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The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors
A masterful hybrid of nature writing and cultural studies that investigates our connection with deer and invites readers to contemplate the paradoxes of how humans interact with and shape the natural world
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. As she reports these stories, Howsare’s eye is always on the bigger picture: Why do we look at deer in the ways we do, and what do these animals reveal about human involvement in the natural world?
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. As she reports these stories, Howsare’s eye is always on the bigger picture: Why do we look at deer in the ways we do, and what do these animals reveal about human involvement in the natural world?
368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 2, 2024
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March 28, 2024
…deer…occupy a middle zone between …extremes of domestication and wildness. Far from tame, they are nonetheless experts at living with people, and in many ways, they actually prefer to share habitat with us. All across North America, as in many other parts of the world, we exist in intimate proximity to deer.--------------------------------------
The FAA considers white-tailed deer more hazardous to U.S. civil aircraft than any other animal.Many images might pop to mind when we think about deer. I am sorry to say that the first one in my tiny mind is the sad vision of road kill. The second is the sheer joy of spotting wild deer in woods, or yards, or, more grandly, in national parks, whether the white-tail native to my part of the world, the mule deer and caribou more prevalent in the west, and even moose. I cannot say I have seen reindeer in the wild, unfortunately. Many visits to the Bronx Zoo introduced me to a much wider range of cervids, the family to which deer belong, including the diminutive muntjacs.
Erika Howsare - image from her site
Erika Howsare has had more of a connection to deer than, I expect, most of us. She grew up in western Pennsylvania in a family that hunted. In fact, the Monday after Thanksgiving is an unofficial holiday in our state, with most schools, and many businesses closed due to expected high absenteeism. This is one of many foci of interaction between deer and people.
I’d had an inkling, even before writing the book proposal, that deer were involved in all manner of controversies, contradictions, and human strivings. That was what got me interested in them. But I didn’t know too many specifics. When I started researching, one of the first things I did was to set up news alerts on deer and several other related terms.Thankfully, Howsare, a published poet, offers a lot more than the daily deer chyron.
Within a week, I had a rough outline of some of the major roles deer play in our world. They are victims; they are pests; they are something to hunt as well as something to study and protect. They are the targets of culling operations and the objects of sentimental love. They are trophies and intruders. It was all there in the news cycle. - From the Lithub article
I did start the book from a fairly cerebral place where I thought, “Oh yeah, great subject. Like, this will bring up all kinds of great questions, and I’ll be able to go down all these roads in terms of the research and make these points, and it’s gonna be a really great opportunity to dig into these intellectual questions.”And a wondrous opportunity it proved. You will learn a lot about the human/deer connection, and a bit about deer behavior as well.
What I wasn’t expecting was how much it would change me as a person. - from the Phoebe Journal interview
White tailed deer - image from PennVet – University of Pennsylvania
One thing to consider is just how long deer and humans have been interacting. Pretty much as long as there have been people, judging by the content of ancient cave art. They appear in all cultures, and are a rich presence in mythology worldwide. As our first-hand experience of deer is usually liminal, many have come to see deer as ambassadors of the wild world, crossing from theirs to ours, and maybe offering a route away from the world of living humans. Of course, for many of us there is an UR deer image that has been burned into our brains. Really, can you name any other deer this side of Santa’s team?
Bambi - image from Disney via KRCA.com
They are beautiful and offer us an image of wildland innocence. But for many they have become pestiferous. Consider having spent months planting and tending your beautiful back yard garden, only to wake one day to find that real-life Bambis and their kin have laid waste to all your work. There is also the carnage caused not just to deer but to people and their vehicles from collisions with deer. There are folks whose job it is to collect the bodies. Howsare spent time with one of them.
Deer have been a crucial source of food for people across the millennia, but also of a wide range of materials. Howsare gets trained in earth skills to find out how to make buckskin, and many other useful items formed from deer parts.
We usually think of reintroduction of wildlife having to do with trout, or other finned creatures. You may have heard of attempts to reintroduce predators, like wolves in Yellowstone. But the largest and most successful reintroduction in US history occurred in the early 20th century when deer, which had been driven near to extinction, were reintroduced in many parts of the nation.
Sweet Tooth - image from Netflix via BBC
Ok, this was not at all included in the book but I kinda hoped it would gain at least a mention, as it does speak to the closeness of our species.
Factlets abound. Did you know that deer can suffer from a chronic, deadly disease that we usually associate with cattle, chronic wasting disease? Or that maybe the notion of adorning rulers with crowns was a way of imitating the stag rack? You will gain an appreciation for the use of deer-based imagery in the film Get Out. There are plenty more.
One of the main points to be gained is seeing how deer are actually quite adaptable, and have managed to carve out an ecological niche at the perimeters of human population.
Moose - image rom Britannica
A survey course on cervid-sapiens connection makes for an entertaining, informative read on its own. But Howsare incorporates a personal journey into her narrative. Never a hunter, at least not one who shoots anything, she has enough personal connection to folks who do, relations, to want to gain a better understanding of the hunting culture and the rationales of those who kill deer. She looks at her own feelings about deer and hunting. Not all who hunt actually shoot. Hunting can be a group activity, with a diversity of roles, very reminiscent of our prehistoric ancestors. One very appealing element of this learning curve for Howsare was becoming more comfortable with being still, settling into a place and letting herself experience the environment, the moment, fully, a form of meditation almost.
She looks at some of the outrages associate with hunting as well. Like releasing or breeding deer in fenced areas to be killed by people fond of killing things, but not much interested in doing all the research and preparation that serious hunters undertake. Think Dick Cheney hunting quail.
My only gripe about the book is a petty one. I find that science/nature books always go down easier when the information is spiced with a bit of humor. No danger of that here. So, past my personal preferences, The Age of Deer is an easy thumbs up. You will learn a lot and gain a far greater understanding of the relationship between humans and cervids throughout history and our interactions today, finding yourself saying, whether aloud or internally, “I never knew that.”
In the Anthropocene, it seems that far too much of humanity has assumed the position of the prototypical you-know-what frozen in place as the headlights of global doom approach at increasing speed. Deer, at least, have an excuse for such behavior, as their woodland-creature-instinct, however misguided it might be on a paved road, is to become very still so an approaching predator might not see or hear them. Given their abundance on the planet, it is a strategy that has worked out well for them, despite the roadside carnage, as deer remain the last large wild animal in most places. The roaches and rats will not be alone after we are gone. Deer, icons of woodland beauty, are adaptable. They are survivors, and will be keeping them company.
If the American project was, in part, to make a pastoral landscape out of a wilderness, deer benefited from that project in a cultural sleight of hand. We thought of them as part of the wild, but we had misconceived them. Their secret was that they, like us—like squirrels, corn, apple trees, clover, ands sparrows—would flourish in our human garden.
Review posted - 03/22/24
Publication date – 01/20/24
I received a hardcover of The Age of Deer from Catapult in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks.
