and sometimes deadly hood ornament. Cover.
Biologists adjust the number of tags sold to hunters to match the size and condition of the deer herd. They sell more tags when there are more deer and less when their number is less than the estimated carrying capacity of the land. It is part of a more successful, bottom-up series policy now known as the North American Wildlife Conservation Model. (For details on the model, click here.
Today, however, hunters rarely kill enough deer that can kill enough livestock to meet the goals set by biologists. Hunting is not easy or cheap, and farmed protein, until recently, was relatively inexpensive. And although hunters can eat deer meat themselves, or give it to friends or food banks, they cannot legally sell the meat, or even fill in the tags of other hunters.
If policymakers understand my work on the wild game market, they can help mitigate the negative health effects of more expensive animal protein through a few simple changes:
- Make it easier and cheaper for hunters to fill their tags by relaxing certain restrictions, such as season extensions and crossbow use;
- Allow hunters to retail wild game meat or, if that is a radical change, what I call proxy hunting, or by agreement with one of the parties (probably someone with less time spent and / or more hunting skills)) Fills the tag for the other party (probably someone with higher opportunity costs and / or lower victim skill level).
If you think that such a policy change would lead to deer extinction, you are wrong. Similar policies have been in place in Europe for decades and even centuries without destroying livestock. The key in the American context is to ensure that wildlife biologists do not have the incentive to sell too many tags.
And if you think about it, bison are almost extinct for geopolitical reasons, not for their meat, which very few people ate. They were killed for hiding and for denying their flesh to Indian tribes like the Lakota, to justify their incarceration in the federal government’s death camp, now called the Conservation.
What policy changes will, in the short term, be to provide more animal proteins for safe human consumption. Eating a diseased dead deer is never a good idea and most roadkills are wasted. Everyone, including deer, is better off if they are harvested by hunters, so the change I suggest would make sense even in a more stable economic situation.
Animals other than deer, such as wild turkeys and pigs, may also increase the animal protein pool available to humans, but deer will provide abundant supplies due to improvements in most parts of the country, including even Hawaii. In fact, there are now many white-tailed deer in America when Columbus sailed the blue of the ocean.
You may think that you want to eat lentils more than some wild animals. That’s great. Many people prefer wild game and eat more of it for the right price, leaving more / cheaper domesticated animal meat for those who prefer that option.
Sensitive deregulation has worked for airlines and their clients, working for sex workers and could also work for American meat lovers.