During meat rationing of World War II, were you allowed to keep game meat? Like, if you shot a rabbit or a deer (assuming it was in-season, you had a “tag,” no other laws were violated, etc.), were you allowed to keep the meat? Or were you expected to turn it in to the War Effort?
Not sure in what country you mean?
In the US, i dont think venison and rabbit were used feeding troops?
I did a little research and there was clearly a deer season during WWII. I doubt people would have bothered if it had to be turned in to the government.
Game hunting is too iffy to be used for regularly feeding troops. Most likely, the government just let it happen for morale if for nothing else.
I’m confident that in the US rationing didn’t affect meat gained from hunting. There were some drives to contribute animal skins to the war effort, but the rationing was on farm-raised and processed meat, not individually hunted meat. I’m not sure that it would be practical to try to ration hunted meat, since (unlike buying food in a store) most hunting was done in private or tight-knit groups and far away from authorities. Game meat wasn’t ever shipped to soldiers so there would be no reason to turn it in for the war effort, though there were some drives for hunters to contribute deer skins to the war effort. I think it was similar in the UK, I know people were encouraged to raise small animals (like chickens) and hunt small game to supplement official rations. I don’t have any definite cites on it because it doesn’t seem to get mentioned very often.
In the UK, hunting for game wasn’t and isn’t a general free-for-all pastime. Predominantly it’s controlled by landowners, who own all the game on their land, and often there’s a managed process for particular sorts of game shooting, in effect a different form of farming, though the game concerned (grouse, partridge, venison) wasn’t normally part of ordinary people’s diet anyway.
Which is not to say that rabbits, pigeons and the like didn’t find a mysterious route to country folk’s tables without reference to rationing, but legally it would have been poaching anyway, and probably wasn’t so copious as to make much of a difference to the food supply.
Apparently, where people were in pig clubs or kept chickens, they were required to give something up to the official stocks (half the pigs, or if you kept chickens you gave up your egg ration, which would have been a disincentive to slaughtering a hen for meat). Perhaps something similar was done for managed game, but the supply would have been intermittent and the accounting correspondingly unreliable, shall we say.
And grouse moors weren’t used for grouse in WW2 anyway, being turned over to livestock or becoming firing ranges etc.
Grouse shooting is a very modern pastime anyway, only going back 150 years or so.
Rabbit was “off ration”, and those who had access to a butcher who could buy it were mostly grateful for the extra meat. Technically they were someone’s property, but with most gamekeepers being called up, there was little risk in poaching them.
In the south alot of backwoods people trapped and hunted and sold skins to revenuers and mail order catalogue companies. Of course they ate the meat. I have alot of old family pictures of large hunting parties with 15 to 20 deer hanging…lots raccoon skins were collected…just a snap shot of how it was according to old folks I know.
What did the hide drives pretend to be using the hide for?
Probably, given that (in the US at least) rationing was mostly for morale’s sake to begin with.
I just finished reading a book on rationing and food warfare during WW2. Hunting was encouraged (where and when legal) because every pound of venison in the freezer meant one less pound of beef bought, so the “extra” beef could be shipped overseas for Our Brave Boys At War.
In the Midwest USA (western Minnesota) rationing didn’t apply to hunted game at all.
So any meat from hunting or trapping was extra, in addition to rationing. Also, meat raised on your own land was not counted in rationing.
So hunting went on just as usual, even more so than normal (except a lot of young hunters were gone). Restricted hunting seasons still applied, but there weren’t many game wardens to enforce them, so out-of-season hunting happened a bit more than normal. Most hunters did still observe the limit on taking does; so there would be game in future years. Oddly enough, hunting ammunition was a bit hard to get – the ammunition being made was going to soldiers.
And just as always, many farmers raised a few food animals on their farm. Chickens or turkeys were common, along with pigs or cows. Even if you didn’t raise cattle, you might have 1 or 2 for your own use – doesn’t take much extra grain for that. Plus in farming country, you had friends or neighbors that you could trade with – half a cow for a pig they had. My Grandfather was the butcher in a small Minnesota town, and prepared the meat for lots of these deals. And all this was outside the rationing system; that just applied to the commercially marketed meat.
Frankly, Grandpa’s stories didn’t seem to consider rationing of meat as a big thing during the war. For him, rationing of gas & tires was more of a problem. And Grandma complained about rationing affecting her baking – sugar & imported spices. Plus some cloth was hard to get.
But by far, the biggest problem was the shortage of young men (and some women). Hired help of any kind was hard to get. Everyone who wanted to, even the aged & retired, could easily find employment. There was no need for government regulation requiring employers to make adaptions for people with disabilities; everybody did so without much hesitation.
The hides were used for leather, of course.
Leather for millions of pairs of shoes, boots, and gloves, and hundreds of thousands of jackets for flight crews, to name a few things.
A fair amount of WWII-era machinery also used leather for internal seals.
Would an exception have been rubber rationing via gas cards? The Empire of Japan did manage to take and hold a lot of the world’s rubber plantations early in the war, didn’t it?
What about ammunition? Was production all allocated to the war effort?
It’s hard to hunt without a bullet. 
Remington has a factory in Arkansas.
I “think” it was here in the 1940’s.
I remember one of my teachers remarking how the stockings she wore during the war were durable and her girlfriends would say that they would return to being flimsy once the war ended.
In the “World at War” 1970s series, people involved in rationing say it was pretty effective except for gasoline. People would connive to be able to drive more and many rationing stamps weren’t destroyed when used by diverted by the mob.
There was one book on baseball during the war that I can’t find listed in Amazon. Baseball with 4-fs, overaged and one armed players or some such title. They mentioned some monasteries were exempt from rationing and one manager had his team spring training at one in the midwest (train travel was restricted; the Brooklyn Dodgers trained at Bear Mountain, NY). He figured the team would benefit from extra protein. They finished 6th or 7th.
A lot of hunters (especially back in the 1940s) make their own ammunition, and recycle whatever they can recover. Though they’d still need powder, and enough lead and brass to replace whatever isn’t recoverable.
It’s not entirely an urban legend that a lot of girls in the UK, if they weren’t the sort to dabble in the black market or in a position to get nylons through American troops, would do without stockings, and just use either a black pencil or a paintbrush with gravy browning to mark a “seam” up the back of their legs (not fishnets, obviously).
Explain, please. How did rationing improve morale?
Everyone knew that Our Boys Over There were suffering, and they wanted to do their part to share in that suffering to help out. So there was rationing, and drives for all sorts of material, and all the other ways people helped out on the Home Front. But most of the stuff saved this way wasn’t actually needed, and just ended up being thrown out.
Basically, it wasn’t necessary for everyone to actually be doing their part (or at least, no more necessary than it ever is). But it was necessary for everyone to feel like they were doing their part.