This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages
Profile – from Catapult
ERIKA HOWSARE holds an MFA in literary arts from Brown University and has published two books of poetry. She also worked in local journalism for twenty years, covering culture and environmental issues. She teaches writing and contributes reviews and essays to various national outlets. A native of Pennsylvania, she lives in rural Virginia.
Interviews
-----Poets & Writers - Ten Questions for Erika Howsare by staff
-----Flyleaf Books - Erika Howsare presents THE AGE OF DEER -Howsare reads from the book then takes questions – the sound quality is poor
-----Phoebe Journal - Hungry Deer and Pissed off Gardeners: An Interview with Erika Howsare by Ashlen Renner
Items of Interest from the author
-----The Atlantic - An Incurable Disease Is Coming for Deer - an excerpt - but requires a subscription
-----Orion - Skin to Skin with a Deer - excerpt
-----Virginia Audio Collective - If You See a Deer - a four-episode companion podcast
-----Lithub - Erika Howsare on Finding Inspiration in Headlines
Items of Interest
-----Be vewy, vewy quiet. - Mister Fudd may be hunting a different species, but his approach applies to deer as well
My review of Stephen Graham Jones’s - The Only Good Indian - a wronged elk on the warpath
-----My review of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s - The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World
-----Gutenberg - The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Read
June 9, 2024In her poetic and scientific exploration "The Age of Deer," Erika Howsare delves into the complex relationship between humans and one of the few remaining large wild animal species we routinely interact with. Through a combination of lyrical prose and factual research, Howsare examines the history, biology, and symbolism of deer, and what they reveal about our own wildness and disconnection from nature.
One of the more difficult aspects of the book is its unflinching look at the many ways deer suffer and die at the hands of humans and also just nature. Howsare details gruesome injuries from car collisions, hunting, accidents (a deer falling into a cavern — that one survived), and the perils of misguided domestication attempts by people who think they are helping by feeding wild deer. These passages can be heartbreaking to read, laying bare the tragic consequences of human encroachment on deer habitat and our failure to coexist harmoniously with them. I cried a few times.
But the book is not unrelentingly bleak. Howsare also marvels at the resilience of deer, who have rebounded from near extinction in the early 20th century to abundance today. She shares fascinating biological and historical information, like the little-known fact that deer were almost wiped out a hundred years ago. Now, their numbers have recovered to the point that many consider them pests. However, she raises the alarming research that Chronic Wasting Disease has become so widespread that it could potentially lead to the species' extinction if left unchecked.
Howsare has mixed feelings about deer hunting. She is repulsed by the idea of killing these magnificent and innocent creatures, acknowledging their endearing cuteness. At the same time, she recognizes that hunting, if done responsibly, is arguably a more ethical alternative to the inhumane conditions of industrial animal agriculture. It's a nuanced take on a highly charged issue.
Throughout the book, Howsare reflects on how deer are intricately connected to the land itself, as much a natural product of forests and fields as wild berries or mushrooms. They occupy a unique place between wildness and a world shaped by human civilization. Our interactions with deer, whether through hunting, feeding, or simply observing, can either widen that gap between humans and nature or help bridge it.
"The Age of Deer" is a reminder of how much we have to learn from other species about how to live in greater harmony with the natural world. Deer are a symbol of the wildness we have lost in ourselves, but also the potential for recovering a more balanced relationship with the environment. Howsare's beautifully-written, wide-ranging meditation brings a fresh and thought-provoking perspective to our enduring fascination with these captivating, crepuscular creatures. It's a poignant call to reexamine how we treat deer (don't feed them!) and what they can teach us about our place in the order of living things.
One of the more difficult aspects of the book is its unflinching look at the many ways deer suffer and die at the hands of humans and also just nature. Howsare details gruesome injuries from car collisions, hunting, accidents (a deer falling into a cavern — that one survived), and the perils of misguided domestication attempts by people who think they are helping by feeding wild deer. These passages can be heartbreaking to read, laying bare the tragic consequences of human encroachment on deer habitat and our failure to coexist harmoniously with them. I cried a few times.
But the book is not unrelentingly bleak. Howsare also marvels at the resilience of deer, who have rebounded from near extinction in the early 20th century to abundance today. She shares fascinating biological and historical information, like the little-known fact that deer were almost wiped out a hundred years ago. Now, their numbers have recovered to the point that many consider them pests. However, she raises the alarming research that Chronic Wasting Disease has become so widespread that it could potentially lead to the species' extinction if left unchecked.
Howsare has mixed feelings about deer hunting. She is repulsed by the idea of killing these magnificent and innocent creatures, acknowledging their endearing cuteness. At the same time, she recognizes that hunting, if done responsibly, is arguably a more ethical alternative to the inhumane conditions of industrial animal agriculture. It's a nuanced take on a highly charged issue.
Throughout the book, Howsare reflects on how deer are intricately connected to the land itself, as much a natural product of forests and fields as wild berries or mushrooms. They occupy a unique place between wildness and a world shaped by human civilization. Our interactions with deer, whether through hunting, feeding, or simply observing, can either widen that gap between humans and nature or help bridge it.
"The Age of Deer" is a reminder of how much we have to learn from other species about how to live in greater harmony with the natural world. Deer are a symbol of the wildness we have lost in ourselves, but also the potential for recovering a more balanced relationship with the environment. Howsare's beautifully-written, wide-ranging meditation brings a fresh and thought-provoking perspective to our enduring fascination with these captivating, crepuscular creatures. It's a poignant call to reexamine how we treat deer (don't feed them!) and what they can teach us about our place in the order of living things.
January 10, 2024
I was interested in this book because I love deer. I'm the person that always points out deer like it's a cute puppy. Growing up in Ohio it is very common to see deer in the wild, in your backyard and mounted on a wall. I like to think (possibly stupidly and naively) that a deer would meet me and become my best friend. Alas, the chance hasn't come yet.
The cover of this audiobook is super cool! I love that the style of the deer is universally representing deer from all over and throughout time. I love the vibrant colors. Definitely would stand out in a collection of books as being unique.
The narrator, also the author, was a little slow and monotone for me. I had to bump up the speed to 1.5 and that made it a lot easier for me. The reading is a bit like listening to a podcast or an NPR radio station. The context isn't heavy but perhaps, dry. I don't think everyone would want to read this book or find it interesting. But to those that are interested in wildlife, I think you'll enjoy!
For me, the book focus on hunting and consuming deer was a little heavy. Two practices that I avoid as much as possible. Just be aware of that going in. And perhaps it was foolish for me to not expect those two topics in a book about deer when those are very popular aspects of deer. In a physical/ebook copy, I think you'd benefit from the table of contents and being able to jump through chapters that do not interest you.
If you enjoy books about wildlife and our relationship to them, I recommend checking out The Age of Deer by Erika Howsare. Thank you to NetGalley, Erika Howsare and High Bridge Audio. I have written this review voluntarily.
The cover of this audiobook is super cool! I love that the style of the deer is universally representing deer from all over and throughout time. I love the vibrant colors. Definitely would stand out in a collection of books as being unique.
