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The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors
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About This Book
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?
Reviews
"Understanding the ways these heroes of the human age have adapted to change may very well help us survive our own era of overabundance."
"Outstanding natural history writing."
"[Howsare] tirelessly puts her boots on the ground and brings back surprising lessons ..."
"He was so beautiful and whole, but so still,' Howsare writes of a deer fatally wounded by a hunter), and her lyrical musings cast her subject in a new light, as when she describes deer as 'mashup-makers, remixers, [and] shape-shifters' for their skill at adapting to diverse environments: 'What animal could be a more perfect emblem for our own selves?"
"A nature writer with a poet's eye and a scholar's acuity, Howsare catalogs the variety of ways the two species have interacted over time, balancing her personal observations with broad research that aims to move the needle from love-hate to understanding-acceptance."
"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')."
"The Age of Deer is that book—and it is a masterpiece ..."
"A thorough, eye-opening invitation to ponder our own relationships with the natural world, practically and reverently."
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