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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
"Our precarious, fluctuating state?' Readers will be enthralled."
"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."
"Through carefully wrought prose and evocative imagery, Howsare depicts how deer and human populations have both relied on and butted up against one another for eons ..."
"She delivers sympathetic portraits of her brother, an avid hunter, and of hunting ranches, largely denounced by the hunting establishment, where customers pay a small fortune to shoot deer and other wildlife."
"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."
"Understanding the ways these heroes of the human age have adapted to change may very well help us survive our own era of overabundance."
"Very much to her credit, Ms."
"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."
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