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
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.
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