Hunting

Hunting takes meat from wild animals that already live on or pass through the land. Nothing is bred, fed or fenced. The animals are there anyway, and the harvest is governed instead by the wildlife authority, which issues a licence, a set number of tags and a season within which taking an animal is lawful. Two things can come of it at once: food for the household, and fewer animals browsing or rooting through what is growing.

Whether it actually reduces damage depends on which animals are taken rather than how many. With deer, numbers are set by the females, since one male breeds many, so a harvest weighted toward males can feel like control while changing almost nothing. Holding a population steady takes roughly a quarter of the females each year and reducing it takes more - and deer walk across boundaries, so that share has to come off the surrounding land too rather than off one holding alone. With feral pigs the practice works against itself. They move as family groups, and the method that removes a whole group at once is a large trap; shooting scatters them and leaves survivors that will not approach a trap again, so hunting them makes the effective method harder.

The other thing that governs it is temperature, and it is the part most often underestimated. An animal has to be opened and cooled promptly, to below about 4 C (40 F), because bacteria multiply fastest in the warmer range just above that. A mild season therefore closes the practical window whatever the legal one says. The meat also arrives all at once rather than steadily, so somewhere to chill it and a way to preserve it - freezing, canning or drying - have to be arranged before the first animal is taken rather than after. And the supply cannot be pushed in a poor year, which makes hunting a seasonal addition to what is eaten rather than something a food plan can be built on.