Huh, we have rabbits coming out our ears. I see a rabbit everytime I look at the back yard, and I’ve seen as many as six at once, grazing my lawn.
I’d be happy to have a way to harvest them. But the houses are way to close here for gun hunting, even if I knew how to handle one.
If you want to mass market a product like venison you need to keep in mind what the average consumer wants, they want the flavor they are used to, maybe with a little exotic flair. And a lot of the flavor in meat comes from the fat. We Americans love us some fat.
Unfortunately, with deer and elk (the two I am most familiar with) you need to remove most of the fat when butchering the meat because that is where the “gaminess” is. A little deer fat will ruin an otherwise excellent cut of meat. So you get some very lean steaks. A few dry roasts that need proper cooking and something too lean to grind into hamburger. You need to add about 20% beef fat back in when grinding your hamburger to get back to the expected taste and texture. And that expected taste for most people is beef fat. This is why venison and other wild meats, even if farmed, remain a niche, novelty, or gourmet product.
When the customer wants the familiar flavor of beef, and beef is cheaper, and you would have to incorporate beef fat back into your product anyway, why not just stick with beef? Bison/buffalo can be found in stores but it too suffers from being too lean and remains a novelty.
Now, don’t jump on me with your tales of excellent meals you have had of venison, elk, moose, antelope, I am referring to the tastes of the average consumer that would be the target market, you know, morons. 
Everyone has them in their yards, but that’s the only place you see them. You don’t see them in the woods or the fields. I guess the foxes and coyotes don’t like suburban hunting. And two-legged hunters aren’t allowed to hunt in between the houses.
Yep, I can’t throw a stick outside my house without hitting a rabbit, quail, or dove. Go out to where you can legally hunt them and they make themselves scarce. There’s a rabbit or two (sorry, all look the same) who will let me get within 6 feet without getting skittish. They’re still wild animals, but very used to humans.
Once the specialty restaurants get their hands on all the good meat, the feet are all the fast food places have left to serve.
Duck season!
I’m a little surprised that there was a season - I would have guessed they were considered a nuisance and shootable on sight (much like squirrels).
Oh, we have foxes, and coyotes, and hawks, and… I’ve had to remove partial rabbits a few times when mowing the lawn.
I was shocked to learn that my state has a squirrel season. I would have expected them to be vermin, not game.
I’m sure it depends on what state you live in, but I can tell you for a fact that both rabbits and squirrels are considered game animals in my state ¶, and have defined seasons, shooting hours, bag limits, allowed firearms and all of the other hunting regulations. You also need a state hunting license and must wear blaze orange clothing.
I think quite a few people dispatch rabbits (mostly for eating their gardens) with air guns or slingshots, but doing so is absolutely against the law here in PA.
Cottontail rabbit typically has a season. Jackrabbit (which is really a hare) often don’t have a season, and most hunters consider them trash meat. It’s actually not half bad, more like gamey beef than rabbit.
Yea, this is about right, I think. For comparison: I don’t go to Walmart enough to know, but Meijer (big ubiquitous Midwestern supermarket chain) sells bison and lamb. For rabbit I’d have to go to Schnucks, a regional chain which is a step more upmarket than Meijer (but there are three of them in my near vicinity). Venison, elk and goat I’d have to get at a specialty grocery like Fresh Thyme, and the nearest of those is an hour away from me (though apparently they’re opening in my town next year). Of course, for venison I could also just ask someone I know who hunts, or the greenhouse manager who owns a deer farm.
You don’t have to cook venison with beef or pork fat, I’ve had really good grilled venison that I don’t think had much added fat. I pan-fried venison a couple times over the summer, and added extra oil to make up for the leanness.
I’m actually in England at the moment, where as mentioned venison seems to be a more commercially available item in general. I had some decent venison ravioli for dinner tonight and the place next door was selling venison too.
Yea, sheep farming is really not a big thing, at least in the Midwest, though I’ve seen a few niche goat farms. On the other hand, I’ve been in England for the past week and sheep are everywhere here.
My understanding is sheep are harder to raise in the grain-fed, intensive factory farming model by which we raise most pigs, poultry and (for part of their lives) cows in the US. That makes them more appealing to me (i.e. in terms of being more humanely raised on pasture), but also inherently more expensive than e.g. beef or pork. (Until such time as we pass stronger laws against factory farming).
