The deer sharpshooters of Maui
Maui has a problem: too many deer, not enough hunters. So on a dark, humid night, Nate joined a group of elite hunters as they endeavor to turn an ecological nightmare into a source of profitable, high-protein venison.
Over the course of a few hours, he watches the employees of Maui Nui Venison methodically shoot dozens of deer, collect their carcasses, and speed them to a mobile slaughterhouse for processing – all under the watchful eyes of the USDA.
Can you bring the efficiency of the slaughterhouse to the natural world? And is commercial hunting a solution for America’s over-abundance of deer?
Featuring: Keahi Camara, Erin Yamauchi, Jake Muise, Yasmin Tayag and Jay Marcoullier
The crew at Maui Nui Venison debrief after a night where they harvested more than 100 axis deer. Credit: Nate Hegyi
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
Read Yasmin Tayag’s argument that Americans must start eating more deer.
A University of Wisconsin professor outlined how commercial hunting would work in the U.S. in a 2011 paper.
Check out photos and videos of my trip with Maui Nui venison at our Patreon.
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CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported and produced by Nate Hegyi
Mixed by Nate Hegyi
Editing by Taylor Quimby
Our staff also includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, Marina Henke, and Jessica Hunt
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Will Harrison, DAJANA, Roots and Recognition, Lennon Hutton, Blood Red Sun, Speigelstadt, Van Sandano, and View Points.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: From NHPR, this is Outside/In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Nate Hegyi.
Keahi Camara: So this is where all of our crew have their personal belongings, their uniforms, our wet lockers that have all of our rain gear, our bags that we use for the night.
Nate Hegyi: I am standing in a bunkhouse on the Hawaiian island of Maui. There's a crew of guys getting ready for work. They're wearing gray athletic hoodies, hiking boots, and camouflage pants—very paramilitary vibes.
Keahi Camara: We'll come in for like a week, stay here, sleep here, work all week, go home for a few days, come back for another week, and then we're off for two weeks.
Nate Hegyi: I'm one of a couple reporters here, and our guide is Keahi Camara. Keahi is in his late 30s. He's Native Hawaiian, and he has the lean, sinewy body of a rock climber. And there is a major "bro" energy in this place.
Crew: Oh no, I've already seen ass slapping, I've seen... Bromance! There is so much bromance going on. I saw nipples! [Laughter] I mean, we only see each other for 12 days. For 12 days! That's a long time. There's separation issues.
Nate Hegyi: They've even got a commander of sorts who gives them the kind of pep talk that you would hear in a football locker room.
Crew Leader: We don't do it when it's convenient. We don't do it when it feels good. We don't do it—certainly don't fucking do it when it looks good. We just keep showing up.
Nate Hegyi: But this isn't a football team. These guys are an elite squad of professional hunters. They work for Maui Nui Venison, one of only two companies in America that hunt deer at scale and then sell the meat commercially. And tonight, they're going to go out and kill more than a hundred wild animals.
Nate Hegyi: Is there a specific brand of gun that you use, or rifle you use?
Keahi Camara: For our main shooting guns, we use these things called Accuracy International, AI. And that's what the British Army uses for their snipers.
Nate Hegyi: But first, they gather together for a little ritual. It's called a kahoʻa.
Keahi Camara: It's kind of like a team chant that just gets our brains switched over to, like, okay, now we've got to perform.
Crew Chant: He maʻaka kai! Eia!
He maʻaka hana! Eia!
He maʻaka maha! Eia!
He maʻaka haʻanai kanaka! Eia!
Let's go! [Clapping, cheering]
Nate Hegyi: Maui's got a problem: too many deer, not enough hunters. So I spent the night with the crew of Maui Nui Venison to find out what commercial-scale hunting actually looks like. Can you bring the efficiency of the slaughterhouse to the natural world? And is commercial hunting a solution for America's overabundance of deer?
Keahi Camara: All clear, we got three. Copy that.
Jake Muise: We, for sure, have the best protein on the market from a nutritional standpoint.
Nate Hegyi: Stick around.
Nate Hegyi: From NHPR, this is Outside/In. I'm Nate Hegyi. I'm in the passenger seat of a UTV. Now, if you aren't familiar, imagine if an off-road pickup truck and a golf cart had a baby—that is a UTV. Keahi Camara is at the wheel. In the back seat, there's another reporter and one of Maui Nui's PR reps, a woman named Erin Yamauchi.
Erin Yamauchi: You guys are all a little bit nuts, huh?
