To get one more comment in on this already-lengthy thread, you got some bum info. In some states, a shotgun, with either slug or buckshot, is all you can use to hunt large game. The reason is simple. A bullet from a centerfire rifle will carry up to five miles (not accurately, but still moving fast enough to be lethal), but a slug maybe a mile, and buckshot much less than that. In the more densely populated states, where you might be hunting a mile or two from a subdivision, less range is obviously safer in case of a miss.

It leads me to believe that the most logically coherent vegan position would be to eschew all meat, but accept the needs/desires of carnivores and omnivores without comment.

I could live with that.

It’s apparently obvious to moralizers that animals shouldn’t be eaten and plants should be. Not to me. Everything alive wishes to stay that way.

that’s the word I was looking for.

Biting down on a bullet, or buckshot pellet, is not a pleasant experience. Bullets sometimes fragment when they hit, and some can be left in the flesh, although not in prime cuts if you’re any kind of a marksman. Doesn’t happen with an arrow.

I don’t know what size bullet you were referring to, but the typical centerfire bullet used in North America for whitetail or mule deer probably ranges from 130 grains on the light side, and 220 on the heavy side. When I put up the bow and brought down the rifle, I used either 150 or 180 grain bullets in a Remington Model 700 in .308 caliber (7.62mm NATO). Or if I happened to be close to populated areas, I used a 12-ga. shotgun with a slug. Didn’t carry as far as a rifle bullet, but had all the stopping power I could want.

The impact of a bullet from a .30-06 has produced coaxial cavities through the deer’s heart and lungs, permanent and temporary, and exited the other side of the animal, generally leaving in the vitals a light sprinkling of bullet fragments. (The bullet has been traveling almost 3000 ft/s and spinning 1 revolution per 0.8 ft, ie, 240,000 rpm, so it tends to mushroom and have lead ablated from the frontal surface. This is not true of monometallic – usually pure copper – bullets.) The deer may be quickly gutted, skinned, cleaned, and aged in the dark for a week at 41F. But it usually isn’t.

Air rushes in (a double pneumothorax) and blood from much of the body and brain pours back to the chest cavity; the animal dies of asphyxia.

The steer – either sledged or brain-stunned with a pneumatic or powder driven ‘humane killer’ – is instantly hooked by a gambrel, inverted by a hoist, its throat slashed (the heart has not yet quit beating despite the brain injury), and its guts freed by a slaughterer using a knife with a very long handle. It is skinned and aged for 1 – 3 weeks before butchering.

Eating

The deer meat may have lead fragments, though these mostly or entirely are avoided by proper dressing and butchering or, as I implied, by using copper bullets. The deer’s hormones are natural and it contains no antibiotics. Deer from a relatively small portion of the US should be tested for chronic wasting disease, no case of which has ever been documented as infecting humans; discard if positive. Venison is very low in fat and cholesterol. Western mule deer are somewhat gamier than whitetails. Venison is fairly horrible if shot badly, treated badly after death, or cooked beyond medium rare; otherwise a treat for the gods. Deer liver is actually pretty good even for those who don’t much like liver. Moose liver makes a grand pate.

The steer will have been injected and bolused with hormones and antibiotics throughout its life, and at all times will have a diet somewhat to extremely unnatural. (Evolutionarily our cattle developed to eat euro-asian grasses,; at best they now eat our grasses; at worst, sileage, artificial feed, supplements and even the ground-up effluvia and scraps of other cattle.) Mad cow disease has crossed to humans, but (I think) not on this continent. Beef is graded higher the more marbled it is with fat. That fat makes it possible to cook it to a greater degree of doneness without wholly destroying the flavor. I won’t touch beef liver.

Killing

If you buy supermarket meat, you are forcing someone – usually a poor black or hispanic – to undergo the psychic changes of being a killer, for you. I understand that the one doing the killing is transferred out regularly because the volume of death they deal makes them weird. If you hunt, you subject yourself to those changes, but in a natural, low-volume, high-precision, intensely-focused way. It seems more honest to me. In fact, while I’m happy to hear from vegans, I won’t abide people who claim moral purity based on displacing their killing to people below them on the economic scale. I also believe that until you take an animal through the whole cycle from free woodland creature to table, you don’t have the right to eat meat.

I know first hand that the initial cleaning of an animal makes the difference if you can eat the meat or not.

Then there’s how it’s cooked.

Everything else (and I’d place diet way ahead of age, unless you’re going mutton-lamb angle) is minor though important in grading the result.

I don’t deer hunt myself, but I do know that folks who hunt at range frequently mention that deer shot correctly will not seem to realize they’ve been hit before they’re dead.

I also know that my aunt and uncle (who hunt with bows) have had to track deer for miles on a hit that should have killed the deer. (They both love life, so they don’t do the usual “oh, I missed and can’t find the arrow” thing.)