Why aren’t Deer domesticated the way cows, sheep and pigs are?
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There are roughly 6 things that species needs to be domesticable: a diverse appetite, rapid maturation, willingness to breed in captivity, docility, strong nerves, and a nature that conforms to social hierarchy.
Deer have a diverse appetite and rapid maturation. Many deer also live in social hierarchies that humans can supplant, as we have done with sheep, cows, and horses. Some places have even had success with getting deer to breed in captivity, but it’s more challenging than you think. It’s really the last two that most species of deer fall down on. They are prone to flights of nerves and acts of reactive aggression. Some deer can have such a bad reaction to being captured that they literally die of fright.
Another concern for modern humans rather than our ancestors is that cervids like deer are a major source of pathogens that can jump into humans, principally via ticks. It gets worse. Deer have their own prion disease that we just call Chronic Wasting Disease. If that ever spread to humans like mad cow disease did back in the 90s… it could be seriously bad.
We farm them in New Zealand, and apparently they are quite profitable. As well as venison they also provide deer velvet, which fetches good prices in Asia. I don’t know much about it, but you always know a deer farm when you see it because of the high mesh fencing. They are an introduced animal here, as are all mammals except bats. Unlike other domestic animals they also live in the wild, where they are a significant pest. Deer hunting is therefore encouraged and popular here.
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
Traveled to Alaska a couple of times in 2018: Juneau, Anchorage, Talkeetna. Not much beef on the menu, except at the Anchorage Hilton. Plenty of “reindeer” steaks, sausage, etc. I don’t know whether they are the same race as those herded by the Saami people of northern Norway and Sweden, or are domesticated native caribou.
There is a tame herd of deer at Nara, a former capital of Japan. They interact freely with tourists. I don’t think they are used for food. There used to be a herd of tame Texas white tails in the Quadrangle at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, may still be. They weren’t used for food.
If I get out for my walk before 7:30 AM in my northwest Austin neighborhood, I will see white tails in my neighbors’ front yards. They aren’t tame, but they live in the city. You have to be careful driving after dark. You may encounter them in the streets.
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