An academy in southwestern Japan has been offering courses on all aspects of catching, processing and marketing wild game, hoping to boost consumption of animals such as deer and wild boar that are culled in large quantities to prevent crop damage.
Seiji Yamasue, who set up the Japan Gibier Academy in Usa, Oita Prefecture in May, says he hopes deer and wild boar can become a "fourth widely consumed type of meat" alongside beef, pork and chicken so as to reduce waste from the culling of wild animals.
Students at the academy learn about hunting, butchering, aging and cooking of wild game, and how to turn it into products for commercial consumption. The school also has classrooms set up for students to have hands-on experience on skinning and gutting wild game.
In rural Japan, wildlife damage has been acute as populations age and animals intrude more into human areas.
The cost of destruction for Oita amounted to around 150 million yen ($1 million) in fiscal 2022, per its latest data, as it works to continue to mitigate the harm by raising public interest in consuming wild game and hunting.
More than 70,000 wild boar and deer were caught in 2019 in the prefecture, the second highest figure in Japan, it says.
Yamasue, who manages a meat processing company, said he learned that the carcasses of culled wild animals are generally discarded, and that convinced him that processing plants specific to game meat were necessary.
Observing a wild game processing plant in the southwestern island of Kyushu, but doubtful about whether the meat was being handled in a safe way, Yamasue, 50, said he thought of "creating a place that teaches appropriate ways" to process game meat.
Unlike farm animals whose weights are managed to be standardized, the weight of wild animals is uneven, making it difficult to butcher them.
Yamasue said he hopes to see the spread of "appropriate ways to process game meat to encourage greater distribution of tasty wild game."
