This is an issue with the AI prioritizing the traps over normal hunting. For now, if you set the traps slider to zero, wait for the hunter to remove all the traps, and leave them to their own devices*, they will generally start hunting game as they do at level one.
What happens, from my observations, is that the hunter will always check traps if there are any that have caught game. This takes higher priority over hunting deer. The hunter will also drop off that 12 meat from skinning a Small Carcass, which gives the traps more time to catch more game, and thus the cycle repeats and the hunter never goes after more lucrative meat sources like deer, thereby leading to the “there hasn’t been any game caught in a while!” popup on the Hunter Lodge.
* IMPORTANT: DO NOT click on the building again after you set the animal traps to zero or you may have to set the slider to zero once again. This is a bug with building sliders like the Work Camp, and Tier 2 Hunters.
ALSO: I strongly suspect hunters storing animal traps in their assigned building (after you set the building’s trap slider to zero and they go out to collect them) are causing weird storage capacity problems. You may end up with a hunter glitching out over a “full” Hunter Lodge when it doesn’t look like it at all. See this post of mine for more information of what’s happened to me.