In California, there are markets where you can pick out live birds either to take home and clean yourself or to have cleaned by the store staff while you wait. Generally, these markets cater to ethinic groups who need freshly killed birds for medicines and other traditional dishes. Naturally, it follows that these markets often carry more unusual types of poultry, like quail, pheasant, and guinea hen. Some of the markets get their birds from dedicated producers, who only raise one species. Some producers diversify and have more than one species.
Short answer: Yes, hunting-type birds are farmed. Though not always for hunting purposes.
I used to share an allotment with a senior citizen. He constructed a wire cage, bought some pheasant eggs and raised them. When they were old enough, he took them out to the fells and released them for others to shoot.
Ostriches and emus were heavily promoted in the United States for a while as get rich schemes. Apparently, a lot of people believed that they could buy a pair of ostriches and/or emus, breed them, and sell the resulting poultry for Big Bucks. While there may well be a market for exotic poultry, the people getting into this business were paying fabulous sums of money for breeding pairs of birds, and of course couldn’t sell the offspring for enough money to cover their investment. I have to admit that I snickered at this.
There’s a couple of restaurants in Fort Worth that offer quail, so I assume that there’s a local supplier of it. I believe that there’s also a place or two that offer venison.
My advice is to make friends with a hunter. We always end up with too much venison in the freezer.
Canada note: Buffalo, beefalo and elk are farmed in Alberta. The elk have sometimes come down with a wasting disease similar to mad-cow. Ostriches have been tried here too with results similar to above . I had an ex-ostrich-farmer in my cab once singing the blues…
In Indiana there are over 100 white tailed deer farmers. Also a fair number of elk farms. As near as I can tell, they spend most of their time selling them back and forth to each other rather for meat.
The Elk’s antlers are the main source of income to elk farmers, so they’d rather keep them alive than butcher them. Having said that, I once had elk jerky at an elk farm.
Definitely, “game” animals are available farm-raised. Here in SF, we have a distributor, Polarica, which specializes in this sort of thing. (Indeed, they carry nothing but farm-raised “game,” i.e., nothing hunted.) They ship, but it ain’t cheap.
When I lived in Memphis we made some delightful acquaintances through our aikido school. We had not lived in the American South before and were unaware how, er, offbeat a certain percentage of the population can be. To me, that is the percentage that, like the smoked chili pepper in the pot, provides all the flavor to the stew… though you wouldn’t want the whole meal to be made up of it.
One of our slightly less screwy friends told us that he had a much, much screwier friend who came to his house late at night and pounded on the door as if the Revenooers were after him. My friend hauled himself up out of bed, and confronted his wacky amigo on the doorstep. Said friend was carrying a compound bow and a dead monkey. “Quick”, he said, “you got a place where I can dress this?”
It is illegal to climb over the chain link fence of the Memphis Zoo and go hunting there at night. But it must be tempting.
I realize this doesn’t exactly constitute farming game animals. Except in the wacky friend’s head it probably does.
“About 85% of the venison sold in America is imported from deer farms in New Zealand. Farmers there and elsewhere are raising red deer and fallow deer in huge numbers on intensively grazed pastures. Subsisting on a diet of almost exclusively grass, these deer produce venison which is of good quality but which chefs often describe as bland-tasting. The free-ranging deer and antelope harvested by Broken Arrow Ranch are truly wild and free-ranging, living on 1,000,000 combined acres in Texas. The wide variety of natural vegetation in their diet gives the meat a more complex flavor profile.”
A biased assessment but apparently you can but US venison too. From the little I’ve read, most or all of these sources appear to be from farms.
Thanks, RatatoskK! I used to shop at Savenor’s. I’d forgotten they sell game. I’ll check them out this weekend. My husband loves ragouts made with various types of game.
Europeans have been raising doves since the Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages, one of the privileges of the nobility was the right to keep dovecotes on your property.
I friend (who was an avid hunter0 told me that wild deer vary considerably in the taste of their meat. if the deer have been eating nuts, acorns, wild fruit, the meat is exceedingly good. on the other hand, if the deer have been eating pine/spruce buds, the meat will taste like its been marinated in turpentine!