What type of firearm do you use to hunt deer? if you do hunt, will you have the deer butchered and use or sell the deer meat?
Where? It it depends on the location and the terrain. In the U.S., there are two main species of deer, the White Tail (throughout much of the country) and Mule Deer in the West.
In deep woods, some people use a lower powered lever action like a .30.30 but that isn’t very good for long range shots. The 30.06 is an ever popular deer round as is a .270 as well as a .308, the 25.06, and shotgun slugs. Some people use bows and arrows or musket guns. Some walk silently through the woods while others sit in a tree stand. There are whole books, TV shows, and magazines devoted to this stuff.
What are you looking for specifically?
When I hunt deer, I use a Ruger Hawkeye chambered in .30-.06.
I contribute to and use an organization called Hunters for the Hungry. You field-dress the animal after a kill and then deliver the deer to a participating processing center. They butcher the animal and give the meat to various shelters and soup kitchens in the area.
I happen to use a .243 Remington. Except for the next year or two; my twelve-year-old son has co-opted my gun, so I’ll carry my backup, a Remington .30-06, until he grows into his own .30-06.
It is illegal to sell any parts of a game animal in California. We do give away a fair amount. In fact, we just moved a freezer from my in-law’s house to ours today, consolidated all three freezers’ worth of assorted meats, and have a freezer’s worth to give away.
We butcher our own. My husband and his father bone out all of the meat and package it for the freezer. Before I met them, I’d take my deer to a locker to be cut and wrapped, but they’re of the opinion that cut bone leaves a nasty taste to the meat. Sometimes we’ll still take game meat to that locker to be made into sausage or hot sticks, but we also do that ourselves. They have ten pounds of my son’s first bear for hot sticks at the moment.
I bow hunt and blackpowder. I avoid regular season. Too many trigger happy cowboys out there.
My dad taught me how to field dress a deer when I was 12. There’s a local guy that grinds it, adds beef fat and makes nice packages of chili & spaghetti meat for my freezer.
No one here sells venison. It’s illegal.
I don’t hunt deer, or anything else. There are a few reasons: I don’t need to, as I can get food at the store. If I did bag a deer, I don’t have anyplace to keep the meat. Get up at Zero-dark-thirty, drive into the wilderness, freeze in the rain, then (assuming I’m lucky) have to field-dress the kill and drag the carcass through the bushes and mud and then load it in the car and take it home (or to a butcher) to cut it up? Seems like an awful lot of work! 
And of course the biggest reason: I don’t know how.
Still, I do like venison. So anyone who has a surplus can meet me in Seattle and give it to me. 
(If I did hunt, I’d use my .30-30 Winchester 94 for tradition’s sake.)
Around these parts, while you can butcher your own deer if you want – after you get the kill tagged by the appropriate authorities – most hunters dump the carcass at a processing plant, then head for a beer at the nearest bar. Often that’s across the street, and you see deer bodies piled up back at the plant.
Some days later, the hunters pick up the processed meat for their freezer, their friends’ freezer, or give to charity. It’s illegal to sell it.
I’ve known local bars that just put deer meat on the grill, cook it and give it away to bar regulars who are buying drinks anyway. It’s not illegal to give it away.
One thing you can’t be sure of when you pick up your processed package is whose deer it came from. You just know that if you dropped off one deer, you get back one deer’s worth of meat, not necessarily the same deer.
I sneak up on them in the dead of night and pluck their eyes out!
No, seriously, I have no-eye deer.
do you hunt for trophy?
do you hunt for good tasting meat?
That is my main complaint. I come from a family of avid deer hunters. We have hundreds or acres of land dedicated to it with full-blown tree houses with pantries dedicated to teaching Bambii a lesson when he gets a little older. I don’t have a problem with that. I do have a problem with dragging my ass out of bed at 3:30 in morning to met met in a pickup truck by some smelly old man who tell the same stories every time.
Get up in the stand…freeze your ass off…doze off…wonder when this is ever going to end. Boom. Someone got one. Now we can go home. Nope. Have to field dress that thing and show it off to friends around town. I don’t have a problem with killing those hooved rats but that is one horrible sport to participate in. I would rather freeze to death during church than deer hunt again.
I’ve only hunted deer in Illinois and with a shotgun. There is no rifle season in IL. There is however bow season, muzzle loader, and handgun (big six-shooter with scope).
