I was at a pet store buying yet another weeks worth of cat food at $.60 cents a can, or $.30 cents per day for each cat when I had a thought. I was watching television a few weeks ago and something came on about the number of deer killed on Illinois highways was about ten thousand deer a year! According to the show, the state of Illinois composts the dead deer as it the cheapest way to safely dispose of the dead deer.
And I am in a pet store paying $.60 cents a can for cat food made from venison because it is cheap compared to other flavors, and the cat’s like it! I did a Google search on the words, ‘dead deer landfill’, and the probable national numbers of government disposed dead deer are mind boggling by any stretch of the imagination. Of course as things go I could not find anything worthwhile on that search for Illinois, but I found some numbers for the states of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. The rest of the country’s daily deer kill can be imagined from those numbers.
One insurance company referenced, estimates about 101,000 deer are killed each year in the states of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York! There is a problem with wasting disease in some states around the United States, so cutting the numbers I found in half, that still is over 50,000 dead deer that could be used for cat and dog food.
I started wondering why those animals are not turned into pet food? Why is there canned cat and dog food in pet stores all starting at $.50 or higher a can, and a titanic number of pounds of deer meat that could be made into pet food just wasted? Some areas and states are paying high fees to have deer carcasses disposed of because there are too many dead deer to go into landfills.
Guessing that the usable meat on average from even those 50K dead deer is 50 pounds an animal, that works out to 2,500,000 pounds of possible high protein pet food thrown away in those three mentioned states alone! I ran it across my little calculator twice, because that is such an amazing number, an estimated two million five hundred thousand pounds of deer meat wasted each year in just three states. Wow!
The can size I buy for $.60 is six ounces, but for the sake of simple math, let’s pretend it is five ounces. That comes out to roughly 833,000 cans of cat food. 833,000 cans of cat food at sixty cents a can comes out to just short of a cool half million dollars! There has to be some sort of profit in there somehow? That is just from three states! Once that figure goes across the major deer road kill states in the United States…well you get the idea.
The same idea can be applied to the more distasteful animal killings in the world. If we are legally killing a species of animal just for its fur, or some other part of it, why can’t they be transformed into pet food? At least they would not go to waste completely. I am not advocating the killing of any animals only for their fur, but it happens, and we should make the most of it we can.
Here in the Southwest, there are companies that buy used cows (dead cattle) from stockyards and holding pens. They manage to make a profit and they are paying for a cow carcass that is no longer useful for human consumption. I sure am not an expert on business, and I am not sure my math is all that good either, but the concept is there, and I am sure someone could figure out how to make a profit at it?
It sure does seem like there is some money in road kill deer pet food for someone where a pet food cannery exists? Or maybe I don’t have a clue, let me know?