The narrator, also the author, was a little slow and monotone for me. I had to bump up the speed to 1.5 and that made it a lot easier for me. The reading is a bit like listening to a podcast or an NPR radio station. The context isn't heavy but perhaps, dry. I don't think everyone would want to read this book or find it interesting. But to those that are interested in wildlife, I think you'll enjoy!
For me, the book focus on hunting and consuming deer was a little heavy. Two practices that I avoid as much as possible. Just be aware of that going in. And perhaps it was foolish for me to not expect those two topics in a book about deer when those are very popular aspects of deer. In a physical/ebook copy, I think you'd benefit from the table of contents and being able to jump through chapters that do not interest you.
If you enjoy books about wildlife and our relationship to them, I recommend checking out The Age of Deer by Erika Howsare. Thank you to NetGalley, Erika Howsare and High Bridge Audio. I have written this review voluntarily.
February 3, 2024
The book straddles a sometimes uncomfortable line between memoir and pop science explainer. I learned a lot, but not as much as I would have liked, about deer. I sympathized with the author’s moral quandaries and appreciated her frankness, but there were plenty of moments where I felt alienated by her assumptions about class. The book felt like it was always on the verge of stepping deeper into discussions of animal personhood, but it never quite went there.
February 13, 2024
This book beautifully examines our relationship with deer through the lenses of folklore and myth alongside human history and innovation. Throughout, the author gently questions moral views both for and against hunting, accompanied by interviews and experiences with hunters, biologists, conservationists, and many other interesting figures whose work intersects with deer. The Age of Deer delighted me with its lyrical and magical descriptions of encounters with nature, concrete and illuminating explanations of how we address problems with deer and hunting, and its overarching contemplative look at how humans have shaped and lived alongside nature.
August 12, 2024
3.5 rounded up! Interesting read, made me think and had a lot of intriguing topics. Will say some of the like speed run of different human culture/myths sections would have benefited from spending more time with those stories as opposed to just rattling them off.
March 1, 2024
Howsare writes about nature through the specific relationships humans have with deer (logistic, destructive, symbolic, etc). This book applies blistering attention to how human’s beliefs about what is natural (and what is not) shape the material world. From anecdotes and interviews about roadkill (or car-killed) animals, trophy hunting, local customs, scavenging deer, and more, Howsare creates a clear depiction of human biases. This kind of depiction by attrition really works for me. I'm definitely going to be thinking about this book for years to come.
May 22, 2024
This is a hard one to review. For the first 260 pages I was thinking four stars despite certain frustrations, but the last two chapters left me literally nauseous.
The good: Howsare is very effective at exploring the various contradictory ideas (and practices) that contemporary US culture has about deer— we love them, shoot them, feed them, eat them, and more. I learned a lot about the bizarre worlds of deer “management” and hunting, as well as some interesting stuff about deer in history. The writing is engaging, I am glad I read it, and I will definitely use some of this information in future research and writing.
The bad: Howsare is far far more interested in the people who kill deer (whether for food or to control deer populations) than anyone else. On some level this makes sense: we kill a lot of deer, and spending time with the people who do this killing allows her to explore various relevant issues. But I am pretty sure the only anti-hunting/culling activist she directly interviews (definitely the only one in the last half, when she explores culling and hunting in more detail) gets a single paragraph in which she is dismissed as self-righteous without actually exploring her ideas. While Howsare believes the death of a deer is sorrowful, perhaps even a tragedy, she does not meaningfully consider that killing, at least some of it, might be wrong: we get brief allusions to vegetarians from Pythagoras to Jonathan Safron Foer, accounts of controversies over culling, but she is dismissive, even disdainful, without even considering their ideas. She is right that we live in a world where some level of death and killing is inevitable, and probably right that we should face this and grapple with it rather than cling to an impossible purity. But there is still a good argument for reducing the killing we do! To be clear my critique here is not simply that she disagrees with me but that she treats anyone with my perspective as sentimental and unserious, while being very focused on her own sentiments and the sentiments of hunters—it’s not like she’s treating the issues hyper-rationally herself. (Another critique is the whole book is a little structureless, just kind of following her own curiosity in ways that can be interesting but aren’t comprehensive or always satisfying.)
The ugly: The last two chapters she accompanies hunters (including many in her own family) and gets really into the idea that killing animals is really the best way to be intimate with nature. Not to pyschoanalyze but it seems she has some guilt over being a liberal intellectual and really wants to prove she can connect with men who hunt? She marvels over how much a man “loves” a deer who he has just shot in the liver and subjected to a slow painful death. She suggests that hunting deer would be a better way to get our meat then factory farming, ignoring that we don’t actually need meat and if we replaced factory farmed meat with hunted deer we’d pretty quickly annihilate deer. She eats lots of venison throughout and romanticizes the chickens she raises on her own land (and makes her husband kill). Again, I think there are interesting questions and ideas to explore with respect to hunting (Emma Marris’ book Wild Souls does a good job even when I disagree), but here Howsare just sort of embraces the vibes of killing animals even though she doesn’t do so herself, in a way that feels gross and, as I said, left me literally nauseous upon finishing the book. Considered 2 stars, but rounded up because much of the book is interesting.
The good: Howsare is very effective at exploring the various contradictory ideas (and practices) that contemporary US culture has about deer— we love them, shoot them, feed them, eat them, and more. I learned a lot about the bizarre worlds of deer “management” and hunting, as well as some interesting stuff about deer in history. The writing is engaging, I am glad I read it, and I will definitely use some of this information in future research and writing.
The bad: Howsare is far far more interested in the people who kill deer (whether for food or to control deer populations) than anyone else. On some level this makes sense: we kill a lot of deer, and spending time with the people who do this killing allows her to explore various relevant issues. But I am pretty sure the only anti-hunting/culling activist she directly interviews (definitely the only one in the last half, when she explores culling and hunting in more detail) gets a single paragraph in which she is dismissed as self-righteous without actually exploring her ideas. While Howsare believes the death of a deer is sorrowful, perhaps even a tragedy, she does not meaningfully consider that killing, at least some of it, might be wrong: we get brief allusions to vegetarians from Pythagoras to Jonathan Safron Foer, accounts of controversies over culling, but she is dismissive, even disdainful, without even considering their ideas. She is right that we live in a world where some level of death and killing is inevitable, and probably right that we should face this and grapple with it rather than cling to an impossible purity. But there is still a good argument for reducing the killing we do! To be clear my critique here is not simply that she disagrees with me but that she treats anyone with my perspective as sentimental and unserious, while being very focused on her own sentiments and the sentiments of hunters—it’s not like she’s treating the issues hyper-rationally herself. (Another critique is the whole book is a little structureless, just kind of following her own curiosity in ways that can be interesting but aren’t comprehensive or always satisfying.)
