Becoming People of the Deer
I grew up in a cow family.
We were a multi-generational dairy farm, milking roughly 200 head of Holstein cows on around 300 acres of land. Cows cared for us. Their generous, sweet milk paid our bills. It gave us children strong bones and good health, enjoyed freely and directly as we took what we needed before sending the rest off for sale. We ate beef nearly every day, for when your freezers are full of beef and you don’t have a lot of money to buy other groceries, you eat beef. As kids, we spent endless hours with calves and weanlings. Admiring them, caring for them, playing with them. I always had a yearling tamed enough to ride around a bit (to the slight annoyance of my uncles. Overly tame cows are a liability). The adults’ days were spent caring for cattle, growing food for cattle, cleaning up after cattle, fixing equipment that cattle needed (and often broke).
Human and cow, partnered in labor and cyclical care, tied to the land and to each other in an intimate cycle of belonging and need. It’s a beautiful thing, really. Something profound, when you stop and really consider it.
It didn’t last, though. After my grandfather retired my uncles and father tried for a while to make it work, but the economics just weren’t there. In 2002, when I was 12, the decision was made. The dairy would fold. I still remember the day the trucks came for the cows. All those beautiful creatures, who I had lived with every day since before I could remember, loaded into the biggest trailers I had ever seen up close, and whisked away.
The quiet was the biggest change for me, after the cows were gone. I was used to the farm as a loud, living, stinking thing. Cows mooing, equipment humming, the drone of the milkers twice a day, every day. The barn yard was so still, so quiet, so palpably empty after that. The cows were gone, and the people faded out too. My uncles didn’t need to be there all day every day (except their every third weekend off, in rotation). My dad had to find new work, which took him elsewhere. Over time we drifted further and further from the home place. It now sits empty, even more silent, as the natural world works to take back the old infrastructure.
I will always love cows, and hold them with respect and gratitude for the ways they built and shaped me as a child. I’ve come to understand, though, that I live in a place where cows don’t really belong. They don’t truly belong anywhere in North America, really, though in vast areas of the country they are a fair (yet still imperfect) analog, ecologically, to the sacred bison whose numbers are so dwindled.
The state I live in, Michigan, is a funny little peninsula, historically deeply wooded and well sheltered by the Great Lakes, all but one of which touches our borders. We probably never had bison, except perhaps in some of our southernmost counties (including, perhaps, the one I grew up in). We’re not a grasslands state, we are a forest state, and it’s the deer family of large herbivores who have dominated our landscape for eons.
Cows are a big topic today. Our desire for beef is undeniably a major driver of deforestation, which in turn is a massive accelerant for climate exchange and our currently underway mass extinction. I personally share the view of many regenerative graziers that when managed well (and most are not managed well), livestock, cattle included, can be powerful agents of healing transformation on the landscape. When managed poorly, as so many are, our grazing animals can absolutely lead to desertification and general destruction on the land. In my view, regardless of management, we should prioritize animals that fit the traditional ecology of the place we’re in. If not with native creatures, then with the closest analog available from amongst our livestock species.
We must also look to the wild beasts, especially those that are currently thriving under the human influence on the land. One of those beasts, a native creature who has long lived in the woodlands of the Midwest, and has not only persisted but has even grown under the modern landscape, is the white tail deer.
The white tail deer is one of the handful of native creatures doing well and expanding under the influence of modern human development. Michigan Wildlife Council cites their numbers in 2017 and 2018 at around 1.75 million. Current DNR reports suggest that number is up to around 2 million. This is an amazing comeback for an animal that went nearly extinct in the late 1800s. Exact estimates vary, but it’s likely this is around or very possibly even higher than the whitetail’s pre-colonization population. A truly amazing comeback, with a dark side.
We now have a pre-colonization level population of a native herbivore, competing for a tiny fraction of its pre-colonization native habitat. Their widely adaptive diet is what has allowed them to adjust and continue to be successful, especially in the agriculturally rich lower half of the lower peninsula. Our deer are nearly as corn-fed as our cattle.
