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Big strong predator that sucks at hunting so much that they need to lure the deer to stand directly in front of their gun.
At that point you're not even a hunter, you're a slob that might as well be ordering from a menu. Pathetic.
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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Usually crackers and it's still cheaper to buy industrial agricultural foods unless you live in an incredibly remote place.
yeah the kind of appalacian poor i'm thinking of that we used to send highschool kids out to do structural home repairs for charity already have guns and might eat for months on a box of ammo. maybe wholesale can compete with the calories in an adult deer but when we're talking $2 or less for a bullet or shell it probably comes down to aim.
The expense does not end after you shoot the bullet...
What, butcher paper and freezer electricity?
The poor who subsist on game and garden butcher their own animals. My stepfather's elk tag fed my family of 11 for six months of the year, and gave him his one personal break per year. Plus, we weren't eating meat drenched in chlorine or fed on trash. He never used shit like in the OP's pic, though.
To your point, he hunted on horseback so feed for the horse probably evened out the savings over time. I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, just that the argument around hunting is more nuanced than most of the conversation in the replies.
Transportation, skin, hang, age, butcher, freeze (including buying the freezer), dispose of or process the parts you're not eating. It's all part of a curated lifestyle, not a poverty decision.
I'm not sure what nuance you're referring to this is an actually simple topic.
Exactly how much do you think meat costs? Last time I looked just basic low-grade beef was nearly $10 a pound, and even historically cheap shit like ground turkey was $6 a pound. Because of that I switched to eating tofu ($2 a pound) and still have to ration that to a few ounces a day. If someone has a gun and can hunt, that's the cheapest source of meat they can possibly have. Hence venison being relatively common for the rural poor, whether it's their family procuring it or someone else in their community, while it's completely absent from everyone else's diet.
Guns and ammo costs hundreds of dollars and you still have to process the animal afterwards, requiring that you either pay someone to do all of that for you or you need to have dedicated semi-sterile space to hang a deer carcass for several days, a space and tools to butcher, and a big chest freezer. You also have to transport the animal, requiring some form of rigging. Most people use it as an excuse to overpay on a truck. The meme of tying an animal to the top of a car is exceptionally rare. They pay someone to move it or they buy the expensive vehicle.
There are also people that field-butcher. They are rare and they invest in a series of several hundred dollar equipment purchases to make this feasible, namely knives and specialized packs and a means by which to clean themselves.
It is almost never a way for the rural poor to save money, it is a lifestyle choice.
Pickups used to be small, cheap, and things that were actually used for a practical purpose. Like that's constantly brought up here as a point of how much modern light trucks are awful in every way compared to older, actually useful models or light trucks from other countries.
You've also got to remember that everything you're talking about is just productive capital, and very cheap productive capital at that, some of which can also be made from repurposed materials or is necessary anyways (like "a means to preserve food" is the most basic sort of "you absolutely need to have this" thing ever). Hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of capital that remains in use for decades breaks down to a very low cost if enables a higher standard of living equivalent to spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a year extra on food, which is what regularly eating meat costs.
Pickups being cheap was over 20-30 years ago and even then unless you were getting a tiny Japanese one you were dropping $5-10k more than for a sedan.
Getting a big freezer to store ya entertainment meat is not a need-to-have food preservation system, it's a luxury that depends on fairly consistent electricity. Dry goods are what you need if you want security. To tie it together, this would apply to people that make jerky and smoked foods, i.e. what indigenous people did and still often do with meat. But very, very few people are in it for that, they're in it for the lifestyle their grandpappy taught them and so they can feel tough and cool and for some of them, just go camping without anyone calling them gay. It's inherited from a colonizer perspective on the "Wild West" that is even itself fairly synthetic and surprisingly recent and, of course, is self-applied by (nearly always white) people in Eastern New York same as someone in Montana same as someone in West Virginia.