Jerry Davis is a retired biology professor who grew up hunting and fishing in Lafayette County and now lives in Iowa County. He writes for several Wisconsin newspapers, including the Wisconsin State Journal, hosts an outdoors radio program and has a weekly outdoors spot on WIBA.
Peculiar events are reported every year when 640,000 gun-deer hunters spend some or all of the nine-day season in forests waiting for deer to walk past.
Sometimes, however, rummy or even grotesque events show up well after venison is in a freezer.
Some years ago I used to give a colleague a deer carcass each year because he loved venison but no longer hunted.
His venison roasts ended up in various regions of our country, because he took wild game meat to Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings in Colorado, Florida and other places where he was invited to share holiday joy.
Not being one to come empty-handed and not trusting a mixup during an airline baggage transfer, my colleague always made sure his gift of venison was part of his carry-on luggage.
Picture this: A frozen venison roast, wrapped in freezer paper, falling to the floor when the airplane banked to approach a landing. Then the paper catching on a seat leg and coming undone. Now this raw, frozen, unwrapped venison was rolling on the airplane floor.
What else could go wrong? Well, of course, a bullet from the cartridge that brought down the doe fell out of the venison, and now a bullet was rumbling in the aisle.
What a fiasco that situation would cause today with airline security!
A not-so-humorous happening occurred recently, too, after venison had been cooked on a grill, as part of venison kabobs, wrapped in bacon. Each bacon strip was held tightly to the venison with a round, double-pointed, white birch toothpick. When thoroughly cooked kabobs were moved to a plate and served to several men playing cards, each man grabbed a kabob, placed the morsel in his mouth, bit down on the meat and pulled the toothpick out and tossed the pick back on the plate.
It is likely one of those used toothpicks stuck to a still-waiting-to-be-eaten kabob. The next man to place some meat in his mouth, swallowed that pick, plus the meat, all the while being careful to remove the pick holding the bacon.
Fast forward from this scenario about a year. Our older son, Tim, paid a visit to an emergency room recently, had an CT Scan of his abdomen and a blood work up in anticipation of surgery to remove his appendix.
A surgeon doing exploratory surgery found the still whole birch toothpick resting at the end of the small intestine, neatly pocketed in an intestine fold. One sharp tip of the pick had recently punctured the intestine wall.
The surgeon said the toothpick could have been in the intestine up to a year and what saved Tim's life was the fold the intestine formed over the pick.
Humans do not have enzymes to digest plant cell walls, such as those in white birch wood. These cell walls contain non-digestible cellulose and lignin. If our digestive system contained cellulase and lignase enzymes, the pick would have ended up becoming nutrients rather than problems for this 41-year-old man.
Even though venison is very nutritious protein, low in fat and enjoyed after hunts, there are times when some not-so-nutritious things happen when the venison goes through our digestive systems.
Some people are worrying about chronic wasting disease causing us problems, but what may cause us problems is how we eat venison, not some disease that has never infected humans.