Why we’ve crowned deer king of animals
The Age of Deer Erika Howsare Icon €25
Have any wild animals that share our earth, had quite such an impact on us as deer? We have stalked, hunted and eaten them for tens of thousand of years; we have used every scrap of them for something useful, from their skins for hard-wearing clothing like buckskin shirts, to superlative springy bowstrings made out of deer sinew; and we have turned their splendid antlers into handles for walking sticks, or trophies to hang on our walls. At the same time we have wondered at their natural grace and beauty, and watched in awe as even a small roe deer, no bigger than a large dog, can spring from a standing position up and over a five foot high fence without apparent effort. They are the most amazing creatures.
Erike Howsare is an American naturalist and writer who is entranced by deer, and our ancient and complex relationship with them. And although she has a transatlantic perspective, many of her observations are equally applicable here. The sheer numbers of deer, for instance, in both the Untied States and in the UK and Ireland, are currently pretty freakish, and for the same reason: we humans have eliminated most or all of their major predators, in this country meaning wolves and lynx.
Howsare is fascinated by the annual Abbots Bromley Horn Dance in Staffordshire, England, so much so that she pays a special visit all the way from rural Virginia. The mysterious ritual ‘deer’ dance is so ancient in feel that it’s is said to be at least 1,000 years ago. Yet from the way the dancers of the village wear deer antlers on their heads and proceed ‘in stately single file’, she observes that it ‘felt almost prehistoric’.
She also wonders fascinatingly whether a king’s ‘crown’ actually derives from the antlers of ‘the deer’s bony crown’? Did ancient tribal chieftains wear antlers on their head, which eventually morphed into the jewelled crown of royalty? And the very word ‘wilderness’, she tells us, in Old English, wild-deor-ness, means a place of wild animals, yet the word ‘deor’ there in the middle gives us the modern word for deer.
She gets very involved in the messy but immensely satisfying business of scraping and tanning deer hides, to turn them into beautiful soft buckskin. Vegans may not approve, but once you have committed to killing and eating an animal, it surely makes good ecological sense to make full use of every part of it. The essence of turning raw deerhide into clothing is first to scrape all the fat off the inner side, and then tan it ... with its own brains. In most mammals, the brain contains just the right amount of material to tan the animal’s own hide, penetrating the leather with rich and nourishingly fatty brain tissue so that it becomes supple and water-resistant. All of this was done by our ancestors, or by American Indians, whose descendants Howsare meets and talks to: nature-loving, non-squeamish, and so reverential towards the deer that they would always give thanks for every one they killed.
It’s a fascinating portrait of the deer in our modern societies, a graceful and consummate survivor, and Howsare researches widely and deeply to give us lots of different angles.
Overall, this is a thoroughly endearing and enlightening book about this most lovely of mammals which, happily, seems to be flourishing even in the nature-depleted 21st century.