The ugly: The last two chapters she accompanies hunters (including many in her own family) and gets really into the idea that killing animals is really the best way to be intimate with nature. Not to pyschoanalyze but it seems she has some guilt over being a liberal intellectual and really wants to prove she can connect with men who hunt? She marvels over how much a man “loves” a deer who he has just shot in the liver and subjected to a slow painful death. She suggests that hunting deer would be a better way to get our meat then factory farming, ignoring that we don’t actually need meat and if we replaced factory farmed meat with hunted deer we’d pretty quickly annihilate deer. She eats lots of venison throughout and romanticizes the chickens she raises on her own land (and makes her husband kill). Again, I think there are interesting questions and ideas to explore with respect to hunting (Emma Marris’ book Wild Souls does a good job even when I disagree), but here Howsare just sort of embraces the vibes of killing animals even though she doesn’t do so herself, in a way that feels gross and, as I said, left me literally nauseous upon finishing the book. Considered 2 stars, but rounded up because much of the book is interesting.
February 5, 2024
A Mary Roach-esque deep dive into human interactions with our close neighbors, deer. From our earliest cave paintings to deer-vehicle collisions.
It really was a fascinating book that had me thinking about my own interactions with the deer around me, from the venison in my freezer, the hide I'm tanning in the shed, to the doe and fauns I see out my backdoor every day and curse when they eat out fruit trees.
It really was a fascinating book that had me thinking about my own interactions with the deer around me, from the venison in my freezer, the hide I'm tanning in the shed, to the doe and fauns I see out my backdoor every day and curse when they eat out fruit trees.
May 20, 2024
quite similar to h is for hawk (although personally i liked that one better) and educational, v cognizant of western conceptions of hunting and the natural world and how it is antithetical to indigenous tradition, although i wish there was more emphasis on wolves and predator restoration in certain areas in the west (yellowstone specifically, the positive ecological impact of reintroducing wolves or other large predators into areas now overpopulated with deer)
January 5, 2024
Reviewing an audio arc from NetGalley.
Howsare explores this niche topic with the perfect mixture of nuance, thoughtfulness, innocence, and humor. The result is a sometimes melancholy, sometimes surprising meditation on reality, ideas, and the complex network between humans and our environment.
Throughout the text the author is careful to stand not in judgment but in curiosity, and creates a rich text full of interesting information with a few graceful brushstrokes of biographical anecdotes.
A great winter nonfiction read.
Howsare explores this niche topic with the perfect mixture of nuance, thoughtfulness, innocence, and humor. The result is a sometimes melancholy, sometimes surprising meditation on reality, ideas, and the complex network between humans and our environment.
Throughout the text the author is careful to stand not in judgment but in curiosity, and creates a rich text full of interesting information with a few graceful brushstrokes of biographical anecdotes.
A great winter nonfiction read.
September 26, 2024
There certainly seems to exist a reverence or appreciation in observing deer that is not reserved for other woodland creatures. In The Age of Deer, author Erika Howsare tackles that proposition from every possible angle—trying to explain human fascination with the large four-legged ruminants.
Howsare breaks her analysis into three main categories: the mysticism of deer (such as their presence on cave paintings and in ancient literature/practices), the management of deer (in terms of population, food-source, and control), and finally the hunting of deer (whether on farms or by licensed hunters). There is one thing I absolutely will not question about The Age of Deer and that is Howsare’s thoroughness. One would be hard-pressed to find more comprehensive coverage of deer than what is present here.
In manner of critique, there are a few times where the material got a little too oblique or “navel-gazing” for my tastes. Sometimes roadkill is just, well, roadkill and may not need multiple philosophical underpinnings to understand. In a way, this seems to be a bit of struggle throughout the book—Howsare’s personal emotions conflicting with her more scientific pursuits.
That being said, I’ll never ding a book or author too much for “doing a lot of thinking”, and that is precisely what The Age of Deer is all about. Instead of just taking “facts” about deer as bastions of truth, Howsare questions their underpinnings—often to extremely interesting ends. For example: human beings often profess to want deer to “return to their wild/natural state”—but what exactly is that? Does wild mean “without human interaction”? If so, then it would be nearly impossible for the two species to interact and would discount all the good that humans have done towards the species. These are the types of deeply-considered notions that Howsare unearths on a pretty regular basis.
Though many folks have expressed displeasure in the book’s final section on hunting (especially the more modern variety of the term), I found that to be some of the best material as it represents a true learning/understanding process. Through experiences documented within the book itself, Howsare lays bare her initial thoughts on hunting and its culture and how that changed after sitting in a stand, doing a drive, and processing a deer for herself. At very least, Howsare is honest about her emotions—and again I have respect for that in authorship.
Overall, I found The Age of Deer to be a fascinating read even if a tad ruminatory at times. It definitely gives the reader a lot to think about vis a vis deer and their physical, psychological, philosophical, and historical place in society.
Howsare breaks her analysis into three main categories: the mysticism of deer (such as their presence on cave paintings and in ancient literature/practices), the management of deer (in terms of population, food-source, and control), and finally the hunting of deer (whether on farms or by licensed hunters). There is one thing I absolutely will not question about The Age of Deer and that is Howsare’s thoroughness. One would be hard-pressed to find more comprehensive coverage of deer than what is present here.
In manner of critique, there are a few times where the material got a little too oblique or “navel-gazing” for my tastes. Sometimes roadkill is just, well, roadkill and may not need multiple philosophical underpinnings to understand. In a way, this seems to be a bit of struggle throughout the book—Howsare’s personal emotions conflicting with her more scientific pursuits.
That being said, I’ll never ding a book or author too much for “doing a lot of thinking”, and that is precisely what The Age of Deer is all about. Instead of just taking “facts” about deer as bastions of truth, Howsare questions their underpinnings—often to extremely interesting ends. For example: human beings often profess to want deer to “return to their wild/natural state”—but what exactly is that? Does wild mean “without human interaction”? If so, then it would be nearly impossible for the two species to interact and would discount all the good that humans have done towards the species. These are the types of deeply-considered notions that Howsare unearths on a pretty regular basis.
Though many folks have expressed displeasure in the book’s final section on hunting (especially the more modern variety of the term), I found that to be some of the best material as it represents a true learning/understanding process. Through experiences documented within the book itself, Howsare lays bare her initial thoughts on hunting and its culture and how that changed after sitting in a stand, doing a drive, and processing a deer for herself. At very least, Howsare is honest about her emotions—and again I have respect for that in authorship.
Overall, I found The Age of Deer to be a fascinating read even if a tad ruminatory at times. It definitely gives the reader a lot to think about vis a vis deer and their physical, psychological, philosophical, and historical place in society.
January 22, 2024
Thank you NetGalley and HighBridge Audio for my advanced copy and the chance to review it honestly.
I received this book as an ALC and although it piqued my interest, it ultimately fell flat for me. The narrator and the story felt a bit dry and I can’t say I loved the writing. I can appreciate how the story will resonate with others though and this cover is absolutely gorgeous. I am trying to read out of my comfort zone this year so typically this isn’t a book I’d normally pick up. Please take my opinion with a grain of salt because I see a ton of great reviews! Just because it didn’t work for me, doesn’t mean it won’t work for you!
Happy reading!
I received this book as an ALC and although it piqued my interest, it ultimately fell flat for me. The narrator and the story felt a bit dry and I can’t say I loved the writing. I can appreciate how the story will resonate with others though and this cover is absolutely gorgeous. I am trying to read out of my comfort zone this year so typically this isn’t a book I’d normally pick up. Please take my opinion with a grain of salt because I see a ton of great reviews! Just because it didn’t work for me, doesn’t mean it won’t work for you!
