Gifts for Hunters

Start with what they actually do

Every gift in this lane is picked for one kind of person: the hunter who brings the deer home and does the butchering, grinding and packing themselves. If that's who you're shopping for, you're in the right place, and you don't need to know the gear to get this right. If they drop their deer at a processor and like it that way, keep it simple: a good knife kit or an instant-read thermometer still lands, but a grinder or a vacuum sealer will probably sit in its box.

The amount of meat is why the gear matters to them. Ohio's Division of Wildlife weighed 115 deer and found an average of 52.19 lb of venison per deer (Ohio DNR venison yield study). A hunter who fills three tags is handling about 157 lb of meat in a season, and the tools that felt fine on the first deer are the ones that fall behind by the third. The gifts that land either make that work faster or make it more fun.

Three budget tiers, no price tags

We don't print prices in our text, because they move; the live price is inside every buy button. Instead, think in tiers:

• Stocking stuffers. Jerky and summer sausage seasoning kits, and a plain professional boning knife. Consumables get used up every season, so they can never be duplicates, which makes them the safest thing to buy for someone whose garage you've never seen.
• Mid-range. A field-to-freezer knife kit in a case, a jerky gun, an instant-read thermometer, food-grade meat lugs, a gambrel hoist. These are tools that come out on every deer. Most of our gifts for hunters under $50 live here.
• The big one. A vacuum sealer or an electric meat grinder. These are the biggest upgrades when they fit and the easiest gifts to get wrong, so they come with the most homework. Our gifts for deer hunters guide ranks all three tiers together, from the safest bet to the big one.

What to check before you order

Grinder size. Meat grinders carry a size number, like #8, #12 or #22, and the larger sizes are built for bigger batches: LEM, for example, pitches its BigBite #8 for small to medium batches and its #22 for medium to large ones. A hunter who processes several deer a season needs more grinder than one who does a single deer. Parts are size-specific too: plates, knives and stuffing tubes are made to fit a size, and even parts with the same number don't always swap between brands. One aftermarket #12 knife lists the LEM #12 and Cabela's #12 among the grinders it does not fit. If you're buying a grinder, our grinder sizes guide explains the numbers in plain terms, and our grinder roundup for deer sorts the picks by season.

Stand-mixer model. If they already own a KitchenAid stand mixer, a grinder attachment is a smaller gift than a standalone grinder, though it's a different class of machine. KitchenAid sells its own grinder attachment as fitting the power hub of any household KitchenAid stand mixer. Some third-party attachments carve out exceptions; one lists the smaller Mini series as not compatible. Find out which mixer they own, then see our KitchenAid grinder attachment roundup.

Vacuum sealer bags. Bags look like an easy add-on, but they have to match the machine. Countertop sealers (the common kind, where only the open end of the bag goes under the lid) pull air through bags with embossed channels; chamber sealers, where the whole bag sits inside under a lid, work with smooth pouches. If you don't know which they own, leave the bags out. The difference is laid out in chamber vs external vacuum sealers.

Knife flex. Boning knives can come in semi-stiff and flexible versions with nearly the same name; Victorinox sells its 6-inch model both ways. For deer, choose semi-stiff. Victorinox aims the flexible blade at more delicate cuts like chicken and fish.

What they'll need to add

Some of the best gifts only work alongside something else, and we flag it on every pick so the present works the day it's opened. A jerky gun or a jerky seasoning kit needs a dehydrator, smoker or oven, and USDA FSIS advises heating jerky meat to 160°F before drying it, so a food thermometer belongs in the box. A summer sausage kit needs a grinder, a way to stuff casings and ground pork. A vacuum sealer needs bags every season. A gambrel needs a solid tree limb or beam to hang from.

One more thing we won't do here: deals. We don't track sales, predict prices or rank anything by what it pays us. The order on each gift page is the order we'd buy in, starting with the gifts that are hardest to get wrong.