They still remember their ancient diet, however, and seek out native vegetation to browse when it’s available. This, sadly, leads to overgrazing, and further degradation of what’s left of our native flora. We don’t entirely understand all the mechanisms yet, to my knowledge, but it seems as if there is a link between our deer, the (also invasive) earthworm, and many of our common woodland invasive plant species. As conservationists and those on the ground working on ecological restoration projects (like myself) work to save our native plant communities, we’ve found ourselves, in deep irony, at odds with one of our most sacred native animals.
Hunting
Deer are prey animals. They are meant to exist in tandem on the land with large predators. Without proper predator populations to keep the herds in check, overcrowding results in disease and famine: slow suffering deaths that do little to serve the greater abundance of life. Bear and coyote may occasionally take deer, especially fawns, but their most significant natural predators are wolves, cougar, and humans.
We have eliminated the wolves and cougar from much of their traditional range, although both species are making a gradual comeback (Michigan’s DNR is publicly admitting what many citizens have thought for years: MI has a breeding cougar population). Still, it’s not enough, and the whitetail populations continue to grow, and disease continues to spread.
That leaves us.
Humans and whitetail have existed in predator-prey partnership for essentially as long as humans have been on this continent. From what I can gather, it seems we even adjust our projections of pre-colonial populations for one based on evidence of the other. Post-colonization, hunting whitetail remained a strong tradition. We hunted our herds to the very brink of extinction in the 1800’s. Better hunting management and conservation efforts allowed the herd to rebound, at first gradually, then explosively, over the course of the 1900’s. Hunting whitetail deer has remained a cultural cornerstone of the rural Midwest. How many rural school districts have running jokes about taking the opening day of firearm season off as a holiday? How many families have a longstanding tradition of “deer camp,” or the taking of a youth’s first deer as something of a rite of passage?
The answer, sadly, is fewer than ever before. Since the turn of the 21st century, hunting has dwindled. We’ve lost 250,000 hunters over the last 25 years, an around 30% decline. This decline in hunters has absolutely correlated with an exponential increase of deer, and the negative consequences of an oversized, imbalanced herd. Farmers report as high as 20% crop losses to deer in some instances. 2023 car collision statistics report just shy of 59,000 deer-vehicle collisions, a number I would guess is underreported, as surely uninsured people have hit deer and failed to report the incident to stay out of trouble. New and concerning diseases continue to spread, as the hype over chronic wasting disease (a prion disease similar to mad cow, truly a frightening prospect) fades with familiarity, new concerns of epizootic hemorrhagic disease grow. And of course, there is the aforementioned pressure to native flora.
This unchecked growth, beyond the bounds of current ecosystem limits, is harming both human and deer. The deer need more predators in order to stay strong and healthy. And while I support the restoration of key predators (though admittedly, cougar in particular are scary!), I also support the restoration of our ancient deer-human partnership. We need more human hunters.
People of the Deer
Our household has entirely replaced beef with venison. We do still participate in normal society, so we eat beef outside of the house on a semi-regular basis. But here at home, in my kitchen, there is no beef. We have venison stews, venison burgers, venison tacos, venison meatloaf, venison steak, really anything you might imagine on a Midwest dinner menu featuring beef, we make it with venison. Our kids hardly know the difference, it’s just what meat is in our household.
Now, we do enjoy other meats. We raise a couple pigs for their ability to turn food waste into fat, meat, and fertilizer. We eat the occasional chicken, and a variety of other game: wild goose, duck, turkey, and the occasional rabbit or squirrel or other small game mammal. But honestly? I wouldn’t be surprised if more of our calories come from venison than any other species. Certainly we get more of our protein from deer than any other single animal, though we consume a lot of cow dairy, a lot of wheat, and when lard is considered, pork does make a strong calorie contribution as well.
