Correct. There are no wild deer anywhere near here. I kill deer for the sole purpose of producing venison. The more venison I sell, the more deer I'll kill, even if it means travelling to do it.
Like I said, you want to kill them because they are conflicting with human interests, and human ideology of what the countryside should look like, not because they need killing. You could just leave them alone and eventually the population would settle down at a level that the ecosystem could sustain, with periodic peaks and crashes. It wouldn't be pretty, and I wouldn't advocate it in our heavily managed environment, but it does demonstrate that they don't actually need killing. Nature would eventually find a way. But in the meantime, being what we are, we kill them because we're very poor at sharing the world we live in with any species that causes us any degree of inconvenience.
For as long as you can remember there weren't a fraction of the number of deer in the UK as there are now, and there were very few people selling venison even as a niche product. The number of people doing that is rising rapidly, and word is getting about, albeit slowly. It is very easy to sell venison now.
But yes, I agree with you about getting easily recognisable stuff like mince into the mainstream market, but that isn't going to happen without a mainstream marketing campaign by the likes of the levy bodies. And you've still got the issue of consistency - even after going through the mincer an August fallow pricket, a December red stag and a mid-summer muntjac are three totally different products, which is why farmed venison is always going to win in that situation.
