Vegan to Venison

Pictured above is my wife Margaret during late Muzzleloader season during a 6 degree day here in Kentucky.

My wife grew up in a house where meat didn't exist. Her parents weren't preachy about it. They just couldn't square the ethics. If you can't know where it came from, if you can't trust how it lived and died, why eat it at all? Easier to skip it entirely. So she did. For years.

Then she met me.

I'm not going to pretend I converted her with some elegant argument over dinner. It was slower than that. Messier. A lot of conversations in the truck, sitting in blinds, walking through timber. What I wanted her to see wasn't the killing. It was everything else. The hours of glassing empty ridges. The four a.m. alarms in November when your breath hangs in the cab and you're wondering why you do this to yourself. The way your hands shake when you finally get one on the ground, not from cold but from something you can't name.

That's the part nobody talks about when they talk about hunting. The gravity of it. You don't just take meat from the woods. You take a life, and you carry that weight home with you, and somehow that weight makes the meal mean something it never could wrapped in plastic under fluorescent lights.

Her parents wanted ethical food. I get it. The industrial meat system is a horror show and everybody knows it, even the people who pretend they don't. But their solution was subtraction. Ours became participation.

Here's what I've learned: grocery stores made us soft. Not weak, exactly, but dependent. Vulnerable in ways we don't think about until the power goes out or the trucks stop running. And yeah, maybe that sounds like prepper talk, but it's also just true. My grandfather could feed his family from the land if he had to. Can you? Could I, ten years ago? No chance.

Hunting taught me how little I actually knew. You think you're going to walk into the woods and come out with dinner? Good luck. It takes years to learn where deer bed, how thermals work, when to sit tight and when to move. You'll blow more opportunities than you capitalize on. You'll come home empty-handed way more than you'd like. And that's the point. That difficulty is the barrier, and most people bounce right off it and head back to the meat case because it's easier. I don't blame them. But I also don't want to be them anymore.

The real turning point came when my wife got pregnant.

She's a small woman. Always has been. And she wanted a natural birth, which meant we had months of work ahead of us. Building strength. Getting her body ready to do the hardest physical thing it would ever do. And protein became non-negotiable.

You know what's hard? Finding meat you actually trust when you've spent your whole life avoiding it for ethical reasons. You know what's not hard? Walking to the chest freezer in your garage and pulling out backstraps from a buck you killed yourself on public land. An animal that lived wild, ate what deer are supposed to eat, died quick with an arrow through both lungs. No feed lots. No antibiotics. No mystery.

She ate venison through that whole pregnancy. Roasts, steaks, ground meat in everything. And when she delivered our daughter, at 8 pounds on the nose, no complications, no epidural, I'm convinced that meat had something to do with it. The nurses kept commenting on how strong she was. How ready her body seemed.

You can't buy that at Whole Foods. I don't care how much you spend.

And look, I'm not here to trash vegetarians. I'm really not. But I will say this: a diet isn't ethical just because it doesn't include meat. You ever look at what goes into those plant-based protein substitutes? The seed oils, the processed garbage, the stuff your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food? There are entire countries where vegetarianism is the cultural norm and cardiovascular disease is through the roof. India's a prime example. Fried everything, cooked in oils that wreck your arteries, but technically vegetarian. Meanwhile I'm eating deer that lived on acorns and clover, and somehow I'm the one people worry about.

I don't know. Maybe I'm biased. Probably am.

But my wife went from never touching meat to sitting in a tree stand with a bow in her hands, waiting for a doe to step into range. That's not something I talked her into. That's something she chose after watching what this life looks like up close.

The freezer's full. The baby's healthy. And she's already asking about next season.