Whitetail deer carry my family the way no other single species does. Their bodies keep my children strong and healthy. They give me the strength to do the work I so value. They give us generous amounts of tallow that I use to make soaps, keeping us sanitary and disease free. I make lotions and herbal salves, keeping our skin nourished and clear. That fat can also be combined with beeswax and other oils and made into fabric conditioners and waterproofing agents, reducing our need for toxic plastics and keeping us warm and dry.
Every deer we take is a profound gift that keeps my family strong. Bones are boiled into broth, lending minerals and collagen to starch dishes and soups. Those bones are then fed to our hens, giving them the calcium they need for strong eggshells, or spread into the gardens and orchards, keeping the cell walls of our plant crops strong and resilient to pest and disease. Offal feeds the soils and the wild creatures we need for a healthy ecosystem. This year, we hope to begin the hard but rewarding work of turning skins into useful leather, sturdy and long lasting, free of toxic plastics, to make useful workwear.
Growing up as a cow family, the ways in which we cared for the cows that supported us were obvious. The reciprocal side of our relationship with deer is more subtle, less obvious, and it would be easy to forgo our side of the bargain, as our ancestors did in the 1800’s and nearly lost the deer as a result. The work is there, however. It starts with gratitude and responsible use. Waste nothing. Use every bit we can, and ensure someone else uses what we can’t. No piece of a deer carcass will ever reach a landfill from our hands. It is all returned to the earth to grow again.
Beyond respect and gratitude comes care for the resources the deer so vitally need. It comes from a reduction in our fossil fuel use, as much as we can manage and more every year. It comes from turning away from the agricultural practices that destroy their habitat. It comes also from restoring the native plants they need to be strong. Prairie plantings, native tree plantings, and, perhaps most critically, replacing as many of our non-native crops with native ones as we can manage. We show our love for the deer that we rely on in as many ways as we can imagine. We vow to never take their gifts for granted.
Can we become a deer culture?
When we really dig into the ecological science, it’s hard to argue the DNR’s position that we need more hunters, and more venison eaters. Even without hunting, we have 60,000 deer killed on roadways each year that should be eaten rather than left to rot, and left to endanger our scavengers and smaller predators. As things currently stand, further population growth of our whitetail deer will surely mean more pain and suffering for those animals. More slow and agonizing disease, more car collisions, more starvation in hard seasons.
In order to keep the deer herd stable, I’ve seen suggestions based on interviews with DNR staff that we should be taking as much as 40% of the fall herd each year (that number surprised me, but when you dig into the math, it makes sense. Does in our area tend to have two fawns each, with an 80-90% success rate. If we are hunting for a stable population, we want to take the growth, minus a certain percentage for mortality). In 2024 Michigan deer harvest numbers are reported around 300,000. That’s only about 15% of 2,000,000 deer. Even if you factor in automobile collisions and the limited amount of natural predation, we’re nowhere close to population stability.
In other words, we could, and probably should, be eating a lot more venison as a population.
40% of our current whitetail deer would 800,000 deer. What does that mean, from a food production standpoint, in comparison to our overall human population?
Let’s do the math.
The amount of meat yield from a whitetail deer varies wildly depending on the age, size, and body condition of the deer in question, but I like to use 60 lbs of meat as a good average. That would give us 48,000,000 lbs of venison. That’s 4.71 lbs per capita, which admittedly, isn’t a life changing amount of meat. However, that is nearly 10% of our per capita 2023 beef consumption. Decreasing our beef consumption by 10% isn’t an insignificant goal. Beef, as it is raised currently, has a massively outsized impact on a wide variety of climate and environmental health issues. In one example, this study showed that reducing beef consumption by 10% could reduce our nitrate load in our water by a full 20%. So simply converting 10% of our beef to venison could significantly improve our water quality and stabilize the deer population–alongside a host of other positive effects.