Keahi Camara: A little bit, yeah.
Erin Yamauchi: It's a good nuts! [Laughter]
Nate Hegyi: Now, I have shot and processed deer before, but this feels more like a special ops mission. It's near midnight, and we are ripping down a dirt road on some ranch land in Maui's mountainous foothills. As we're driving, the UTV ahead of us comes to a quick stop, so we stop too.
KeahiCamara: [Whispering] They're maybe about a hundred yards ahead. They just turned off their lights over there. They probably see deer.
Erin Yamauchi: Do you guys have night vision, or how do you not spook them?
Keahi Camara: We have thermal imaging, so it's like night vision, but they just see heat, yeah.
Nate Hegyi: The UTV in front of us is called the harvest bike. Their job is to shoot deer, as many as they can. And we—we are on the rover bike. It's our job to wait, watch, and collect the bodies after they've been taken out. Suddenly, there's a flash.
[Gunshot]
Keahi Camara: Probably a miss, yeah.
Nate Hegyi: If you didn't hear him, Keahi tells us it was a miss. He starts the UTV back up, and we move on.
[Engine starting]
Nate Hegyi: The whole reason I'm in Hawaii for this story traces back to an article I read called "Eat More Deer".
Yasmin Tayag: The first time I had venison, it was prepared as a carpaccio in a restaurant.
Nate Hegyi: This is Yasmin Tayag, a staff writer for The Atlantic. She's a non-hunter who has recently been introduced to the world of venison.
Yasmin Tayag: There was almost like a... I don't want to say a stink, but there was like an odor to it, like an animal odor to it that I can imagine would be really off-putting. But to me, it just registered as a complexity and depth of flavor that I'd never experienced before.
Nate Hegyi: The most abundant deer in America is the whitetail. Nowadays, there are about 35 million of them in the US, mostly concentrated east of the Mississippi.
Yasmin Tayag: The last time deer were this overabundant was before America existed as a country.
Nate Hegyi: They have few natural predators to kill them anymore. Suburban development has created acres and acres of delicious grass to munch on, and shorter, warmer winters because of climate change mean fewer of them die off every year. And all of this has led to a deer crisis.
Yasmin Tayag: The deer are running into traffic, a lot. You know, tens of thousands of car crashes involve deer, I think, in the Northeast. They do carry diseases, in particular, they carry the ticks that spread Lyme disease. And they also, when they are overabundant, they tip the ecosystem of our forests out of balance. They're a big social and environmental nuisance.
Nate Hegyi: In her piece, Yasmin argues that as beef becomes more expensive and American cattle herds decline, more of us should be turning to wild venison—that we should start harvesting these animals on a commercial scale. There's a big problem, though. In most of the US, that is illegal. Deer are protected from commercial harvesting by law. But in Hawaii, the deer here are an exception, because they're invasive.
Keahi Camara: All clear, we got three. Good copy.
Nate Hegyi: So far, it has been a night of stop-and-go, stop-and-go, whisper-whisper. But now, finally, a half hour into our shift, the harvest bike has taken down three deer.
Keahi Camara: Eyes on one.
Nate Hegyi: The deer that Keahi and his crew are hunting are called axis deer. They're a lot smaller than the white-tailed deer you'll see on the mainland. And they were sent here as a gift, from India to the King of Hawaii back in the 1860s. And they lived on a single island until they were introduced to Maui a hundred years later.
Keahi Camara: The deer was introduced by the state as a hunting animal. After World War II, we had all these veterans coming back to the states, coming back to Hawaii. They wanted to shoot. They were itching to use the skill sets that they learned in the war, so there was a big push for hunting after the war.
Nate Hegyi: But then, they spread like wildfire. The axis deer have no natural predators here, and unlike white-tailed deer, they breed all year round, which means their population grows by 20% to 30% every year. Hawaii's wildlife agency estimates that there are at least 26,000 deer on the island. That would put it at one of the highest deer densities in the country. And surveys by Maui Nui Venison suggest there are actually a lot more than the official estimates say.
On the rover bike, it's our job to actually go out and collect the dead animals. That means leaving the UTV and searching by headlamp in the grass.
Nate Hegyi: [Walking sound] We are slipping and sliding on wet grass at midnight, trying to find another dead deer.
Nate Hegyi: Once they locate them, they haul them back and throw them in the bed of the UTV. I offered to give Keahi a hand.
Keahi Camara: You want to help with the drag?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, tiny little guy.