There’s two main ways to hunt deer that I know of: passive and active. Passive hunting is waiting in a blind or tree stand. If you’ve scouted out the land and are a savvy woodsman you know where the most likely deer crossings are. I typically hunt on farmer’s land, and they always know where the deer are; they’re out there with them every morning. Some hunters use calls or antlers to lure deer. This is legal, but baiting them with salt licks or piles of corn/apples is not. Land owners can plant fruit trees and leaves some crops standing to draw deer in however.
Active hunting is forming a drive. This is much like the strategy that lions use - substitute guns for fang and claw of course. A number of hunters will march through a section of timber. They spread themselves out; but not so far that a deer could or would run back through their line. Instead, the deer will be flushed out from the racket and will run away from the drivers into a few hunters on the opposite end that are waiting to ambush them. Since the drivers are marching towards the ambushers, they typically do not shoot. This is something that’s agreed upon before the drive. Sometimes the terrain is hilly enough that the drivers can safely shoot deer they’ve flushed. 12 gauge shotgun deer slugs aren’t much effective past 100 yards. Most people say 80, but I’ve pulled lethal hail mary shots at well over 80 yards [brag]and without a scope[/brag]
My father and I have always hunted for the sport and the meat. A trophy buck would just be considered a lucky bonus. We routinely shoot does, rather than pass up “sure thing” shots waiting for a trophy buck.
Field dressing a deer is actually pretty easy, and it’s my only source for fresh, delicious offal. We’ve butchered our own, and taken it into a actual butcher to transform into burger and sausage. Steaks and roasts we can cut ourselves. I’ve got a charcuterie book on my X-Mas list this year, as making my own is something I’d like to get into.
Using a Rifle is only legal in the northern third of Minnesota. Below that it is all Shotguns during the firearms season. Then there are Archery seasons and Black Powder seasons.
Wait, what? I’d never considered that using a rifle wouldn’t be an option at all. Why is there no rifle season, or do you know?
Where I’m from that’s called a “Thirty-Yawt-Six”.
And yes, you can kill a deer with it.
However, Og made a Weatherby .270 that is the best overall hunting rifle in existence. Compare and contrast and you’ll see which is best.
The shots carry too far. Rural Illinois is largely flat and there’s houses and farms closer than you might think. If your shot travels hundreds of yards and isn’t stopped by the terrain, you can put a hole in someone’s house or worse. There are a good number of deer hunters in IL that travel to neighboring states to hunt deer with rifles. I’ve never done it, but having shot a rifle with a sighted in scope - it seems like it’d be too easy. I don’t even want a scope on my shotgun.
I shoot a Ruger model 77 rifle chambered for 7.62 x 39mm, with a 3 to 9 Leupold scope. The area where I live and hunt is almost all heavily forested, miles and miles of trees. If you ever watched the logging show Ax Men a few years ago the land I hunt is the same place, the Coast Range in northwestern Oregon. My home is at the bottom of a logging mainline.
I have never seen or heard of anyone using a shotgun to hunt deer around here, it wouldn’t be practical anyway because you may be shooting quite a distance over a clear cut area or canyon. It is high powered rifle and scope country. It is also great country for Roosevelt Elk and that hunting season is going on right now.
As already mentioned it is illegal to sell deer or other wild game meat almost everywhere. In fact you are required to keep the hunting tag with the meat. Some people do take the animal to a processor to have it cut and some made into summer sausage and pepperoni, but you cannot be assured of getting your own animal back, instead you might get an equivalant amount of meat shot by someone else, so I skin, clean and package my own meat. Butchering is a handy skill to know.
I didn’t take a deer this year but I greatly enjoyed my hunting season. Being quietly out alone in the forest, just sitting or hiking around is an awesome experience. Hunting season is October and the weather was beautiful this year.
An effective (albeit not highly recommended) method I know of involves the following steps:
- fly back to my home province of Saskatchewan
- rent a car, be sure to have full insurance on it
- go for a drive on backroads at dawn/dusk
- see deer, make attempt to avoid
- pick deer up off road and enjoy
Haven’t gone in a few years, but I used to go hunting in northern NY state. I’d carry a Remington model 600 bolt action chambered in .350 Remington Magnum. This is a bit more gun than called for, but comes in handy when Black Bear season overlaps deer season…as do the territories of both. The rifle was manufactured a couple years before I was born and I inherited it from my father.
Some trips I’d stalk, some I’d tree-stand. When I was successful, I’d field-dress the carcass and then drop it off to a friend who’d fully butcher it in exchange for a portion of the meat and the head, if trophy worthy.
Oh, that makes sense. Thanks.
…which would go well with a nice Chianti and Fava beans.
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btw- re: rifle shots carrying too far: Didn’t we lose a great baseball pitcher that way?