Then, consider what would happen to the land that currently goes to housing or growing feed for that 10% of our beef herd we would no longer need. What could it become instead? Could it perhaps become diverse ecological restoration sites, in turn capable of holding more deer, in a healthy way? Could we then raise our overall deer herd goal, and perhaps in time, harvest even more deer responsibly? And then could we lower our beef consumption even more? How far could we go?
And then again, land that is good for deer can be good for other things, too. We could eat more wild turkey. Perhaps we could regain a truly huntable population of quail and grouse. More rabbit, more wild goose. And then, many of our native flora are also edible. Could we replace some of our wheat with native nuts? Or even non-native chestnuts, which do support a host of native herbivores (including deer), as well as providing excellent carbohydrates for us humans? Could we eat milkweed and basswood leaves and nettle and liatris and any number of native vegetables, and return some of our muck fields used to grow vegetables into wetlands, that then may themselves hold more edible game, as well as all the other amazing things wetlands do?
Whitetail provide resources other than meat, as well. How many plastic shoes and coats could be replaced with buckskin? How much soap and lotion could be made from regionally produced fats instead of tropical oils produced at great expense to tropical ecosystems?
We can do the math again to get an estimate: 1 average deer hide can be anywhere from 8-14 square feet of good leather. Let’s use 9 as an average, knowing that there will inevitably be holes, tears, and thinner spots that will render some of the leather less useful for bigger garments (though still usable for lacing or small projects!). This ehow guide I found, aimed at reenactor and cosplay types wanting to make their own period garments, suggest that for an adult, you might need about 3 square feet to make a pair of low shoes, and 8-10 for a pair of calf-height boots. So, 1 pair of sturdy boots or 2-3 (I’m going to use 2, to again account for waste and cutting margins. Let’s keep this thought exercise on the conservative side).
Given our theoretical goal of 800,000 deer, that’s not an insignificant number of shoes! We could, perhaps, make 400,000 pairs of boots and another 800,000 pairs of lower shoes. Every year, out of sustainable and non-petroleum materials. That’s enough leather from deer alone to get one pair of shoes every 8-9 years for everyone in the state. Again, not enough on its own, but not insignificant when you consider how much longer good leather footwear lasts than cheap manmade materials. With resoling and regular care, I expect my husband’s dress shoes and my everyday boots to last that long. Deer hide isn’t as thick as cowhide, so will buckskin boots last as long as cowhide? Quite likely not, but still, a worthwhile cut in our plastic waste and petroleum usage as a state.
And then there’s the fat. Deer yield a hard white tallow that isn’t popular as a cooking fat. To be honest, I’ve eaten (and enjoyed) enough things that “everyone” says are no good to begin to question whether deer tallow really is all that bad to cook in, but most hunters complain of the mouthfeel and flavor and no one (in the broad sense) really cooks with venison tallow. In our household, we use our pork lard, purchased butter, and a bit of olive oil for cooking, and save our tallow for homegoods.
What can you make from one deer? As in all things, and more than any other category we’re exploring here, it very much depends on the deer. A younger yearling or medium aged buck likely won’t have much tallow. A prime condition doe taken in the fall, however, may have quite a lot. I just processed our last deer of the season–a massive doe, with a generous amount of suet and a layer of fatback ranging from a half inch to a full inch thick in places. Her raw fat, once ground, weighed in around twenty pounds! Some initial weighing of my own rendering process suggests about half that becomes usable tallow (This is lower than what the internet suggests, but it’s what my scales say. Some is lost as connective tissue and bits of meat that get strained out. Some is lost clinging to filters and equipment, as tallow utilized for cosmetics is rendered several times to yield the most pure product possible). 10 lbs of good tallow from one animal!