Nate Hegyi: We grab it by the legs and start walking back.
Nate Hegyi: I'm good, I'm good, I'm good.
Keahi Camara: Go ahead.
Nate Hegyi: I slip, I fall, but Keahi isn't even breaking a stride. This is hard work, and we've got to be really fast about it. That's because as a commercial operation, Maui Nui Venison is subject to the same sorts of USDA regulations as a beef processing plant is. They only have a couple of hours between when the deer is shot to when it needs to be cleaned, eviscerated, and skinned. The clock is ticking.
Nate Hegyi: While I'm helping to collect these deer, I am seeing the gory evidence of another USDA requirement—one that a sharpshooter named Mikey sums up best.
Mikey: Viewer discretion is advised! [Laughter]
Nate Hegyi: "Viewer discretion is advised," he says. To be considered a humane death, livestock must be, quote, "rendered immediately unconscious". In a slaughterhouse, this is often done with a captive bolt pistol, like the one Javier Bardem uses in No Country for Old Men. But in the wild, it's got to be done with a gunshot—to the head.
[Gunshot]
Nate Hegyi: Compared to hunting, where most people are targeting the torso, the result of a headshot is gruesome. Some of the deer have half of their skulls missing, or the pressure of the bullet has made their eyes bulge out of their sockets. So I ask Keahi.
Nate Hegyi: How long did it take you to get used to that kind of shot?
Keahi Camara: Pretty quickly, actually. Even our guys when they first come out, they're like, "Oh wow, that's crazy." And then... after your first run, after a week, you're just like, "Oh." You just saw almost a thousand animals die, you just get numb to it real quick.
Nate Hegyi: "You just get numb to it real quick," he said.
Nate Hegyi: You know, I can see if a group like PETA or something like that had a single shot of the back of that vehicle with the two yearlings, fawns, and the violence of it, like what would you say to people that would be like, "That is an incredibly violent and cruel thing to do"?
Keahi Camara: I would say... these animals need to be shot, harvested. I mean, the state has a bounty out on them, so like, they need to be controlled one way or another. These animals are living free, wherever they want to roam, you know, even more so than domestic animals that get penned up in fence units. These animals don't care about fences, they'll go wherever they please, they're wild. And then one day, their lights are out.
Nate Hegyi: As a hunter, I've prided myself on some of these same ideas—that the meat in my freezer is more ethically sourced than the beef at the grocery store. And despite how graphic they look, these headshots are arguably more humane even than the hunting that I do. When I shoot a deer in the chest, the animal still takes 30 seconds to a minute to die. But a headshot is instant. Though, it is hard not to feel conflicted about what I'm seeing, too. To me, you should always feel something—sadness, excitement, pride, probably all those things when you kill a deer. It's not something that I want to become numb to.
Nate Hegyi: This operation, though, it sits somewhere between the ethics and traditions of the hunting community and the efficiency of a commercial operation that must be scaled to be profitable. And when I'm hunting in the woods alone, I follow the rules and the regulations not because I have to, but because it is the right thing to do. Here, there is literally a USDA inspector in the UTV with the shooters every single night. If they break the rules, the whole operation can get shut down.
Nate Hegyi: What happens when you shoot, you don't miss, you hit it in the neck, the chest, everything else like that, the animal dies, but the USDA doesn't sign off on it?
Keahi Camara: Sadly, we have to leave it in the field. They call it slash and denature. The USDA won't allow us to take it back. We have a denature spray, we have to spray on it so nobody goes and picks it up.
Reporter: And the guys can't take it home or anything like that?
Keahi Camara: Yeah, it's one of those weird bureaucracy rules. Just like a hunting kill, you know, like I always hate leaving it in the field, but yeah, it's just one of their rules.
Nate Hegyi: We sat there in the truck for another couple of seconds. Then the radio squawks.
Radio Chatter: All clear, got two more.
Keahi Camara: Good copy. All clear, they got two more.
Nate Hegyi: This is pretty much how the rest of the night goes. Shoot, find deer, load deer onto the back of the UTV.
Crew Member: If there's blood on your hands, the wet rags work better.
Nate Hegyi: And once it is full with more than a dozen dead deer, we race back to base camp, where a mobile slaughterhouse is set up to turn all of these deer into venison. That's after a break.
Nate Hegyi: From NHPR, this is Outside/In. I'm Nate Hegyi. After four hours of riding across a ranch in Maui shooting and collecting deer, the UTV I'm in pulls back into base camp, where music is wafting out of a pair of big, white, air-conditioned trailers in the parking lot.
