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On the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia, a line of large chest coolers waits outside Wise Brothers Processing. Inside them, skinned deer lie packed in ice, ready to be cut into cubes, ground up or made into sausage, depending on the customer’s order. Once ready, the meat is wrapped and placed in the freezer for the hunters to take back home.
This is all pretty standard for deer hunters, the way animals they shoot become meat to feed their families. But a lot of this meat isn’t going back to the hunters who brought it — it’s bound for a soup kitchen in the heart of Savannah.
“The charity that we use, they feed 250-plus people, three times a day,” said Debra Wise, who runs the business along with the rest of her family. They’ve sent 500 pounds of ground venison to Old Savannah City Mission so far this year, she said.
The Wises are taking part in the Georgia Wildlife Federation’s Hunters for the Hungry program. Georgia hunters are allowed to kill up to 12 deer in a year, but many don’t have the freezer space to keep them all or don’t need that much meat to feed their families. Hunters for the Hungry allows them to donate the extra. The state recently increased funding to $350,000 annually, allowing the program to expand from six processors to 56 and add freezer trailers to store additional meat. This year, the program has set a goal of collecting 140,000 pounds of donations, which the state Department of Natural Resources estimates can feed 560,000 people.