Obviously, that’s an exceptional edge case. I’d put the average, and I am largely guessing here, though as someone who cleans anywhere from 6-10 deer each year (and has done so for at least a decade now), at maybe a third to half of that. Let’s use four pounds as our average. Converted to soap, that becomes 5-6 pounds of good quality bar soap. In our household, we use bar soap for most of our personal washing needs, while purchasing laundry and dish detergents, and shampoo. We’re a household of 6, and one batch of soap seems to last us about the year. Essentially, we’re using 1 lb of soap per person (again, that’s excluding laundry and dish cleaning). By my math, that could cover a little more than a third of the daily soap needs of Michigan’s population. Not everything, but again, not insignificant.
What about lotion? One of my favorite products is a whipped tallow balm that I use instead of commercial lotion. It’s super hydrating and nourishing to my skin, can be made entirely with regionally appropriate materials (the base recipe is about 4 parts tallow to 1 part plant based oil, I choose sunflower oil as a skin-healthy native oil crop), and a little goes a long way. A 4 ounce jar lasts me a full month or more in the winter, and far longer in the summer months. Again by my record keeping, 2 lbs of tallow yields 22 4 oz (by volume) jars. Essentially, 1 lb of tallow is enough to keep at least one person’s skin hydrated and healthy each year. That’s just a little under a third of the population.
Looked at another way, that’s 3,200,000 lbs of tropical oils like palm, shea, or cocoa butter we could replace with a sustainable, locally sourced, environmentally sound alternative. When we consider the catastrophic environmental effects of palm oil (effects felt not on-shore, but largely in the global south, a fact that in my opinion greatly compounds the ethical implications), the fact that palm oil can be found in 50% of us consumer goods (!), and 24% of global palm oil consumption is in cosmetics, we can see the significance of that potential impact. Could venison tallow alone replace all our cosmetic oil consumption as a state? No, it could not. Could it make a truly meaningful dent? Yes, it absolutely could.
So could every family in Michigan lean as heavily on the whitetail deer as mine currently does? No, the reality is that our population has (probably) grown too high to completely revert back to an ancestral, hunter-gatherer type diet that relies solely on wild game. It seems, however, that we could make a very real and very significant impact on the issues of climate change, environmental degradation, and community health by embracing our sacred whitetail deer as an integral part of our dietary culture.
Please, fellow Midwesterners, let’s consider becoming people of the deer again.
A note on the statistics used in this article: Anywhere it isn’t specified, the numbers presented here are given for the state of Michigan, where I live. Some numbers, such as per capital beef consumption, are only readily available to me on a national basis, and were subbed in for Michigan-specific data when needed. While these numbers are specific to my state, the basic points arrived at are broadly applicable across most of the Midwest, and really, across much of North America, though different areas may rely more heavily on other game species. I’d imagine there are significant game species in other parts of the world that could be managed comparably, but I can only speak to my home region. If you’ve done the math on animals in your region, I’d love to hear about it!
Thank you for a very inspiring piece! There’s no beef in our freezers either. Venison, pheasants, ducks, geese, and wild turkey take up most of the space. But - I’m a slacker when it comes to making as much venison broth as I could and I’ve never made any use of deer fat. Thought provoking. I do render the fat from all my ducks and geese - wonderful stuff to cook with!
I do not send any remains from animals I’ve killed to the landfill. I make a point of placing those in a “non-obvious” spot for consumption by coyotes, crows, raccoons, fungi, bacteria, etc. I want the parts I don’t use to help support the natural world.
Thank you for writing this. When I was a young mother and wife in the 1990s, my husband and his family would go deer hunting and small game hunting. I used to joke that we were so poor we had to go hunt our meat because we could not afford beef. But looking back, it seems like we lived a life that was rich, even though we didn't have much money. My childrens' diet was a mixture of wild game and foraged foods, plus our large garden, in addition to the grocery store. I'm thankful for the time I had living that lifestyle when I was in Michigan. Now, here in Florida, my husband and I have bought some rural property and are gradually returning to living off the land as best we can. I recently subscribed, and I'm looking forward to reading much more from you here on Substack.