Happy reading!
February 15, 2024
This book was a trudge for me, but the cover sure is beautiful.
"The Old English word deor meant "animal," and so wild-doer-ness was the place of wild animals. That deer lurk in the center of our modern word wilderness suggest that deer are thoroughly baked into our idea of nature at its purest, and perhaps that deer are such a fundamental presence in human life that they, of all species, took over the word we once used for animals in general."
"The Old English word deor meant "animal," and so wild-doer-ness was the place of wild animals. That deer lurk in the center of our modern word wilderness suggest that deer are thoroughly baked into our idea of nature at its purest, and perhaps that deer are such a fundamental presence in human life that they, of all species, took over the word we once used for animals in general."
Shelved as 'didn-t-finish'
March 22, 2024I keep getting burned by books that I think will actually be about their purported subjects, and then find out that they're glorified memoirs with some light research thrown in. I would love to read this book but written by an actual zoologist, who can bring a deeper sense of science and history to the table than some personal reflections, Wikipedia-level history, and what I assume will become an overdependence on references to COVID and American politics to keep deer relevant to the general American audience.
July 30, 2024
An introspective book on our relationship with deer. From Bambi to roadkill Howsare lays it all out there. She grew up in a family of hunters but had never been on a hunt until she wrote this book. Lots of interesting facts and statistics on deer as well as philosophical musings on mythology, killing, and our relationship with nature.
June 27, 2024
Actually, I ended up just browsing this book. It was a bit too detailed about too many aspects of deer in the culture for what I was looking for. -- I was hoping for more of a natural history. Maybe it was later in the book but the book was due back at the library so I gave up.
April 8, 2024
An interesting nonfiction look at the history of our interactions with deer.
February 11, 2024
Entertaining and informative. I know very little about those enchanting creatures who are pooping on my lawn.
July 30, 2024
A beautiful, lyrical exploration of what deer mean to humans in the current day and in history. Particularly looking at deer as a resource for deer hunting, indigenous culture, nature and biodiversity and as a pest. This is one of the most beautifully written pieces of nature writing I have ever read and was incredibly compelling, measured and illuminating.
-
“The very etymology of wilderness links it to deer. The Old English word deor meant "animal," and so wild-deor-ness was a place of wild animals.”
“So much was lost in a fog of erasure, as European colonists worked deliberately to separate Indigenous people from their lifeways-the songs or stories, say, that might have accompanied this communal labor, as women passed hours under trees.
Claytor and Furr saw their work as a kind of ongoing engagement with half-obscured knowledge; they'd try things, examine archaeological evidence and oral histories, experiment and learn and then try something else. Their ways were a mix of old and new, undertaken in twenty-first-century clothing, with no pretense of reenactment, and sometimes with frank anachronisms.
I was enchanted, for example, by the hide scraper Claytor made from a deer leg bone, but she readily offered, "I had to make it quickly, so I used a Dremel tool."
“But most of the ror uses on this list were not for food. The left column named parts of the animal: hair, hide, far, sine, organs, bones, antlers, hooves, teeth, eyeballs, blood, even scat and urine. And the right column read like a list of human needs, from essentials to enrichments, each need matched with a body part on the left.
That list helped me imagine a life in which I could stuff my child's pillow with deer fur, use the fluid from an eyeball for pig: ment, make a sack from the membrane that surrounds a deer's heart. The longer I stared at it, the more it seemed to diagram a relation: human and world, person and animal. The complemen-tarity of it all-the sense that for every item people wanted, there was a corresponding resource at hand, offered by an animal or a plant—felt so utterly different from our own world, in which Dremel tools are made from fossil fuels and mined metal, Dawn dish soap comes from a lab, and they both are acquired using a debit card in a big-box store. The list was the opposite of ab-stract, the opposite of outsourced. It outlined an existence firmly anchored to a local, self-generating reality. And it represented an entirely different paradigm of waste: If every part of animal was used, there was little waste to begin with, and any minor scrap that did go unused would simply return to the earth, feeding small creatures and the soil.”
“It takes culture to turn a deer into a life-sustaining resources.”
“We suffer from amnesia about the history of the lan In truth, European colonists and their descendants in right down to Americans of all stripes today-have almost perer had a chance to observe deer populations free from our ora fluence.”
“Humans are subtracting animals and adding themselves; beings that wear fur or bark are cut down by those in cotton. There is something so familiar about the scene—it is pure Americana, from the cabin to the caps—and yet so unearthly, like a tornado's aftermath.”
“Certainly deer do inhabit wooded lands; they like eating acorns, the seedlings of certain kinds of trees, and some of the wildflowers and plants (what ecologists call "the herbaceous layer") that pop up on the forest floor. But mature woods generally have less to offer deer than certain other environments. (The very word forest came into English signifying not woodland but simply "place of deer.")
The habitats that can support deer in the greatest numbers are less celebrated, less picturesque. They don't even have a name in common parlance, nothing as simple as "forest," though ecologists call them early-successional habitats. They're places with a lot of brushy, leafy vegetation below six feet in height. What does that mean in an undisturbed landscape? If by undisturbed we mean "untouched by humans," then it could mean a place where lightning recently caused a forest fire, opening the canopy and inviting lower-growing plants to rapidly fill in the space below.
If by undisturbed we mean "prior to Columbus," then that fire could well have been set by Native Americans in a controlled
burn.
In the last few centuries, the places most full of deer food have taken many forms, like logged forests where brush proliferates.
Or lately abandoned farms, where infant trees and fast-growing shrubs are roiling upward from what had been a pasture or hay-feld. Or the cuts under powerlines, where nearby trees offer shel-ter, and there's a vigorous supply of bushes and small plants in the sunny spaces below the lines. Or suburban neighborhoods: a tight patchwork of trees, shrubs, and the narrow zones where the woods meet the shoulders of roads.
Such places, to a strolling deer, are rich with food in the form of leaf and stem, as well as cover, one of their other key re-quirements. In these environments, deer live easy and reproduce quickly. Take away the predators, too, and you've created a cer vid nirvana.”
“There was a finders-keepers mentality toward land irself (legally ratified by the Homestead Act, which gave away land to chose who sertled on it), and that attitude extended to animals as well. Tr was seen as Americans' right to clear tard and use whatever was found there. If the decline of deer war an inevitable part of taming the wilderness, people sometimes rook that as a reason to kill even faster-because the overall project of settlement was the master moral narrative of the age, and individuals wanted to get a decent piece of the pie while they still could. Only later would hunting be defined as "sport," implying an ethic of fair chase.”
“Even if they hadn't been restocked, deer probably would have skirted extinction; in the early 1900s they were holding on in isolated pockets, and new conservation laws were coming into play. But without the restocking programs, it's doubtful that we would have nearly as many deer now as we do.”
“Calling them a commodity had almost wiped them out, while calling them a resource had helped them recover. In either case, though, we had treated deer more or less as objects.”