The reason I don’t eat venison is Chronic Wasting Disease. CWD is widespread in deer, elk, and moose. CWD is transmitted by prions, which is the same means that Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy aka Mad Cow Disease is transmitted.
I will readily concede that there have been no known cases of a human contracting CWD by eating venison. But humans can contract BSE through eating beef. So I choose not to take the risk.
I think Dallas Jones was talking about grinding venison into burger when he mentioned adding beef fat. When we process part of our deer into burger, we indeed grind it with the fattiest ground beef we can find to add enough fat to the burger to make it usable. Parts of our venison is left unadulterated to use in other dishes. But it is so extremely lean that you have to be careful when cooking it, or use it in certain dishes where lean meat is desirable. Frankly, I think beef tastes better and is easier to cook with.
Getting back to the OP’s question…
One big factor which would lead me to say that there isn’t enough venison capacity in the U.S. for a regular menu item at a major fast-food restaurant is the simple fact that the big fast-food restaurants sell a lot of food.
McDonalds only sells McRib sandwiches a few times a year, and part of the reason for this is that demand for McRibs during those promotional windows is enough to deplete their yearly supply of the processed rib meat that goes into them.
Similarly, I had Applebee’s as a client for several years. One of the “signature” items at Applebee’s is “riblets,” which are like little bite-sized ribs.
Spoilered for those of you who might like Applebee’s riblets:
They come from bones attached to the spines of pigs; I’m not sure that they’d be technically referred to as “ribs.”
At least when I worked on the account, Applebee’s had to carefully monitor how often they ran riblets promotions, for fear of depleting their supply of them.
And both of those items are from pigs, which the US breeds in enormous numbers. Unless someone were to figure out how to effectively and efficiently raise large numbers of deer for venison (far, far more than are raised today), I have a hard time picturing how the demand could meet the supply for a full-time menu item.
So don’t eat the brain…?
The main worry with wild game is trichinosis from bear and boar, and tularemia from rabbit and jackrabbit.
Don’t want the wild McRib to go extinct!
Regarding Applebee’s, Wikipedia says:
“Button ribs (or feather bones) are often confused with riblets mostly because Applebee’s sells these as “riblets”. In fact, what Applebee’s sells is found just past the ribs near the back bone, just underneath the tenderloin. This cut of meat actually has no bones, but instead has “buttons” of cartilaginous material with meat attached”
I can’t think of a single supermarket I’ve ever been in that DIDN’T have lamb chops. Where do you people live?
The reason there’s a duck season is that migratory waterfowl were way overhunted during the Depression to supplement the family meals, just as the Dust Bowl was destroying the small ponds and lakes the birds used as stopovers. Fascinating story told well in “The Wild Duck Chase”:
https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Duck-Chase-Strange-Wonderful/dp/1620403072
But that’s the best part!
Seriously, this is one reason I still eat beef while I don’t eat venison. BSE prions are confined to a cow’s brain and spinal tissue. CWD prions can be found in a deer’s muscle tissue.
There’s also the odds. BSE is a rare disease in cattle. Worldwide the odds that a cow has BSE might be as low as one in a million. In the United States, the odds are even lower. But CWD is very common in deer. Some studies have found 30% of the deer tested had the disease.
Am I the only one who thought this was a brilliant reference to Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste at first read? For those who haven’t seen it, it takes place in New Zealand and there are alien species (the outer space kind) hunting humans for food.
The two major chains of groc stores here in South Florida do not normally carry any lamb at least in the neighborhoods I’ve stopped into. Other minor chains carry a couple sorts of chops year round. Most stores, even the ones that don’t normally have lamb, will have legs of lamb available at select holidays. If you want lamb or goat you go to the specialty butcher shops or the smaller grocery stores in the more ethnic neighborhoods. There you can get anything, even heads for making head cheese.
The situation was similar when I lived in St. Louis. You simply couldn’t find basic lamb chops unless you went to the specialty markets that catered mostly to recent immigrants. And there you could find anything from chops to stew meat to whole legs or even half torsos = “a side of lamb”.