It’s going to come down to the economics of raising deer and bringing them to market. A lot of people like venison, but it’s not part of the standard meat list Americans are used to. Only an economic advantage is going to make them popular. If you can’t move a Bambi-burger out of McDonalds for far less than the price of a cowburger it won’t have an impact. Ostrich, buffalo, and plenty of other meats have attempted to break into the market without success.
HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW … yeah that says it all …
I’ve eaten a lot of goat in my time, comes as a by-product of a dairy herd … so a couple of observations to be added to puzzlegal’s comments: 27] Goats and deer aren’t grazers like cattle or horses, they are browsers and that means they need a more varied diet … they can survive on just grain and hay, but to be healthy they also need tree twigs, forb, ripe fruit and tin cans … foodstuffs atypical to your normal farm operations; 41] We can fence in a cow with a few strands of barb wire four foot up off the ground … for deer we’ll need an eight foot tall Cyclone fence … deer jump and they’re very good at jumping … and a cow can be kept happy inside a fenced pasture, however deer are wanderers so just keeping proper food about for them isn’t enough to keep them in … they’ll just naturally want to move over to the next pastureland and keep going.
Finally … and this is surely heresy … venison ain’t all that great tasting … maybe it’s because I’ve eaten so much goat but I really don’t think venison is all that much better … I think once the novelty wears off, people will go back to ordering beef burgers … I say this based on the lack of menu offerings for venison in spite the abundance of deer, whereas I can think of three places here locally that serve elk-burgers as a permanent item and there’s a limited supply of elk … elk, beef, pork and chicken just tastes better …
“Mr Natural, do goats really eat tin cans?”
“... do goats really eat tin cans? ...you fucking numbskull, pack your shit and shut up”
So why are rabbits not a significant source of meat?
They used to be, in the U.S., at least (it was apparently a relatively common source of protein during WWII), and you can still find it, particularly in specialty grocery stores.
But, as evidenced by what happened when Whole Foods tried to introduce it a few years ago, my guess is that enough Americans now see rabbits as “too cute to eat.”
Yeah. Reindeer is a fine source of venison, no drier or tougher than other deer. Certain types of reindeer meats are cured quite dry and tough, but the idea is to carve paper-thin flakes off those. Freshly & quickly cooked reindeer meat is very juicy and tender.
No reindeer are farmed, per se. The domestic reindeer, which is the sole source of reindeer meat these days, spend their lives roaming the Lapland fjells, ear-marked and monitored, sure, but uncorralled (most of the time), finding their own food etc.
You misspelled “møøse”.
Seriously, moose (“a møøse once bit my sister…”) are F’ing huge. Yuge, I say. I recall passing an accident scene in the dead of winter in northern Ontario. An 18-wheeler was in the ditch and nearby was the carcass of the moose it hit. The dead animal, lying on its side, was 4 feet across the shoulders. Plus these things are irascible, especially during mting season - those antlers aren’t for decoration… well, they are for decoration and for other more destructive purposes. Plus moose are semi-aquatic; they like to eat the crud growing in beaver-pond swamps.
the dangerous part about colliding with a møøse is that they’re basically 1,000 lbs of meat on stilts. run into one, you take out the legs and now have a half-ton ass coming through your windshield.
I had reindeer in Finland and Norway. It was common on menus in both. I tried it a couple of times. Maybe I just didn’t like the way they prepared it, but it wasn’t very good.
The staple protein in Finland seemed to be salmon. I was even served a salmon noodle soup. The salmon was uniformly delicious. (And I usually favor mammal meat.)
Not that I’ve seen, just all-ostrich ones. But an ostrich-beef mince mix is a fairly common thing so making patties would be the next step.
Ostrich by itself tends to be just a little too lean for a nice burger, IMO - I make my own mince with 80% ostrich and 20% pork belly for burgers.
There are a few bat species native to NZ. Flying has it’s advantages. 