“I thought of all the deer I'd found, in art, literature, com-merce; deer who functioned as "a sight," something to view or to spot, ornaments or tokens. Meesha's white deer—"a messenger," she said, tapping into an ancient notion-gazed directly at the viewer from the dress's skirt. Here was a deer who looked back.”
-
“No one's sure why males in the deer family shed their antlers each year. It's an evolutionary mystery, and it makes deer, in a strange way, akin to trees.
For millennia, other animals, like mice, have gnawed on shed antlers for the calcium. Years ago, I found a three-point antler covered in tooth marks; its smaller tines were all but gone.”
“It hadn't surprised me at all that most ranches I called wouldn-talk to me. I knew they felt unfairly targeted. Even the very pro-hunting National Deer Association opposes all deer breed ing, and the Boone and Crockett Club pointedly calls what hap pens at these places "shooting," not "hunting."
Yet some people call them an ecological boon because they give landowners a reason to return the land to a more natural state, instead of using the acreage for cattle-which beat up the land by overgrazing — or crops that require irrigation and pesticides. In rural areas, they argue, people need a way to make a living from their property if they're to avoid selling out to developers.
It all makes sense within the framework of human dominion-if your basic question is, What's the least harmful way we can manage the land? But the more telling argument is the one that says trophy hunters are just buying a service- the experience of an exciting and gratifying hunt.”
“There’d been deer too far off to shoot at, looking as tiny as emojis on faraway hillsides, or glimpses of orange behind distant trees: an awareness composed of distances that turned things unreal.”
“Venison is nutritious, wild food that could let us bypass factory farms—deer as the most viable wild substitute for cows. It’s an answer that says if we want to eat meat that doesn’t cook the planet, we are willing and able to kill it ourselves.”
-
“The very etymology of wilderness links it to deer. The Old English word deor meant "animal," and so wild-deor-ness was a place of wild animals.”
“So much was lost in a fog of erasure, as European colonists worked deliberately to separate Indigenous people from their lifeways-the songs or stories, say, that might have accompanied this communal labor, as women passed hours under trees.
Claytor and Furr saw their work as a kind of ongoing engagement with half-obscured knowledge; they'd try things, examine archaeological evidence and oral histories, experiment and learn and then try something else. Their ways were a mix of old and new, undertaken in twenty-first-century clothing, with no pretense of reenactment, and sometimes with frank anachronisms.
I was enchanted, for example, by the hide scraper Claytor made from a deer leg bone, but she readily offered, "I had to make it quickly, so I used a Dremel tool."
“But most of the ror uses on this list were not for food. The left column named parts of the animal: hair, hide, far, sine, organs, bones, antlers, hooves, teeth, eyeballs, blood, even scat and urine. And the right column read like a list of human needs, from essentials to enrichments, each need matched with a body part on the left.
That list helped me imagine a life in which I could stuff my child's pillow with deer fur, use the fluid from an eyeball for pig: ment, make a sack from the membrane that surrounds a deer's heart. The longer I stared at it, the more it seemed to diagram a relation: human and world, person and animal. The complemen-tarity of it all-the sense that for every item people wanted, there was a corresponding resource at hand, offered by an animal or a plant—felt so utterly different from our own world, in which Dremel tools are made from fossil fuels and mined metal, Dawn dish soap comes from a lab, and they both are acquired using a debit card in a big-box store. The list was the opposite of ab-stract, the opposite of outsourced. It outlined an existence firmly anchored to a local, self-generating reality. And it represented an entirely different paradigm of waste: If every part of animal was used, there was little waste to begin with, and any minor scrap that did go unused would simply return to the earth, feeding small creatures and the soil.”
“It takes culture to turn a deer into a life-sustaining resources.”
“We suffer from amnesia about the history of the lan In truth, European colonists and their descendants in right down to Americans of all stripes today-have almost perer had a chance to observe deer populations free from our ora fluence.”
“Humans are subtracting animals and adding themselves; beings that wear fur or bark are cut down by those in cotton. There is something so familiar about the scene—it is pure Americana, from the cabin to the caps—and yet so unearthly, like a tornado's aftermath.”
“Certainly deer do inhabit wooded lands; they like eating acorns, the seedlings of certain kinds of trees, and some of the wildflowers and plants (what ecologists call "the herbaceous layer") that pop up on the forest floor. But mature woods generally have less to offer deer than certain other environments. (The very word forest came into English signifying not woodland but simply "place of deer.")
The habitats that can support deer in the greatest numbers are less celebrated, less picturesque. They don't even have a name in common parlance, nothing as simple as "forest," though ecologists call them early-successional habitats. They're places with a lot of brushy, leafy vegetation below six feet in height. What does that mean in an undisturbed landscape? If by undisturbed we mean "untouched by humans," then it could mean a place where lightning recently caused a forest fire, opening the canopy and inviting lower-growing plants to rapidly fill in the space below.
If by undisturbed we mean "prior to Columbus," then that fire could well have been set by Native Americans in a controlled
burn.
In the last few centuries, the places most full of deer food have taken many forms, like logged forests where brush proliferates.
Or lately abandoned farms, where infant trees and fast-growing shrubs are roiling upward from what had been a pasture or hay-feld. Or the cuts under powerlines, where nearby trees offer shel-ter, and there's a vigorous supply of bushes and small plants in the sunny spaces below the lines. Or suburban neighborhoods: a tight patchwork of trees, shrubs, and the narrow zones where the woods meet the shoulders of roads.
Such places, to a strolling deer, are rich with food in the form of leaf and stem, as well as cover, one of their other key re-quirements. In these environments, deer live easy and reproduce quickly. Take away the predators, too, and you've created a cer vid nirvana.”
“There was a finders-keepers mentality toward land irself (legally ratified by the Homestead Act, which gave away land to chose who sertled on it), and that attitude extended to animals as well. Tr was seen as Americans' right to clear tard and use whatever was found there. If the decline of deer war an inevitable part of taming the wilderness, people sometimes rook that as a reason to kill even faster-because the overall project of settlement was the master moral narrative of the age, and individuals wanted to get a decent piece of the pie while they still could. Only later would hunting be defined as "sport," implying an ethic of fair chase.”
“Even if they hadn't been restocked, deer probably would have skirted extinction; in the early 1900s they were holding on in isolated pockets, and new conservation laws were coming into play. But without the restocking programs, it's doubtful that we would have nearly as many deer now as we do.”
“Calling them a commodity had almost wiped them out, while calling them a resource had helped them recover. In either case, though, we had treated deer more or less as objects.”
“I thought of all the deer I'd found, in art, literature, com-merce; deer who functioned as "a sight," something to view or to spot, ornaments or tokens. Meesha's white deer—"a messenger," she said, tapping into an ancient notion-gazed directly at the viewer from the dress's skirt. Here was a deer who looked back.”
-
“No one's sure why males in the deer family shed their antlers each year. It's an evolutionary mystery, and it makes deer, in a strange way, akin to trees.
