When I was a toddler, well into the last millennium, I went with my grandparents to look at the deer park in Hilversum, then located on the edge of the built-up area and overlooking rolling fields that have since been swallowed up by the Media Park. When I became a father myself and lived in Rotterdam, we went to visit the deer in the deer camp in the Kralingse Bos. And last year I walked with my elderly father in a wheelchair from his nursing home through Laren, and we watched the deer in the Laren deer park. Unfortunately, it would prove to be his last outing.
We all have such memories: with children, grandchildren, parents or grandparents, watching the deer in the deer park, sticking an apple peel through the wire mesh, marveling at the beauty of the animals and the imposing antlers of the males. Who never visited a deer park?
The deer park phenomenon should perhaps be included in the Unesco list of Dutch heritage, but on the contrary, it is on the nomination to be banned. If it is up to Minister Adema of Agriculture, deer will soon no longer be allowed to live in a deer park. Fallow deer, because that’s what it’s all regarding.
Ethical issue
I had to think regarding that for a while, because it is an ethical issue. Wild animals belong in nature and not behind a fence. As far as I’m concerned, zoos should limit themselves to breeding species that are on the verge of extinction in order to preserve the species – and not display wild animals as curiosities.
Something else is dealing with fully or semi-domesticated species such as rabbits, sheep, goats, pot-bellied pigs and other forms of petting zoo fauna. Fallow deer that populate our deer camps are somewhere in between. Fallow deer are wild animals, but by being housed in deer parks and petting zoos for generations, there is actually some degree of domestication.
But the real question is probably this: does a fallow deer suffer from its existence in a deer park, and if so, is that suffering, if any, greater than the suffering of a sheep or dwarf egg or other species that are not going to be banned? I do not think so. It won’t make a difference to a deer, a sheep, or a goat.
The brain of a sheep and a deer differ little
They are all even-toed ungulates, ruminants, herbivores. I can’t look into the brain of a sheep or a deer, but apart from species-specific characteristics there won’t be much difference. They seek plant food, especially grass in the case of sheep and leaves and twigs in the case of deer. They are instinctively alert to predators because in the large food chain they are prey animals. I suspect that they are not dissatisfied with the protection that a deer park or petting zoo offers them.
If Minister Adema really cares regarding animal welfare, he would be better off targeting the sordid excesses of the factory farming industry than the fallow deer in deer parks that we all enjoy and that are usually excellently and lovingly cared for.
Jelle Reumer is a paleontologist. Every week he discusses an animal that makes the news for Trouw.