I think this is largely true. Partly due to the steady decline of rabbit hunting, which (at least where I live) is due to reduced habitat along with increased predation by hawks, coyotes, foxes, etc. When I was a kid, the first day of rabbit season was an annual special event, and we all saw and shot lots of rabbits. Now, when I go hunting, we are lucky to see a single bunny, even in places that have lots of brush and cover.
So, even among rural families, eating rabbits is largely a thing of the past. Add in the fact that fewer people are exposed to hunting at all, and if they are, they are likely deer and waterfowl hunters, not rabbit hunters. When I was young, eating rabbits was common for many families - though limited to fall hunting season. Now, I think my kids have eaten rabbit only once or twice, and I’d bet almost none of their friends have.
At least here in the US, we seem to have a pretty rigid divide between domesticated food animals (cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys), game animals that are eaten by hunters but not by most people (deer, elk, wild turkeys, ducks, pheasants, etc.) and other animals that are seldom eaten by anyone on a large scale (farmed rabbits, farmed deer, goats, sheep, etc.). I think a lot has to do with ease of farming and resultant cost per pound. It’s hard to spend more when pork, chicken and turkey is so inexpensive. Beef has gone up quite a bit in price, but is still somewhat affordable.
I’ve never been a hunter – I grew up in Wisconsin, where it’s absolutely part of the culture (particularly deer hunting), and my father hunted both deer and birds, but I never got into it.
I’d be curious to learn to what extent small game hunting, as you describe, has declined in the U.S.
And, I think your other point is spot-on – industrialized farming made certain proteins (beef, pork, chicken, and turkey) so inexpensive, and so widely available, in the U.S. over the past 50-60 years, that other proteins got left by the wayside.
Me, too. I can only speak from my own experience here in PA. I can tell you here that very few people hunt small game. They have expanded the deer season to cover many months (archery, muzzleloader, rifle), completely enveloping small game season. Most hunters here now primarily or solely hunt deer. Turkey hunting is fairly popular, too and wild turkeys have made a big comeback in numbers.
I always enjoyed small game hunting more, but I lost interest once I could hunt for hours and not see a single rabbit, grouse or pheasant.
I’m not sure about sheep. I think the rigid divide is not so rigid and you have animals like sheep and bison in the middle, where they are expensive and relatively rare but not hard to find at all, versus the harder-to-find game animals and venison.
Interesting. I was curious about Wisconsin – my recollection from when I was growing up, in the 1970s and 1980s, was that deer season was no longer than 2 weeks, and that there was a separate season for bowhunters earlier in the fall.
Looking it up now, I see thatWisconsin now has several additional deer hunting seasons: a period for disabled hunters, a “youth hunt,” a muzzleloader season, and two “antlerless-only” periods.
I think for the reasons above, deer farming is very popular in Scotland, where you have vast swathes of mountainous forest land unsuitable to traditional grazing stock. It’s a good way to make double use of woodland - for wood and venison.
My local park is divided between public park and deer park - it used to be the estate of a country house, with a mixture of grazing and and woodland, so it suits the farmed deer very well. (This is in England, for the record).
Venison is pretty popular in the UK - in restaurants and supermarkets.
Same with deer. Venison burgers almost certainly have beef or pork fat mixed in.
Yes, even Wal-Mart sells bison and lamb. Costs more than beef sometimes, but not hard to find. Rabbit and venison may show up at regular supermarkets sometimes, but it’s still mostly a specialty item.
I don’t disagree. Bison is definitely in the middle. There are a couple of bison farms near me, and you find bison on menus fairly often. I really don’t see lamb/sheep very often at all - live, on menus or in meat coolers.
I saw a documentary on the cartoon channel once - it’s hard to tell which day it is, duck season or rabbit season; and the rabbits can be very dangerous, you may shoot your own face or beak off. If you have a speech impediment, avoid hunting.
Yes. They are big enough to clear the hood and take out the windshield and above. And if you meet one on the road, don’t honk. That’s close enough to a mating challenge they may put their head down and charge, put all sixteen points though your radiator at close to 30mph.