Deer have been an important part of the world that humans occupy for millennia. They're one of the only large animals that can thrive in our presence. In the 21st century, our relationship is full of contradictions: We hunt and protect them, we cull them from suburbs while making them an icon of wilderness, we see them both as victims and as pests. But there is no doubt that we have a connection to deer: in mythology and story, in ecosystems biological and digital, in cities and in forests. Delving into the historical roots of these tangled attitudes and how they play out in the present, Erika Howsare observes scientists capture and collar fawns, hunters show off their trophies, a museum interpreter teaching American history while tanning a deer hide, an animal-control officer collecting the carcasses of deer killed by sharpshooters, and a woman bottle-raising orphaned fawns in her backyard. Why do we look at deer in the ways we do, and what do these animals reveal about human involvement in the natural world?
Ever since I read the chapter about deer in Bethany Brookshire’s excellent Pests, I have hoped for an equally insightful book about our fraught relationship with this familiar neighbor. The Age of Deer is that book—and it is a masterpiece ... Her thoroughly researched and comprehensive book combines science, philosophy and history, delving into the role of deer not only as prey and pest but also as neighbor and artistic inspiration ... Howsare’s hands-on approach keeps her storytelling vivid and personal ... Somehow this book about deer captures a wide swath of 21st-century America.
Fascinating ... Understanding the ways these heroes of the human age have adapted to change may very well help us survive our own era of overabundance.
Howsare approaches the topic with a journalist’s open mind and a poet’s open heart; she is both. It is an absolute delight. There’s not a page on which the reader will not learn something, from the sublime (images of deer engraved in an English cave are considered the first Ice Age art found in Britain) to the absurd (some hunters buy bottled doe urine to attract their prey, including one whose label promises 'Powerful Sexual Attractor: Bring in the Bucks — AROUSED'). Yet the book is more than a cabinet of delights. Howsare engages thoughtfully with big ideas, from classical art and old myths of deer and deer-gods to the long, intertwined history of human beings and deer in North America, from pre-Columbian Indigenous folkways that shaped and affected deer population to the near-extinction that occurred after white settlers arrived.
