For a healthy source of meat, venison could be fair game but beware what you wish for. Lachlan Kenneally writes.
The UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) recently published its approach to controlling deer numbers. They view increasing sales and consumption of venison as “a key part of the deer management cycle”’. Their numbers are seen to be a bit of a problem in the UK (see box: The deer issue) so eating more of them seems an obvious solution. But is this as good an idea as Defra and any others think?
The current price per kilogram for wild venison is prohibitively low for many deerstalkers because, once overheads, including fuel, equipment and time, are factored in, there’s little money to be made on the carcass, if any. Most stalkers won’t go out unless they know they’re going to be able to make use of the carcass; be that personally, gifted to friends or family, or sold into the market. With limited capacity for throughput in the wild venison supply chain, there is a now dominant logic circulating in the spheres of deer management policy and practice: if we can cultivate wild venison demand — that is, make it culturally ‘normal’, widely available, and perhaps procured publicly and privately at scale — prices would rise, which would in turn incentivise and enable more culling, thereby reducing deer impacts. In line with this framing, wild venison is, through various campaigns such as EatWild, frequently touted as a more sustainable, ethical, and healthy meat than most other widely consumed meats.
In the abstract, this has the allure of clarity. It seems an ethical win (consume what we cull for conservation), an environmental win (reduce the ecological impacts of deer on woodland (re)generation and reduce consumption of unsustainable meats produced via industrial animal agriculture), and an economic win (support rural livelihoods). However, I believe that this smooths over the political-ecological stakes of deer and land management; potentially reinscribing inequities in land use, access and ownership, and foreclosing alternative and post-capitalist food futures.
Cultivating edibility through capitalist markets entails building a socio-technical pathway that can move deer from woodland to plate at scale.
It also demands caution: treating “the market” as a neutral instrument that can be merely switched on to deliver ecological balance underplays how quickly capitalistic processes can themselves become unruly — operating according to their own imperatives and thresholds, with little or no consideration for the socioecological consequences.
Cultivating edibility through capitalist markets entails building a socio-technical pathway that can move deer from woodland to plate at scale: involving carcass collection, chilling capacity, veterinary inspection, processing, distribution, branding, procurement contracts, menu integration, and consumer habituation. Once edibility is built into the capitalist food system, human-deer relations could take on a particular trajectory. As Science and Technology Studies (STS) pioneer Michel Callon suggests: “All in all, what dominant economics does[…] is to perform disentanglements which cause market goods to proliferate while dissociating them from the agencies that are in a position to produce and trade them.”
Conversely, culling should be a situated practice of stewardship that is always open to public contestation. Culling decisions should be made in accordance with the local landscape and ecology—that is, with attention to how deer move through and make a given place, what other factors constrain woodland regeneration, what shapes multispecies toleration and co-existence, and what people in that community consider legitimate. When these relations become subject to capitalist market forces which transcend the local conditions of specific landscapes, there exists a number of risks which demand caution and consideration.
Thinking ahead
Leaving to one side the problematic nature of considering deer in purely economic terms, there is a potentially drastic mismatch in the potentials of demand and supply when it comes to wild venison. Clearly, supply is very limited in scope and scale in comparison to demand. Wild venison, it must be said, is not like animal agriculture—the supply pool cannot be expanded or contracted year-to-year according to demand expectations. Of course, more wild venison can be produced through hunting but only to an extent; ultimately, there’s a finite supply of deer in the landscape. Unleashing the seemingly insatiable appetite of capitalist food systems, for example, by supplying venison in stadiums across the country, on the relatively meagre and potentially fragile populations of free-roaming deer could well be a recipe for disaster.
Let us assume that the populations and impacts of deer do go down significantly as a result of widespread consumption. If this were to put pressure on deer populations, wild venison would no longer become a sustainable or ethical meat to eat; it could well become an unsustainable and unethical meat to eat. Not only this, it would also become prohibitively expensive for most—accessible only to landowners and the wealthy. This would of course reinstate the historic inaccessibility of venison along lines of socioeconomic class.
We could then see a rise in wild venison imports to cash in on that demand for wild venison, and perhaps a rise in unsustainable and unethical farming practices to meet venison demand at a cheaper price point. This is not to mention the considerable demand produced through rising interests in health foods—particularly natural foods with rich macro- and micro-nutrient profiles—which would also contribute towards a persistent demand for wild and farmed venison alike.
I attended at a community woodland, where eating venison was not framed as a sustainability swap or a health hack, but a ritualised encounter with relational dependency and death.
Part of what makes the venison-market solution appealing is that, by framing venison as sustainable, ethical, and healthy, it seems to sidestep a contentious debate — the ethics of killing and its relationship to class — between rural cultures and communities (where killing is variously framed as stewardship, skill, tradition and so on) and urban cultures and communities where shooting is often assumed to be cruel, backward and political. However, this keeps important issues at arm’s length, such as the cultural politics of who gets to decide what ‘nature recovery’ means.
Thinking otherwise
In my PhD research, I’ve encountered practices that cultivate different relations to deer and venison. One of the most striking was an evening I attended at a community woodland, where eating venison was not framed as a sustainability swap or a health hack, but a ritualised encounter with relational dependency and death. Together, we skinned, butchered, cooked, ate and honoured the life of this particular deer. This opened space for us to sit with the uncomfortable fact that our being alive as humans is dependent on the lives of other (non-)living beings—whether we consume them directly or not. Land and the (non-)living became valued as not just a mere resource, but a set of intricate relations of care and violence which demanded ongoing attention and atonement. It is this that the abstractive nature of the commodity effaces in food. These practices keep venison consumption connected with its reality. They also potentially cultivate different publics: not just consumers, but people who can be affected by what eating entails—and who might change how they relate to place, nonhumans, and responsibility because of it.
Likewise, there are socioeconomic possibilities that become harder to see when the capitalist food system is treated as self-evident: smaller scale, place-based food networks and cooperative arrangements that keep venison tied to local ecological goals rather than distal market demand. These are models where human-deer relations are not valued primarily according to price, but ecological repair, stewardship, and forms of accountability that don’t disappear into large supply chains.
So let’s not leave deer to be turned into just another commodity for our consumption and miss out on the potential they could create for new types of relationships with the world outside capitalist logics.