For millennia, other animals, like mice, have gnawed on shed antlers for the calcium. Years ago, I found a three-point antler covered in tooth marks; its smaller tines were all but gone.”
“It hadn't surprised me at all that most ranches I called wouldn-talk to me. I knew they felt unfairly targeted. Even the very pro-hunting National Deer Association opposes all deer breed ing, and the Boone and Crockett Club pointedly calls what hap pens at these places "shooting," not "hunting."
Yet some people call them an ecological boon because they give landowners a reason to return the land to a more natural state, instead of using the acreage for cattle-which beat up the land by overgrazing — or crops that require irrigation and pesticides. In rural areas, they argue, people need a way to make a living from their property if they're to avoid selling out to developers.
It all makes sense within the framework of human dominion-if your basic question is, What's the least harmful way we can manage the land? But the more telling argument is the one that says trophy hunters are just buying a service- the experience of an exciting and gratifying hunt.”
“There’d been deer too far off to shoot at, looking as tiny as emojis on faraway hillsides, or glimpses of orange behind distant trees: an awareness composed of distances that turned things unreal.”
“Venison is nutritious, wild food that could let us bypass factory farms—deer as the most viable wild substitute for cows. It’s an answer that says if we want to eat meat that doesn’t cook the planet, we are willing and able to kill it ourselves.”
September 3, 2023
Both deeply rigorous and ceaselessly tender. Questing and intimate. A really fine work of Cultural-Natural nonfiction.
March 2, 2024
My thanks to NetGalley and Catapult/Counterpoint Press/Soft Skull Press for and eARC copy of this book to read and review.
I live in a state in the US that is just FULL of deer. Like FULL. They are like giant rats with really skinny legs that have a really bad habit of standing in front of cars while they are traveling at a high rate of speed, killing themselves and ruining the car and the driver's day in the process. Bodies of deer who commit suicide via car are always on the side of the road where I live. It's impossible to miss seeing. (The area I live is not one where roadkill is picked up and used to it's fullest, so once a deer is down, it takes a few days for the local authorities to pick up the bodies and dispose of them. My area also doesn't have carrion scavengers to "circle of life" the dead deer. I live in a non-wild except for deer, Canadian geese and squirrels area. It's sad, but I also don't have to drive 50+ miles to get to the local grocery store, so there is some compensation I guess.)
I was going through a mini-book slump when I was attempting to read this book, so I admit, I didn't finish it. Not because the book was bad, it just didn't grab me. It also had a lot of the history, and current, humans are only good at killing things vibe, though apparently deer were so bad off and people regretted it, so they literally SHIPPED IN deer from areas where the population was still doing ok to the areas where they were non-existent and now POOF deer are so plentiful they are a nuisance because the predators of said deer were not also shipped in. So now cars are the main predators. So yay, we didn't make the deer extinct, but now we have given auto-body workers much more steady employment than if deer didn't exist.
I think I am too heavily negative to deer to really enjoy a book that seems to be positive towards them. I think if I lived in an area where hunting was the norm and deer were a major source of food for me, I would feel differently. I DO think it is cool that people are trying to re-learn if they don't know already, the way to live off of the land and to use a dead deer for EVERYthing, to respect the cycle of it's life and death. But that's not me. Oh, I have flights of fancy, if I was isekai'd into a world where I had to survive off of the land, if WWIII happened and I survived, how I would ruggedly "live off the land", but those are just fantasy. I would hope if those things happened, I could figure out a way to survive, but it would be VERY difficult for me. I respect those who CAN do that. Hats off to you. Can we be friends? You keep me alive physically, I keep you mentally and emotionally stable by being your friend and giving you an outward goal of keeping someone helpless alive? No? Shrug, just thought I'd ask.
So. Would I recommend this book? If you are into nature, want to learn about the multiple uses for a dead deer and you appreciate when they are alive because BAMBI IS TOO CUTE, then yes, this book would be very interesting and informative to you. It just didn't work for me.
2, it was interesting but a book slump killed it for me, stars.
I live in a state in the US that is just FULL of deer. Like FULL. They are like giant rats with really skinny legs that have a really bad habit of standing in front of cars while they are traveling at a high rate of speed, killing themselves and ruining the car and the driver's day in the process. Bodies of deer who commit suicide via car are always on the side of the road where I live. It's impossible to miss seeing. (The area I live is not one where roadkill is picked up and used to it's fullest, so once a deer is down, it takes a few days for the local authorities to pick up the bodies and dispose of them. My area also doesn't have carrion scavengers to "circle of life" the dead deer. I live in a non-wild except for deer, Canadian geese and squirrels area. It's sad, but I also don't have to drive 50+ miles to get to the local grocery store, so there is some compensation I guess.)
I was going through a mini-book slump when I was attempting to read this book, so I admit, I didn't finish it. Not because the book was bad, it just didn't grab me. It also had a lot of the history, and current, humans are only good at killing things vibe, though apparently deer were so bad off and people regretted it, so they literally SHIPPED IN deer from areas where the population was still doing ok to the areas where they were non-existent and now POOF deer are so plentiful they are a nuisance because the predators of said deer were not also shipped in. So now cars are the main predators. So yay, we didn't make the deer extinct, but now we have given auto-body workers much more steady employment than if deer didn't exist.
I think I am too heavily negative to deer to really enjoy a book that seems to be positive towards them. I think if I lived in an area where hunting was the norm and deer were a major source of food for me, I would feel differently. I DO think it is cool that people are trying to re-learn if they don't know already, the way to live off of the land and to use a dead deer for EVERYthing, to respect the cycle of it's life and death. But that's not me. Oh, I have flights of fancy, if I was isekai'd into a world where I had to survive off of the land, if WWIII happened and I survived, how I would ruggedly "live off the land", but those are just fantasy. I would hope if those things happened, I could figure out a way to survive, but it would be VERY difficult for me. I respect those who CAN do that. Hats off to you. Can we be friends? You keep me alive physically, I keep you mentally and emotionally stable by being your friend and giving you an outward goal of keeping someone helpless alive? No? Shrug, just thought I'd ask.
So. Would I recommend this book? If you are into nature, want to learn about the multiple uses for a dead deer and you appreciate when they are alive because BAMBI IS TOO CUTE, then yes, this book would be very interesting and informative to you. It just didn't work for me.
2, it was interesting but a book slump killed it for me, stars.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 16, 2024
This was an interesting deep dive into the topic of deer - some mythological and artistic context, the importance of deer historically for sustenance and survival materials, how the role of deer has changed in our urban landscapes and everyday lives, and the world of deer hunting for food and for sport.
I enjoyed the author’s engagement with the different groups and activities discussed, sharing her own non-judgemental personal experiences and feelings. Whether travelling to locales overrun by deer (just to see what it’s like), taking survival classes and learning how each part of the deer’s body can be used for tools or materials, or even attending a hunting convention and journeying on a hunting excursion herself, Howsare brought vulnerability and honestly to her commentary. I did find that the topics jumped around a lot and in some cases ran a little long, and I think this book could have been structured a little differently to better demonstrate the human past, present, and future relationship with deer.
