I’m sitting on my back porch; I live in a small city. There are what we call, city deer (white tail deer), munching away at my neighbors lawn. These animals are extremely adapted to living among houses and busy streets. They live off of small patches of grass, bird feeders, and have to travel to and from their water source.
All in all a fairly hearty animal.
Why don’t humans use them to pull carts or raise them for meat? To me they seem as hearty as a goat but bigger. Wouldnt that be a better domestic animal?
My first explanation is that they can jump to high, making them impractical to contain. Is that why humans havent domesticated deer?
In: Biology
They are dumb, they can leap tall fences and escape, they don’t taste as good as beef, pork, lamb. They don’t have a lot of meat relative to other animals. They aren’t strong to work as beasts of burden.
Reindeer/caribou are used by some people but smaller deer just aren’t really that big or strong enough to be useful. Ultimately there are much better alternatives already available.
You kind of answered your own question. It’s about domestication. Some animals just can’t be domesticated. It’s the same reason we don’t use zebras the same way we use horses, or keep chipmunks as pets the same way we do hamsters and gerbils. Some animals just don’t take to being domesticated no matter how hard we try.
Most domesticated livestock are herd animals and grazers (grass eaters). Deer tend to be solitary or in small groups, and they tend to be browsers (leaf eaters), neither of which make it easy to raise them as livestock.
You mean…. like a…. rein…. deer?
> a fairly hearty animal
I disagree. All female deer are going to be smaller than the average human male, and the fully grown males are going to be roughly the same size as a human male, for the most part. They also go crazy during mating season.
From a physical standpoint, elk would be a *much* better choice.
Animals which evolved to live in herds are easier to train and domesticate. Horses, cows, sheep, dogs – they are travel in groups with a leader. To domesticate them, you just have to replace the leader – then breed the more docile ones and in a few generations you have an easily managed animal. Deer are solitary – they have no instinct to follow a leader – making them much harder to train and domesticate.
Whitetail deer are horribly stupid and panicky animals (only intelligent when they are trying to raid your garden), they have no problems clearing an 8’ fence, they can’t carry much on their spindly legs, they are highly aggressive when in season, and their default response to everything but traffic is to cut and run. Lots of work, no benefit.
There are much bigger deer that form bigger herds and are trained and used as beasts of burden.
Ever seen either scene in It’s Always Sunny where Charlie cuts the breaks and screams “wildcard, bitches” then jumps out of the van?
That’s just a human personification of deer.
They have elk farms out here in northern Idaho, not dear but might lead you down a rabbit hole if you look into it
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