Showing results by narrator "Erika Howsare" in All Categories

From the earliest cave paintings to the present day, humans and deer have a long and complex history. Royal harts were the coveted quarry of European kings, while the first Americans relied on deer for everything from buckskins to arrow heads. Once hunted to the point of extinction in some parts of the world, deer numbers have exploded in recent years, causing tension between scientists and conservationists. And yet, this is our own story, as the fortune of deer is inextricably bound up with the actions that we humans take on the world around us.

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 twenty-first 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.