Minnesota hunters donate 78,000 pounds of venison

[Len Backus]

In the first year of a new venison donation program, Minnesota hunters
donated 1,977 deer, creating the opportunity for 97 food shelves located
throughout Minnesota to distribute 78,000 pounds of venison.

?Overall, I think we had a very successful first year,? said Lou
Cornicelli, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) big game
program coordinator. ?Most of the deer donated came from areas with
overly high deer population densities, and the venison from those deer
was put to very good use.?

The donations were made possible by a new venison donation program that
allows hunters to donate harvested deer without having to pay processing
costs. Managed by the DNR and Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA),
the program?s goal is to provide a sought-after food source to those
in need while encouraging hunters to harvest additional animals to help
manage the deer herd.

?Hunters always could donate harvested deer,? Cornicelli said.
?But without funding, only a few deer were donated annually. The
infusion of new money allowed us to greatly expand the program.? The
program is funded by a legislative appropriation, a nonresident license
fee increase and voluntary donations when resident hunters purchase a
deer licenses.

Cornicelli said the hunting portion of the program is designed to allow
hunters to harvest extra deer in areas where deer populations are above
wildlife management goals. In 2007, permit areas that allowed individual
hunters to take more than one deer provided 95 percent of the donations.
Nearly 70 percent of donated deer came from permit areas that allowed
the harvest of five or more deer.

The program requires that hunters donate deer only to processors
certified by the MDA and that deer be free from signs of illness, field
dressed with the hide intact, free of visible decomposition or
contamination and properly identified with a DNR registration tag. In
2007, 72 certified processors distributed the venison to 97 Minnesota
food shelves.

[P KUNDA]

What the Greenies donate?

Peter

[Buffalobob]

What we donate is free medical service from trained board certified physicians. We make sandwiches and distribute them. We clean up the trash and beer cans you throw down in the national forests. We build trails in the National Parks. Those are just some of the the things my family does for free.

And we tolerate your insults and fight for your freedom to continue to insult us.

What do yo do?

[Buffalobob]

Well, I was so irritated by what I saw that I forgot why I came to this thread in the first place.
I would just say that Wyoming really makes it hard to donate meat. Their website does not give you instructions on how to do it unless they have changed it in the last few months. When I stopped in the Casper office it took nearly 20 minutes for them to find out themselves so they could tell me. It also cost me nearly $70 to donate about about 30 pounds of boned out antelope meat.

Maryland has gone to a system where the state pays for the butchers costs, although I expect the money comes from the hunting license revenue it is probably spread across all of the licenses.

Being as there are so many out of state hunters in Wyoming it would seem like they could get their act together