WMOA News

Deer Gun Season Underway; Hunters Can Contribute to Food Charities

Posted on: 11/26/2012

Ohio’s deer-gun season is underway. The main season started this morning and runs through next Sunday. There’s a second gun season on December 15-16.

More than 420,000 hunters are out in Ohio’s woods and fields, from Marietta to Defiance.

Vicki Ervin with the ODNR Division of Wildlife says that while the start of deer-gun season is a big deal, deer hunting has actually been going on for several weeks.

“There are folks hunting now at different times if the year because we’ve got a really long archery season that a lot of people also take part in. It started on September 29 and it’ll continue until February 3 of 2013,” she states.

Ohio hunters harvested more than 100,000 deer last year.

While some people find hunting unpleasant or even abhorrent, Vicki Ervin says it plays a key role in maintaining the balance of nature.

“One of the benefits is population control," she says. "Without the hunters, the deer would just reproduce to the point where – the numbers would just go off the charts. They really don’t have any other predators than humans.”

And that, she says, would lead to far more deer-car crashes; to more crops being eaten by deer; and the herd would become less healthy as it depleted food sources.

Speaking of food, Ervin says hunters are helping people in need.

“We have a program in Ohio called Farmers and Hunters Feeding the Hungry, where they happily accept donations of venison, and they’ll pay for the cost of processing it as long as the hunter takes it to a processor that’s in their program,” she explains.

The Farmers and Hunters Feeding the Hungry website is fhfh.org. A list of participating butchers includes one in Washington County - Hickory Hills Meat Processing at 144 Groves Avenue on Slaughterhouse Hill here in Marietta. Their phone number is 740-374-6916.