by Wm. Hovey Smith

Created on: August 04, 2009

There has always been a backlash from non-hunters when attractive animals are concerned. However, an animal's physical attributes do not rebut basic biology. Animals die. If too many are in competition with restricted food resources, some will die. If too many are in close contact with man and his activities, wild animals will be killed. Deer are increasingly abundant throughout the continent. Each year there are about 10,000 deer-vehicle collisions and about 100 people killed. The option very quickly becomes to either remove deer by hunting or other methods, or they will be killed by our cars, trucks and trains and some of us along with them.

Starvation is not attractive when it happens to people or animals. Almost completely unappreciated is that old deer often starve to death. This is how deer ultimately die, assuming that they are not first taken by hunters, vehicles or disease. Their teeth wear out. They can no longer eat hard food, like acorns, and when the soft fruits and browse of summer gives out, they slowly starve. Predators take them down, disease racks animals that can no longer fight it off and they stumble, fall, lay down and die. This is the real world. We do not live forever, and wild animals don't either.

Hunters play a part by removing excess animals from a population and using them for human consumption. Perhaps the most recent strong advocate for this approach is a new book, "Backyard Deer Hunting: Converting deer to dinner for pennies per pound." According to author, this book is designed to instruct people who have seldom, or never, hunted on how to find, hunt, kill, dress, process, store and ultimately feed their families from the animal's flesh. Nothing is new here. This is exactly what our grandparents and their parents did. In the present economy,using deer and other wild-game animals for food is increasingly attractive. The author also stated that the last deer he processed cost 11 cents a pound, including the energy costs for boiling the animal's bones for his dogs. This particular deer was a road kill which was salvaged. This is a legal operation in Georgia, where he lives, but the utilization of roadside deer is illegal in some states, permitted under special circumstances in others with each state having its own laws on the subject.

"I don't know how to do this?" is a logical question. With photos and detailed instructions, Backyard Deer's writer tells his readers how, and even supplies 50 easy-to-follow recipes

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