Why aren’t Deer domesticated the way cows, sheep and pigs are?
In: 3230
Deer farming is a growing industry in my country (New Zealand) in significant but much smaller numbers than more traditional animals like sheep and cattle – there are around 800,000 farmed deer , vs ~28m sheep, 4m beef cattle and 6.4m dairy cattle. ([this is my source for these figures](https://beeflambnz.com/sites/default/files/data/files/Compendium-2020.pdf); some sources give much higher numbers for deer, eg Wikipedia has the figure at something like 1.7m in 2006). The herds here are primarily red deer, fallow and wapiti/red hybrids.
I don’t know what the threshold would be for determining whether something is properly domesticated as opposed to being, like, an enclosed-but-still-behaviourally-wild animal – most local resources refer to deer as having been domesticated, and conscious decisions are made about breeding them (you can get catalogues of breeding stags for sale with detailed lineages), and according to [this source](https://www.landcare.org.nz/file/deer-farmers-landcare-manual-2012/open), the behaviour of wild deer and farmed deer is significantly different but then that’s at least partly down to how the farmers treat them. I guess they’re semi-domesticated?
I think other people have already raised a lot of the arguments as to why deer weren’t domesticated in the past – they’re skittish, fast-moving creatures; the males get very aggressive during mating season; they don’t produce very much meat compared to other animals (although they do produce other products – eg antlers/velvet/deer penises – which can be sold at quite high prices, velvet accounted for almost NZ$60m of the $296m made by the deer industry in 2018-19 according to the compendium I linked above). Historically the effort to farm deer would have outweighed the advantages, I think.
e: also another reason why I think they’re “more domesticated” here than elsewhere is that our strict biosecurity laws mean that the diseases associated with deer in the rest of the world aren’t a factor here, if we had to contend with that it might have discouraged deer farming
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