Pay the Butcher, Not the Body Shop

By Robert E. Wright, Ph.D.

Two seasons ago, I killed seven deer in Michigan. I could have killed eleven. I stopped at seven because the tags cost me less than $200 but the butcher cost me more than $700, and it was three weeks before Christmas.

That is not a hard-luck story. It is a price signal, and it explains much of why Americans keep hitting deer with their cars.

Michigan drivers reported 58,324 crashes with deer in 2024. Those wrecks injured 1,816 people and killed fourteen, half of them on motorcycles. Kent County alone logged 2,097. Nationwide, drivers hit well over a million large animals a year at an average repair bill near $4,000, and that counts the sheet metal, not the ambulance.

We built this problem on purpose. Around 1900, market hunters had stripped the deer out of most settled parts of the country. A body of law now called the North American Wildlife Conservation Model reversed that. It outlawed the sale of wild meat, imposed seasons and bag limits, and taxed guns and ammunition to pay the game wardens. It worked. Michigan's southern counties, nearly empty of deer a century ago, now carry the state's heaviest herds and lead it in collisions.

But the Model has no throttle. Every mechanism in it was built to increase deer populations. Nothing in it was built to bring numbers down, and the one instrument that can bring them down is a hunting public the model does not control. Licensed hunters grew from roughly 10.3 million in 2001 to 11.4 million in 2020, slower than the country as a whole, so the share of Americans who hunt fell and likely will not soon reverse. Those who remain hunt fewer days and kill fewer deer than their fathers did.

The usual answers call for more hunters or more government. Both are slow. There is a faster lever, and it costs about a hundred dollars.

Ask a hunter what keeps him from filling another tag and he will rarely say the license because antlerless tags are cheap. He will say the processor. Getting a whole deer cut, wrapped, and frozen runs about $100, more if you want sausage. Two generations ago a suburban father hung his deer in a tree in his yard and butchered it himself. Now he pays someone, for the same reason he pays someone to change his oil.

That hundred dollars is the whole problem. The hunter pays it. Everyone else collects the benefit of one fewer doe standing on the shoulder at dusk. It is a textbook wedge between private cost and public gain, and here the party gaining most is easy to name. Auto insurers write the checks for all 58,324 of those crashes.

So let them subsidize doe processing fees. Insurers in each state should form a consortium that reimburses hunters up to $100 per antlerless deer processed at a licensed shop. Fraud control comes nearly free because conservation officers already audit tags and inspect processors. The paperwork exists. Only the money is missing.

Will it pay? Round numbers: at $100 a deer against a $4,000 repair, insurers break even if forty additional deer removed prevent one collision. Michigan carries close to two million deer and reports 58,000 crashes, or about thirty-four deer for every crash. That comparison is crude, a stock set against a flow, and the marginal deer is not the average deer. But the crude number lands on the profitable side of break-even while counting only bent fenders and ignoring 1,816 injuries and fourteen funerals. Any actuary with claims data can sharpen it in an afternoon. My point is that the estimate is not obviously wrong, which is more than most policy proposals can claim.

Why won't insurers free-ride on one another, no pun intended? Because a single company acting alone pays the whole bill and keeps only a slice of the savings. Hence the consortium. Insurers already fund crash-safety research together. Deer are a smaller lift than barrier tests.

Won't the deer come from the wrong places? Partly, yes. Collisions cluster where subdivisions meet woodlots, and those are exactly the places where firearms are banned, parcels are small, and access is hard. A subsidy by itself would mostly reward hunters in the north woods, where pressure is heavy and traffic light. Pair it with wider suburban archery seasons and managed access near roads, and the money pulls where it should.

Why doesn’t this already exist? It does, in part, and that is the best argument for it. Michigan Sportsmen Against Hunger and Hunters Feeding Michigan already pay processors so that hunters can donate deer at no cost to themselves. The plumbing is built and it works. What it lacks is scale and the right backer. The Michigan Farm Bureau's venison task force gave those two programs $25,000 last year, about the cost of six collisions. Charity is already bankrolling a service that saves insurers millions.

Two changes would fix that. Cover the deer a hunter keeps, not only the ones he gives away, because, after they kill their buck most hunters hunt for the venison and a donation-only program leaves the largest margin untouched. And fund it out of auto premiums rather than out of hunters’ own license add-ons, which is where much of the money comes from today. Something is backwards when hunters pass the hat to solve a problem that costs insurers and drivers hundreds of millions of dollars.

The four deer I did not shoot are still out there, somewhere between my woods and your front bumper. A hundred dollars a head is all it would take to remove them.