Wicht said:
Hunting a deer with a bow is a bit of a challenge.
Should killing goblins over and over again garner any experience, or only the first 5 or so?
IMHO, the D&D rules intend to award experience for overcoming challenges where you have a risk of losing something, usually your life, but at least some hit points and potions. If all you risk losing are some arrows while sniping at a doe, that's not a challenge in the D&D sense.
If a deer is CR 1, it is much more challenging than real world deer. CR 1 animals in the SRD include riding dogs, light horses, hyenas, medium vipers, and wolves, all serious threats to level 1 types. If the elves are hunting things that tough, they probably team up and gain experience slower. Or they hunt alone and have a high death rate, but the survivors are around 9th level.
If you lower the CR of deer to nil, then the hunters can still gain significant experience from avoiding things that might hunt them in the forest (see above and the rest of the monster manual), but the gearhead DM can tune the frequency of those encounters to make the hunters whatever level is desired.
(Disclaimer: I agree with Hong about the futility of this sort of exercise, but it is still fun to post about for me.)