Hygiene of deer keeping

Abstract

Deer can hardly be called agricultural, much less domestic animals, but the history of keeping and breeding these amazing animals is very peculiar and time-consuming. In the countries of Northern Europe, rock carvings depicting deer in a stall or enclosing structures, which are about 5,000 years old, are still found. Since ancient times, deer have been hunted both for meat and for entertainment, in Western European countries the deer was a "royal" trophy available only to aristocrats, but in extreme cases (for example, in case of war) deer meat saved people from starvation. In peacetime, the ban on hunting for commoners maintained the number of these animals in the wild at a certain constant level, most red deer and fallow deer lived in park areas, in fact, representing the prototype of a modern deer farm. Deer were also kept in farms, menageries, nature reserves, and since the middle of the 20th century, modern deer farms have become widespread. According to statistics from the European Reindeer Herders Association FEDFA, there were 75,150 owners of red deer and 204,550 owners of fallow deer. So, only in modern Britain there are about 300 reindeer herding farms, where the deer is already considered quite a familiar, agricultural animal.