The Age Of Deer Why we’ve crowned deer king of animals
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 thousands of years, and have used every scrap of them for something useful, from their skins for clothing to bow strings made out of deer sinew. We have even turned their antlers into handles for walking sticks.
At the same time we have wondered at their grace and beauty, and watched in awe at how a small roe deer, no bigger than a large dog, can spring from a standing position up and over a fence without apparent effort. They are the most amazing creatures.
Erika 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 in Britain.
The sheer numbers of deer, for instance, in both the US and the UK, are currently pretty freakish and, for the same reason: we have eliminated most or all of their major predators – in this country, that means wolves and lynx. The result is that there are perhaps two million deer in Britain today, most of them roe deer – more than at any time since the Middle Ages.
Howsare is fascinated by the annual Abbots Bromley Horn Dance in Staffordshire, so much so that she pays a special visit all the way from rural Virginia. The ritual ‘deer dance’ is said to be at least 1,000 years old – yet from the way the dancers of the village wear antlers on their heads and proceed ‘in stately single file’, she observes that it ‘felt almost prehistoric’.
She also wonders whether a king’s ‘crown’ actually derives from the antlers of ‘the deer’s bony crown’? Did ancient tribal chieftains wear antlers on their heads, which eventually morphed into the jewelled crown of royalty? And the very word ‘wilderness’ – in Old English, wild-deor-ness – means a place of wild animals, she tells us. Yet the word
‘deor’ there in the middle gives us the modern word for deer.
She gets very involved in the messy business of scraping and tanning deer hides to turn them into 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.
The essence of turning raw deerhide into clothing is first to scrape all the fat off the inner side and then tan it... with the animal’s own brains. In most mammals, the brain contains the right amount of material to tan the hide, penetrating the leather with rich and nourishingly fatty tissue so that it becomes supple and water-resistant.
All this was done by our ancestors, and by Native Americans, 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 many different angles.
Despite being an American liberal, even in rural Virginia, she does go along to a proper old-school Hunting and Fishing Expo. It’s another world to her, one of red meat, guns and God. A banner for one rifle company reads: ‘Where Faith, Country and Firearms Matter.’ And of course she is confronted by a man in a Trump 2024 T-shirt. The author is rather disapproving of it all, despite being a keen eater of venison, and at one point has to ‘take a breather outside’.
It’s a funny and self-mocking chapter in an endearing and enlightening book about this most lovely of animals, which, happily, seems to be flourishing even in the nature-depleted 21st Century.
Christopher Hart