The magnitude and economic replacement value of wild meat obtained from ‘recreational’ big game hunting in the United States

Abstract Meat production has notable benefits for food security, nutrition and various production economies, but has elicited substantial negative environmental impacts. Recreational hunting provides an alternative to agricultural meat production for over 24 million hunters worldwide. This sustainably managed, legal activity may have important implications for human health, food security and conservation; however, unlike subsistence hunting practices in tropical and arctic regions and subregions, the scale and importance of wild meat procured through ‘recreational’ hunting have received very little attention. As part of the Wild Harvest Initiative ® , we quantified the mass of wild meat procured through state‐regulated big game hunting in the United States for the period 2014–2019 and then determined the economic cost of replacing this wild meat with domestic meat alternatives according to consumer preferences for domestic meat in the United States and the retail prices of those meat products. Specifically, we determined the cost of replacing the total mass, lean meat, protein and calorie content of wild meat with domestic alternatives. We also portrayed these data per capita, hunter, land area and hunter effort at the state level. We found that big game hunting in the United States generated 235.76 kt of wild meat per year, and that replacing this wild meat with an equivalent mass of domestic meat would cost $3.21 billion USD in 2024. Replacing the lean meat and protein from wild meat would cost even more ($3.79 and $4.21 billion, respectively), while it would cost $2.54 billion to replace the calories derived from wild meat with calories available from domestic sources. At this scale, wild meat harvesting likely has meaningful impacts on the health, food security and economies of many communities. Further, this wild meat harvest may positively contribute to conserving biodiversity by reducing dependence on industrial agricultural systems and through direct financial support for conservation efforts provided by the harvesting community. We argue that recreational hunting should be more rigorously considered in research and policy frameworks as an example of how regulated animal harvest can sustainably generate wild food while having positive economic and conservation outcomes. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.