Nate Hegyi: Our guide, Keahi, explains that in order to sell meat from these wild animals, they need to make sure that the animals were healthy, just like they would at a regular slaughterhouse.
Keahi Camara: They'll process the deer right here, take out all of their guts, save their organs. We put them in bins, and all these bins are numbered. So we have a tag that goes on the deer, the same organs go in a numbered bin, so when the vet looks at everything, if there's anything out of place, they'll go and verify on the actual carcass.
Nate Hegyi: When I get to the opening of the trailer, there is blood on the floor as a guy saws off a hanging deer's head. This is where the deer will stop looking like deer and start looking like venison. They are washed, gutted, and skinned in much the same way that a cow or a lamb is. Keahi and some of the others are unloading more deer onto a table outside the trailer. Again, for a hunter like me, the scale here is wild.
Nate Hegyi: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25... 25 deer right now.
Nate Hegyi: But in the meatpacking industry, these numbers would be considered boutique. A mid-sized slaughterhouse might kill 600 cattle a day. Another thing that sticks out as really unusual here is that most of these deer are does, young males, and even fawns. In the hunting community, killing fawns would raise an eyebrow. But killing them for population management is another matter. A young axis deer can start breeding at just six months old. And also, young deer and females just taste better than a big mature buck, in the same way that folks eat lamb instead of mutton—adult sheep. So it all makes sense. But it also makes this scene look like Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Bambi.
Nate Hegyi: And that's going to have to be something the American people will have to swallow if Yasmin Tayag can make her case that commercial harvesting begins on the mainland, too.
Yasmin Tayag: There are two big reasons that are very obvious to me. One, there are too many deer and they are causing havoc; and two, this is a perfect opportunity to harvest some good, lean red meat.
Nate Hegyi: Humans are actually the last abundant predator of deer in the eastern US. Every year, recreational hunters kill about 6 million deer. But in a lot of states, that has not been enough to stop their growth. And the number of hunters out in the woods has been decreasing every year, largely because the older generation of hunters is dying out and there aren't as many young people replacing them. Which is why Yasmin is arguing for commercial hunts—a lot like what's happened in Maui, only in places with too many deer, all under the watchful eye of the USDA.
Yasmin Tayag: To me, I see it as not so different from the way we try to control deer populations now—culling, hiring sharpshooters to kill deer. The benefit of commercializing it would be providing meat for the public, generating money for wildlife agencies, and potentially creating jobs.
Nate Hegyi: Logistically, there would be challenges to commercial hunting on the mainland. Some of the highest-density deer areas in the Northeast are densely populated with homes and humans, so safety would have to be a priority. Many areas are also heavily forested, making it harder to kill deer in the numbers they do in Maui. But the biggest pushback Yasmin has heard about this idea actually comes from hunters.
Yasmin Tayag: It's almost a spiritual or philosophical argument: America's game is not for sale. They belong to the people, not to be profited off of, and it is our duty to protect them.
Nate Hegyi: More than a century ago, America had many commercial hunters who nearly wiped out animals like bison, ducks, and white-tailed deer. Conservationists and politicians acted to save what was left by passing strict state and federal laws—the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation—which declared that wild game is public property and cannot be hunted commercially. This is the bedrock of modern conservation and a huge reason why game populations rebounded. But you could argue it went too far, and that's why we're in the pickle we're in today.
There is an irony in all of this. In order to make their case, advocates of commercial hunting on the mainland will have to convince hunters and lawmakers that it won't wipe out deer, just manage them. But for Maui Nui Venison, where the deer are invasive, wiping them out would also put them out of a job.
Jay Marcoullier: How do we produce the best product for our customers? It takes craftsmanship and skills.
Nate Hegyi: This is Jay Marcoullier, the head butcher at Maui Nui Venison. He gave me a quick warning before I got a 6 a.m. tour of Maui Nui's butcher shop.
Jay Marcoullier: I guess you could call it controlled chaos in there. It's loud, there's music, machines going, the floor is slippery.
Nate Hegyi: If you've ever worked in a restaurant, this scene is probably familiar. Early morning, blasting music to stay awake, this group of butchers in white frocks is turning deer into sirloins, rib chops, and ground venison. Maui Nui sells its meat through a tiered pricing structure: Hawaii residents can buy a box of venison for about $11 a pound—cheaper than beef in grocery stores here. The company also gives about 10% of its meat away for free in community freezers scattered across the island—kind of like those little free libraries you see, but for venison.
