DEER, animals of the family ../Cervidæ/
(q.v.), which are noted for their grace of structure
and their fleetnesss of motion. Since the
earliest times they have been known as objects
of the chase, and their meat, “venison,” is
considered a delicacy. The male deer is usually
called “buck,” but the male red deer of Europe
is a “stag,” or when mature a “hart.” The
female is called a “hind,” or “doe.” In the
language of mediæval venery each kind of deer, and each age of growing buck, has a distinctive name.
All deer have a coat of short fur, dull in
tone, ranging from reddish-brown to gray on
the upper surfaces, and usually white below. Those that are marked bear such markings on the face and throat and on the tail. Only a few genera are spotted. In most genera only the young (the fawns) are spotted, and lose their spots when they are about one year old. Deer breed annually, the young, one or two at a birth, being produced in late spring. The fawns remain with their mothers until they are about a year old, when they are sufficiently mature to become independent. The grass-land deer, especially, are gregarious, and often gather in large herds at the approach of winter. These feed on the meadow herbage, whereas the
forest deer eat the leaves, twigs, and buds of
bushes.
The deer is valued not only as food (it is the
main subsistence of some northern tribes), but
for commercial purposes. The skins make a
peculiarly strong, soft leather, known as buckskin; skins with the fur on are not of much account, as the hair is brittle and soon disappears. The hoofs and horns are prized for ornamental purposes, especially the antlers of the roe-deer, which are utilized for making umbrella-handles, and for similar purposes; and the elk-horn, often employed in making knife-handles. The Chinese also make a medicine from stag-horn and they eat the antlers of certain species when "in the velvet." The reindeer is as valuable to the people of the frozen North as the camel is to the desert traveler. The Indians of the region north of Hudson Bay and Great Slave Lake are almost wholly dependent on the caribou.
Deer have long been bred in captivity as
ornaments for parks, but only in the case of
reindeer has thorough domestication succeeded. Considerable attention is being paid in those parts of the United States where large tracts of wild land are available to breeding the American deer for market and this will doubtless become in the future an important source of meat supply.
The deer family is older than other families
of ruminants, dating back to the Lower
Miocene Period, when they were very small
and without antlers. With a gradual structural
change in other directions, such as variations in
dentition and increased size, the antlers have
been produced and amplified, so that the deer
of the present is a far larger and finer-looking
animal than his fossil ancestor. In the matter
of antlers the young stag typifies the evolution
of the race; as a yearling, his antlers are merely
one-pronged spikes; but each successive year
they become more branched and forked until at
maturity they may have seven or more branches. See articles under various English names of deer, as ; ; , etc. Consult Lydekker, ‘Deer of All Lands’ (London 1898); Roosevelt (and others), ‘The Deer Family’ (New York 1902); Ingersoll, ‘Life of Mammals’ (New York 1907).