If you’re a meat-eater or flexitarian, then a good case can be made for switching out farmed meat for wild game. Eating wild game can be better for our health than eating regular farmed meat (it is very low in fat and cholesterol) and can be better for the environment. It can also offer great value for money and is often more flavourful. The punchier flavours of many game meats matches perfectly with winter and the heartier dishes that many of us gravitate towards at this time of year – which also coincides with open season on the majority of game species and therefore its availability to us consumers.
What Counts as Wild Game?
Gamebirds such as pheasant, partridge and grouse (to name a few), waterfowl like ducks and geese, and rabbits, hare and the various species of deer (‘ground’ or ‘fur’ game’ – the mammals) all count as game. It is legal to shoot these species in the UK, but many of them have closed seasons when it is illegal to shoot them to allow them to breed, raise young, and migrate between their breeding and over-wintering grounds. The open season is the period of time within which they can be shot, and this is when wild game is most readily available. Some game species are farmed either directly for consumption (venison) or for organised shoots (gamebirds) – this is game meat, but not wild game and so whilst it may well carry the same flavour, eating it does not have the lower environmental impact that wild game does.
When Is Wild Game Available?
In England and Wales, the majority of gamebirds and waterfowl (certainly the most popular and readily available) have an open season from between the 1st of September or the 1st of October, and the end of January. There are some exceptions, and you can see the full table here. There is technically no closed season on rabbits and brown hare on private land in England and Wales, however there are date restrictions on moorland and in any instance it is only legal to shoot them between December 11th and March 31st which effectively creates a season for these ground game species.
The open season for wild venison depends upon the species and differs for male deer (stags or bucks) and female (hinds or does). In Scotland, stags or bucks can be taken year-round. Through winter and into early spring from November 1st through to March 31st, is open season for hinds and does. Roe deer bucks can then be taken between April 1st and October 31st creating a year-round season for roe deer. For red, sika and fallow deer, the stags or bucks have an open season from August 1st through April 30th, so for these species there is a closed season through late spring and into summer.
You can ask your local butcher about wild game meat, although be sure to specify wild rather than farmed if that is important to you. In Cornwall we are fortunate to have suppliers such as Duchy Game (at Pelean Cross, just outside Ponsanooth) or you can look online for a supplier local to you or who sells online.
Game Recipes
If you are interested in learning how to prepare and cook game animals, then our Game Workshop (the next one takes place on Thursday November 23rd) is a great course to give yo the confidence, skills and recipes to add wild meat to your winter repertoire. Over the years, several game recipes have been shared on our Foodie Blog, from game terrine to “posh” venison kebabs. Take your pick from the links below, and give wild game a go this winter!
When it comes to eating well, there are a number of different ways to look at it; here at Philleigh Way we try to cover them all. Eating well for the planet and environment is something that more and more people are taking into consideration these days. It is a nuanced topic full of debate, and it’s easy to get distracted by the arguments and side-taking. There are a few things that each of us can do, and for meat-eaters and flexitarians, eating wild game or replacing farmed meat with wild game, particularly replacing beef with venison, is one of them.
Venison is nutrient rich, and is the result of deer grazing the grass, plants and trees that we can’t eat directly. Deer no longer have any natural predators in the British Isles and as a result their population booms with disastrous consequences. They often end up having a negative impact on biodiversity within forests and woodlands, damage and destroy crops, and there are often cases of starvation and death amongst deer populations when their population outstrips their food supply. Every year in the UK, around 350,000 deer are culled to keep their numbers under control so that they don’t outgrow their food sources or become a nuisance to farmers. There is also a net benefit to the smaller wildlife and birds that would be outcompeted by deer. In short, by controlling wild deer populations, nature wins and we get nutrient and mineral rich, lean, organic meat that has none or only a fraction of the carbon footprint of farmed red meat. You certainly couldn’t meet the nation’s appetite for red meat with wild venison, but at the moment it’s under utilized and we could and should be eating more of it.
We recently caught up with Scott Martin of wild game supplier Duchy Game at Pelean Cross, just outside Ponsanooth, to find out more about wild game in Cornwall.
Scott started out hunting rabbits. “I used to go out with lurchers, because farmers liked it because you weren’t taking guns on the land with livestock, and the lurchers were stock trained so they wouldn’t touch the stock but they would pick up rabbits.” He tells us. “I was getting 100-150 in a night which was really good. I was earning way more money doing that than from my day job! I was aware I had to be sustainable. I had an end use for what we were catching.”
