I wonder what percentage of deer never go to a processor. I know we used to never take anything to one. We occasionally do now only to ave speciality items made, but do most ourselves. I wonder how many ppl still clean and store their meat at home without processing. I bet it’s nowhere near as many as it used to be. I know a lot of hunters who couldn’t process a deer if you showed them how step by step.
Matt, I used to process all of my own deer, without exception. Now, I have found a processor I like, so I take all my deer in now, it's just so much easier and they do a pretty good job.
I can only speak for our club, but 100% of our deer are taken to a processor. We have as many or more deer on our property than we've had, at least since I've been in the club (7 years) but we are killing fewer. We are becoming more selective in the deer we kill. I sat on a 1 acre greenfield last week, which I don't often do, but I saw 16 deer in one evening, 9 does/little ones and 7 bucks (4 with racks), and I never raised my gun. There were 11 deer on the field at one time (7 bucks and 4 does).
I pay to be in a club with low pressure. If you look at GC numbers, ours are not that great. We killed a LOT more deer when we had more members. Now that our membership is less than half of what it was, we don't kill that many. As more and more private land is being managed for quality and quantity of deer (I know those two are somewhat at odds with each other), I think the GC numbers may not accurately reflect the deer densities.
Maybe we are atypical, but we use GC to report our deer, we take all our kills to the processor, and we are killing fewer deer than we did in the past, out of choice. Even if the limit was raised, that would not affect our kills. In our case, I'm not sure if there is any useful data being obtained through GC???