JAY Marcoullier: Like I tell the team, it's always mission first. No one is bigger than the mission, and the mission comes first: balance axis deer population, feed communities, and balance the ecosystem.
Nate Hegyi: But make no mistake, Maui Nui Venison is a business. In addition to those other goals, they're also trying to make a profit—which is why if you live on the mainland, you're going to pay a premium, like $25 a pound for ground venison. And folks are willing to pay that because America is in the midst of a protein craze. Maui Nui Venison is—Hawaii pun incoming—surfing the trend.
Jake Muise: We for sure have the best protein on the market from a nutritional standpoint.
Nate Hegyi: That's Jake Muise, the CEO of Maui Nui Venison.
Jake Muise: We have half the calories of beef. If you're trying to get 20 grams of protein in a meal, you get 20 grams of protein with 100 calories from us, and it takes 200-plus calories from beef. People counting macros and putting it in diet apps—we solve that problem for them.
Nate Hegyi: Like a lot of folks I talked to at Maui Nui, Jake says this whole idea started because the island had a problem: too many deer. It's something he witnessed firsthand on a hunting trip in his 20s.
Jake Muise: Came back with my buddies for a weekend to hunt and fill up our freezer. Went to our favorite spot, turned a corner, and saw like 200 deer laying there dying of malnutrition.
Nate Hegyi: When deer populations get too big, they can crash from disease and starvation. Jake was from northern Alberta and had hunted all his life, but he'd never seen anything like this.
Jake Muise: I was like, wait, what? This can't be the way—we do nothing and they die of starvation.
Nate Hegyi: That was 21 years ago, and he has thought about deer every day since. But as the company is growing, so has the market for what it's selling. Venison, once thought to be the gamy meat of hunters, is becoming hip.
Jake Muise: So we accidentally created this really valuable product through the systems we built.
Nate Hegyi: How do you square that, though? Part of your mission is reducing axis deer, and some would say the goal for an invasive species is eradication. At the same time, you've discovered an incredibly valuable product, and suddenly we want more of these animals. How do you square that?
Jake Muise: Well, one, the goal for us was never eradication.
Nate Hegyi: On the mainland, deer are protected. In Maui, they're invasive. And this is one of the arguments against commercial hunting of wild animals: if you create a market for an invasive animal, we might end up wanting more of them, not less. But this is a complex place with a complex history. Nearly all of the Hawaiian islands are dominated by non-native species—from grasses to palm trees, wild pigs, and feral chickens. The guys in Maui don't see these deer as a mistake made 160 years ago by the King of Hawaii; instead, they see them as a gift to the Hawaiian people that's gotten out of control. If they learn to manage them right, maybe they can have their deer and eat them, too.
Jake Muise: First and foremost, the animal has value within our community, even if for periods of time it has been an ecological disaster. There's a tension that has to be held between something that has value and something that is adversely affecting communities and ecosystems. In the end, the majority of people believe there's more value to them as food than if they were gone.
Nate Hegyi: It's the morning after a long night of shooting. I'm standing at base camp watching the hunters return. The sun's up and the guys' shirts are stained with blood. They killed more than a hundred deer over the past few hours. They end their shift a lot like how they started: by gathering around in a circle, this time to sing the Hawaiian Doxology—a prayer before eating.
(Hawaiian Doxology plays)
Nate Hegyi: After that, they sit down. It's time to eat.
That is it for today's episode. It was reported, produced, and mixed by me, Nate Hegyi. Our team also includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, Marina Henke, and Jessica Hunt. Taylor Quimby is NHPR's director of podcasts.
Special thanks to Mark Tarrington all the way out in Nottingham, England. Mark is a member of our Patreon. If you want to join him and get ad-free episodes of the show, go to patreon.com/outsideinradio, where you can also see pictures and videos of my night out with Maui Nui, where I got to hear a whole bunch of wild stories that had nothing to do with deer. I think my favorite is how Hawaiians hunt feral pigs: they'll catch a wild boar, neuter it, make a mark on its ear, and release it back into the wild.
Keahi Camara: And then once they do that, they start to get really fat, they lose all their testosterone, and after another year or so, if you catch that pig again, it's probably some of the best eating!
Nate Hegyi: Oh, really? Wow!
Music by Will Harrison, Dejanna, Roots and Recognition, Lennon Hutton, Spiegelot, Van Sandano, and Viewpoints. Outside In is a production of NHPR.