I’ve seen some similar type rituals for kids growing up around 1980s Whitetail hunting culture in rural SW Tennessee, but nothing was really on the scale of actually eating heart. More like get some blood smeared on your forehead for a picture, possibly drink a sip of blood with blood smeared on your face, but I think that was actually much less common than most people like to remember. The movie “Red Dawn” has a drinking blood from a first deer kill scene (as a metaphorical scene) which over romanticized the idea of such rituals. There was also a heart eating scene in the movie “Dances with Wolves” that further romanticized the idea during that era, both in hunting culture and as to what non hunters thinking about hunting culture.
In the year 2019, it probably still exists in a handful of very traditional hunting clubs in places like Lower Alabama, Pennsylvania and Maine, but it definitely doesn’t seem to exist on social media anywhere. On top of that, I’m a pretty aggressive “eat your meat rare” who has helped some guys get started hunting kinda of guy and I have never even considered asking a person to do that.