The narrator voice at 1x speed was very slow and monotonous, I found this best enjoyed at 1.5x speed (or greater). For some reason I always heard “the fawns” as “The Fonz” which I found kind of funny.
Thank you to NetGalley and HighBridge Audio for providing this ALC!
I enjoyed the author’s engagement with the different groups and activities discussed, sharing her own non-judgemental personal experiences and feelings. Whether travelling to locales overrun by deer (just to see what it’s like), taking survival classes and learning how each part of the deer’s body can be used for tools or materials, or even attending a hunting convention and journeying on a hunting excursion herself, Howsare brought vulnerability and honestly to her commentary. I did find that the topics jumped around a lot and in some cases ran a little long, and I think this book could have been structured a little differently to better demonstrate the human past, present, and future relationship with deer.
The narrator voice at 1x speed was very slow and monotonous, I found this best enjoyed at 1.5x speed (or greater). For some reason I always heard “the fawns” as “The Fonz” which I found kind of funny.
Thank you to NetGalley and HighBridge Audio for providing this ALC!
August 19, 2024
Took me completely by surprise: informative, entertaining, thoughtful, and compassionate. I’d say there’s good material here for nearly everyone who lives in the lower 48, although it seems particularly apt for those of us in deer-overrun areas.
Howsare looks at human-deer overlap from every angle I could imagine and more: biological, ecological, historical, cultural, economical, social. She considers broad ecosystem scales and micro ones and does so with curiosity and respect. She (correctly) dismisses the myth of “natural balance”; refrains from judging anyone (this reader can judge for himself: people who chase deer with ATVs and dogs to harass them into dropping antlers, for purposes of collecting their shed, are vile putrid monsters); and, over and over, presents complex issues with nuance and sensitivity.
There’s a lot to know. Much of it is uncomfortable even to people who’ve never seen a deer, because the built landscape that humans rely on causes harm, to deer and other species and even to ourselves, and Howsare does not sugar coat. She offers no recipes for absolution or improvement, she just wants us to be mindfully aware. It’s up to each of us to do better, however we can.
PS do not feed the deer.
Howsare looks at human-deer overlap from every angle I could imagine and more: biological, ecological, historical, cultural, economical, social. She considers broad ecosystem scales and micro ones and does so with curiosity and respect. She (correctly) dismisses the myth of “natural balance”; refrains from judging anyone (this reader can judge for himself: people who chase deer with ATVs and dogs to harass them into dropping antlers, for purposes of collecting their shed, are vile putrid monsters); and, over and over, presents complex issues with nuance and sensitivity.
There’s a lot to know. Much of it is uncomfortable even to people who’ve never seen a deer, because the built landscape that humans rely on causes harm, to deer and other species and even to ourselves, and Howsare does not sugar coat. She offers no recipes for absolution or improvement, she just wants us to be mindfully aware. It’s up to each of us to do better, however we can.
PS do not feed the deer.
February 27, 2024
Four stars for sure, maybe another half depending on my mood. This book won't appeal to everyone, which is too bad as this kind of nature-as-protagonist, highly literary nonfiction bears fruit unrealized by anthropocentric texts. It is biographical in structure and centers around the human/deer interface, so not entirely divorced from the human but even more fruitful for this. If you decide to read this text, make a commitment to read it all the way through. Take time to think about and integrate what you've read. In m opinion this book is in some ways a very important work, far more important than one might think. Ms. Howsare is imagining an emergent reality, blending past, present, and possible futures, blending human and non-human, the material and metaphysical. The Age of Deer is in every sense a liminal text, its worp and weft being the knowing and weaving of borderlands into our rapidly changing everyday reality. A phenomenological dreamscape, if you will, with dreaming being an equal or even superior way of knowing. In the end this book is a great reminder that any way forward through the mess humans have created will fail unless women teach up how to go there.
March 27, 2024
This took me a long time to get through, but I'm glad I stuck it out. I found that around the 100-page mark, the writing becomes more engaging and the subject matter more interesting. Like the author--like many people, I imagine--I've been fascinated by deer an struggled with my relationship to them: admiring their beauty and joking that I wish I could have a job escorting fawns away from the side of highways while also happily digging into a bowl of venison stew. It can seem like hypocrisy, but it isn't.
Howsare accomplishes a lot in The Age of Deer. She provides history on how they became so commonplace; she discusses the ethics of hunting; she explores attitudes toward deer from "bambi" to pests; and, in general, considers the way we can continue to coexist with them. Over-all, I thought this was a really strong book--somewhat dense in its content, but it builds to a satisfying conclusion.
I thought the illustrations came off as an after thought and the typesetting was a bit cramped. Otherwise, though, I love the cover and design of the book,
Howsare accomplishes a lot in The Age of Deer. She provides history on how they became so commonplace; she discusses the ethics of hunting; she explores attitudes toward deer from "bambi" to pests; and, in general, considers the way we can continue to coexist with them. Over-all, I thought this was a really strong book--somewhat dense in its content, but it builds to a satisfying conclusion.
I thought the illustrations came off as an after thought and the typesetting was a bit cramped. Otherwise, though, I love the cover and design of the book,
April 21, 2024
I found this book engaging and thought-provoking. I love writing that causes me to see familiar things in a new light, and it did that! I was most interested in the first half, which provided a lot of new-to-me information. The second half was heavier on memoir, and didn't give me a lot of new insights, but still felt engaging.
My biggest issue with the book is what felt to me like a cursory engagement with Indigenous relationships with deer and hunting. Living Native people did not figure prominently in the book (while at the same time, non-Native folks were featured interpreting Native cultures and traditions). It felt like a notably missing piece.
I would still recommend this book to others (and have already!), with that caveat. As a content warning: there are many graphic depictions of animal death.
My biggest issue with the book is what felt to me like a cursory engagement with Indigenous relationships with deer and hunting. Living Native people did not figure prominently in the book (while at the same time, non-Native folks were featured interpreting Native cultures and traditions). It felt like a notably missing piece.
I would still recommend this book to others (and have already!), with that caveat. As a content warning: there are many graphic depictions of animal death.
February 16, 2024
Good read that explores the many contradictions we have with the largest wild animal we regularly see up close. I found there were certain parts of the book that dragged on but she did an excellent job of covering all aspects of our relationships we have with deer. Her research on how their populations are constantly changing is really fascinating and refutes a lot of misconceptions. Her breadth of coverage on the subject makes it worth reading. She covers the people who save hurt deer,the people who farm deer so people can shoot trophy’s every time they pay, the people that euthanize deer in the suburbs, and of course the people and millions of dollars that go with the people that hunt deer
February 13, 2024
A very deep dive into the history of Deer including mythology, legends and everything else you can think of including our relationship with Deer. I was really looking forward to this book because I do love animals and Deer in particular. It just gets too deep for me and after a while I didn't care anymore. I think it had a lot to do with the way it was written I was going to DNF the book several times because I felt that I was investing too much time in it, but I kept trying to stay interested and was forcing myself to read. End result I couldn't do it. It didn't work for me at all. Thanks to the publisher and Goodreads for the copy of the book.
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