George Reistad (right) and his cousin Erik Reistad bow hunting in Waupaca County last month.
George Reistad lives in the Williamson Street area, where foodies have it pretty good. But there are some gaps.
“You can’t buy wild venison in retail markets,” says Reistad.
Reistad has recently taken up hunting as a way to secure locally sourced meat. “It’s really cool to be able to get your own food that way. You clean it, harvest it, butcher it — and if you get 25-50 pounds of meat, you can feed yourself for the whole season.”
Reistad didn’t grow up in a hunting family or culture. “To be perfectly candid, as a black guy from Milwaukee I didn’t know many people who hunted growing up.” He does have relatives up north who hunt, though.
Reistad found his own way to hunting through a free Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources class called “Learn to Hunt for Food” (originally offered as “Hunting for Sustainability” through Madison College).
Sarah Witman
George Reistad butchers a deer during a DNR class.
He says he found the class diverse, at least in terms of age and gender, if not in racial makeup. There was a common thread among students, though. “A lot of people cited the fact that they would be sourcing their own food as one of the main reasons they wanted to hunt,” says Reistad, who works at an advocacy group for sustainable agriculture.
John Rodstrom, who also graduated from the DNR course, says eating locally is important to him, but acknowledges it’s difficult to pull off on a grad student budget. “For me, obtaining meat was definitely a motivator to take the course,” says Rodstrom, a graduate student at the UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology. “I enjoy having the satisfaction of harvesting my own meat, and I really like the flavor of venison. The fact that it’s very lean and from a local source is a secondary benefit.”
Reistad and Rodstrom are part of a new crop of Wisconsin hunters, wooed to the outdoors by state officials determined to keep the long tradition of hunting alive in Wisconsin. Among those targeted by the DNR are urban locavores who are interested in sustainability, local food sourcing and eating off the land.
The number of hunters statewide has been on the decline for more than a decade.
The DNR sold 609,779 deer hunting licenses for last year’s gun season, nearly 13% fewer than even a decade and a half ago. The 1990 gun season saw nearly 700,000 licensed hunters participate.
Fewer hunters means the deer population can get out of control. It also threatens a vital source of funding for state conservation programs. Resident hunting and fishing permits are by far the biggest source of revenue for fish and wildlife management, above timber sales and tribal gaming. Some licenses — such as wild turkey, pheasant, waterfowl, trout and freshwater salmon — also require the purchase of a separate stamp that directly funds habitat restoration projects, education, research and equipment purchases.
A 2010 study conducted by the UW-Madison’s Applied Population Laboratory, at the request of the DNR, found that fewer men between the ages of 25 and 44 — historically the largest demographic of Wisconsin deer hunters — were hunting than ever before. The study projected the number of male gun hunters to drop to 400,000 or fewer by 2030. A slight increase in female hunters, especially younger ones, has not yet made up for this sizable gap.
Keith Warnke, hunting and shooting sports coordinator for the DNR, says becoming a hunter is a process. “I may be interested in golf, or I might take a lesson, but it would take repeated exposures, a continuum of experiences, for me to consider myself a golfer,” says Warnke.
Since 2012, Warnke has led the “Learn to Hunt for Food” class. The four-week course includes classroom instruction in hunting history and ethics, firearm safety, deer biology and behavior, scouting and field dressing — as well as hands-on practice at a shooting range, a venison cooking demo, a butchering workshop and a guided hunt.
His colleague Kelly Maynard, who also teaches the course, has a master’s degree from UW in agroecology, which is the study of food production and its impact on the environment. Maynard took one of Warnke’s very first “Hunting for Sustainability” courses in 2012, when there were fewer than 20 students. Now the course has grown so popular that both 20-person sessions fill up within a few weeks, and there’s a long waiting list.
She and Warnke have built up contacts at the Wisconsin Local Food Network and area farmers’ markets, and advertise through the UW’s Environmental Studies Student Association listserv and the Willy Street Co-op newsletter. The course’s popularity does not entirely surprise Warnke. “There’s is a lot of interest in this,” he says. “This class gives skills and knowledge to people who wouldn’t have any other opportunity of gaining it.”
Students are instructed on what clothes to wear, where to lawfully hunt and and how to properly dispose of entrails.
To foster strong connections between seasoned hunters and newcomers, there is a one-to-one mentorship ratio during each of the course’s guided hunts. It helps create stronger connections between urbanites and rural dwellers. “One of the great things about this weekend is that groups of people who otherwise might not interact come together for this, and discover what they have in common,” says Maynard.
Francis Eanes took the class in 2014 and plans to go out hunting this year. “I’m someone who cares a lot about where my food comes from, and I grow some of it myself — fruits and vegetables. I am also the occasional meat eater, so I thought, ‘Why not participate in that part of my diet, too?’” Eanes is a Ph.D. candidate at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
Although Eanes didn’t kill an animal during the course’s guided hunt, he practiced butchering with the others. “There’s something to participating in the whole process that’s unlike anything else. I have slaughtered rabbits and chickens before, and it can be pretty intense to take the life of something. I think it’s a good thing that it’s that intense — it’s not something you want to do all the time, and it makes you more mindful.”