Now he supplies wild rabbits and pigeons shot on his family’s farm, with wild venison from Tregothnan Estate making up the majority of the wild “fur” game meat that he sells (rather than feathered game). He’s one of a dozen or so people who regularly hunt at Tregothnan, the seat of Viscount Falmouth and the ancestral stately home of the Boscawen family just outside Truro (they have lived there since 1334). The estate is estimated to be almost twice the size of The Duchy of Cornwall’s holdings. “In the early 1900s, fallow deer were seen as a good parkland deer. The stately home at Tregothnan has a 300-acre park that surrounds it. Other places like Powderham Castle near Exeter have a lot of deer, or Prideaux Place in Padstow. In Richmond Park up in London there’s a big herd of fallows and reds, they coexist together up there. At Tregothnan over the years some deer have escaped from the parkland into the greater estate. They’re famously good at jumping fences! The greater estate over there is massive – it covers thousands of acres.” Scott says that around 400-550 deer are culled there every year to keep the numbers down for grazing purposes and so that the deer don’t end up going hungry (which for wild game meat would result in a poor quality carcass), and that only around 100 of those come from the park itself. The rest come from the greater estate. “There’s been reports of them over the other side of Tregony and Gerrans on the Roseland. During the shooting season the more they cull, the further the deer will spread. In the 3-4 months in the summer when they’re not being culled they all wander back towards Tregothnan as it’s quieter and there are more bucks in the park.”
One condition of sourcing from Tregothnan is that the meat can only be sold within Cornwall, but there is a benefit that it all comes from a single traceable source. Wild game is not farming, however. “I can only sell what’s been shot.” Scott says. “I can’t go and pull an animal out of the field – with livestock farming you gauge, you know your numbers, you know your stock, you know the busier times and quieter times of year it terms of demand and all that sort of thing. Game is a bit different because it’s weather dependent, light dependent, and so on. There are loads of different factors that come into it.” He goes on to explain that if it’s really stormy or windy weather then the deer tend to stay in the woods and during those periods he doesn’t tend to hunt as much. “The last few weeks have been lovely and normally it’s unheard of to shoot 20-30 in February for the whole month, but they’ve shot that in around 10 days this year because the weather has been so good and they are able to hit them.”
There are legal seasons for shooting different deer, as well as the weather and hunting conditions to consider. Most of the venison that Scott shoots, butchers and sells is from fallow deer. Roe deer are the small deer that most people see occasionally in fields and on the edges of woodlands, in ones and twos; they don’t really move in herds. Fallow deer stay in herds from six individuals up to perhaps 90 or 100 animals. Because of the smaller size of roe bucks, which are in season during the summer, Scott doesn’t tend to take them. “I can’t get a high enough meat yield on the roe, I can’t get good haunch steaks.” He says as we tour his on-site butchery. “These legs are quiet small-ish fallows, but still I can just about get the three main muscle groups out of the legs. With roe I don’t, I just sell it whole on the bone. They are too small. Financially it doesn’t make much sense. I do shoot a few roe at Tregothnan but 98-99% of what we shoot are fallow deer.”
Scott’s views are that the animals that we eat should be treated with respect, and that waste should be avoided. “My personal view is that an animal should be killed in it’s own environment instead of being put on a trailer and dragged around everywhere.” He says. “Working with Tregothnan they are very good, because they are more interested in making sure the meat is processed properly for the food chain, which is another reason I don’t want or need to take venison from anywhere else because I know how it’s been treated. If you’ve got someone purely thinking of financially gain they don’t always treat the carcass with respect. They are just thinking about what they’re going to get paid for it.” Scott cites the varying demand for wild game and particular cuts of venison, and how it doesn’t necessarily lead to some people utilising the whole beast. “All the restaurants wanted at Christmas was loin. If I could have been getting five saddles off every deer I would have been quids in, but that isn’t the case!”
Scott tries to send the hides off to be tanned, however because they are wild deer only about 60% are good enough to be sold because the deer skins had been damaged from rutting and snagging. The ones that couldn’t be sold whole are turned into cushion covers – all efforts to use the whole animal and get the best return on investment, particularly considering the cost of disposing of waste properly.
When it comes to the meat itself, Scott sells direct to the public from his farm shop at Pelean Cross, between Ponsanooth and Perranwell, and supplies restaurants in the county. “The restaurants seem to like the fallow deer down here, which tends to be slightly fattier, for wild flavour. Red can be very strong. Only 5-10% of people in the UK eat game regularly, whereas in Europe, like France and Germany, it’s up to 70-80%. If you’re trying to introduce people to it then, as with almost all foods, you want the milder version so as not to put people off.”
Our final question to Scott, as we browsed the fridge in the converted vintage lorry that acts as his farm shop in the roadside food court that he’s developing, was if he were going to take his pick for dinner out the fridge what would he have and how would he cook it? “My favourite cut of game is venison shank. Slow cooked because it’s sort of like a pulled venison. There’s loads of flavour because it’s got the marrow as well. Put that in the slow cooker, a lamb shank would melt away but this stays the same size and it would feed three of you comfortably. It’s a bit different to the standard answer – lots of people come in looking for diced venison for stews, or sausages or burgers.”
Keep an eye out here for our next Game Workshop cookery course to learn how to make the most of the varied game meats that we have available to us here in the UK.
