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kwickimom, tell us more about raising whitetailed deer!!!


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Okay, so if I understood you correctly in the other thread, you can't raise wild-genetics deer, but have to buy "farm"-genetics breeding stock. How expensive is that to do? Are they readily available?

 

What happens when the wild stock males decide love is in the air and come looking for your does?

 

How are your animals identified as separate from the wild population - tattooed?

 

How tall are your fences? What kind of shelter do you need to provide? How do you keep the local hunters from raiding your farm when you are not home? Or from accidentally shooting your stock when they are lost in the woods and a bit fuzzy on where the property lines are located?

 

Why, other than taxidermy reasons, do you seek out the shed antlers?

 

Any problems with the males being aggressive? How are the females when they have fawns? Do your domestic stock resemble captive wild animals more or exotic domestics in terms of temperament?

 

Inquiring minds want to know! Or at least my little pea brain is very curious! Thanks in advance for answering my pesky questions.

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Okay, so if I understood you correctly in the other thread, you can't raise wild-genetics deer, but have to buy "farm"-genetics breeding stock. How expensive is that to do? Are they readily available?

 

Totally depends. Most of ours were given to us by people trying to get out of the business (older people who didnt have the energy to care for them) You can get semen from humongous bucks for a couple thousand dollars! There are a ton of them. Texas has some really big farms wth thousands of deer on them. There is a disease that affected many deer (I believe called Chronic wasting disease) that made it illegal to transport live deer across state lines. I dont know the specifics (my hubby does).So we buy and sell in IL. We havent AI'ed any of our deer.

 

What happens when the wild stock males decide love is in the air and come looking for your does?

 

Some bucks will fight with ours through the fence. I have heard of other farmers bucks tearing through their fences to get out and fight or breed. :001_huh: They are fiesty during the rut!

 

How are your animals identified as separate from the wild population - tattooed?

 

the state vet can check your deer anytime through DNA. You need to keep really good records about where you bought each deer and where each fawn is from.

 

How tall are your fences? What kind of shelter do you need to provide? How do you keep the local hunters from raiding your farm when you are not home? Or from accidentally shooting your stock when they are lost in the woods and a bit fuzzy on where the property lines are located?

Our fences are 10 feet tall. Deer can JUMP. They can clear an 8 foot fence if they want to. we have run in sheds, but they hate them. they like to lay under trees and up against hay bales or tree trunks. They even sit out in hail. We are not up against woods thankfully :) I have heard of some people poaching fenced deer and cutting the fence and dragging them out. They usually get caught because they show off the deer and try to pass it off as a wild one, but word gets around and antlers are very easy to recognize

 

Why, other than taxidermy reasons, do you seek out the shed antlers?

 

My husband collects sheds form his hunting grounds. He keeps trail cameras out and can recognize any deer from his antlers. he likes to match them Pto pictures he has, or deer we have killed. He has sheds from 2 or 3 years of the same deer. We have hundreds, maybe thousands, of antlers and he remembers exactly where we found them and if they matched up tot a deer we killed or had on camera. People will buy big sheds just to have and collect. Crafters will buy antlers by weight to make things out of. He will not sell any of his antlers, but we could. He loves them :)

 

Any problems with the males being aggressive? How are the females when they have fawns? Do your domestic stock resemble captive wild animals more or exotic domestics in terms of temperament?

 

Males are super agressive, the tamer ones are dangerous as can be when in full antler. They see us as playmates. We do not enter pens with antlered deer, ever. We have a dart gun to tranq if needed (medicines,etc) We also have the option of sawing off antlers of a super agressive buck if he is harming does.

So far our does are sweet as can be when they have fawns. They run off the bucks, but allow us near. Some get a little nervous but have never charged. We stay away as much as we can though because we have heard of wild does attacking joggers during fawning season.Ours are super tame though and see us as their moms.

Even our tamest deer can still be "wild" They all have their own personalities. Mae, our first deer, is crazy as can be. She has climbed a laddder up to the top rung! She lived in the house with us for 6 weeks and my husband would crawl around with her. She loves him to death. She was able to be let out of her pen and all she did was follow him around. She cannot be trusted around kids though because she plays with them as if they were deer (paws at them and trys to butt heads) She is a trip.

We love them, but realize they are never 100% tame. We are lucky to have our local vet help us out with any medical issues. I have researched everything to death though. There is an excellent website for deer farmers and a deer farmers association with super helpful people on it!

 

Inquiring minds want to know! Or at least my little pea brain is very curious! Thanks in advance for answering my pesky questions.

 

Anytime! I love to talk about em!:D

Edited by kwickimom
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More questions!:D

 

What is your stocking density per acre? Do they eat mostly scrub, grass, or hay and grain?

 

Can you share a link to that website?

 

(As I type, I can see 4 wild deer out in our pasture, browsing calmly.)

 

I would love to do this but am scared of the 10' fences. Possibly doable if we could hire some of the work done and if they don't need a huge amount of space. Due to our rocky soil and crummy existing fences, that has been a real sticking point for my many livestock schemes over the years.

 

Thanks so much for the information.

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More questions!:D

 

What is your stocking density per acre? Do they eat mostly scrub, grass, or hay and grain?

 

Can you share a link to that website?

 

(As I type, I can see 4 wild deer out in our pasture, browsing calmly.)

 

I would love to do this but am scared of the 10' fences. Possibly doable if we could hire some of the work done and if they don't need a huge amount of space. Due to our rocky soil and crummy existing fences, that has been a real sticking point for my many livestock schemes over the years.

 

Thanks so much for the information.

 

 

www.deerfarmer.com sooo many knowledgeable people on this forum! So far we only have a 1 acre pen divided into 3 sections and we rotate them. We generally only have 2 bucks and 4 does around. We replant the pen they are not in. We usually only keep 2 bucks at a time. They can be together until they are in hard antler, we seperate right before they start rubbing out their velvet. When they drop antlers we put them all back together and rotate through the pens. When the does are fawning, we ususally seperate them out, but not always. the bucks generally leave them alone. We seperate only to monitor feed rations.

 

We feed a mix of soybeans, corn, and sweet feed. My husbands family farms so we get beans and corn for nothing. Purina actually makes a pelleted deer feed also. we used to feed that and it is really good but expensive We plant clover (they LOVE this) and wheat in the pens. They do not really like hay. They will eat the clover hay and alfalfa if they must. We dont have many trees yet (they kill them all) so we go to town and collect everyones leaves after they rake and use that for bedding and they also like to nibble on them. We also put a lot of straw down in the winter. I really suggest growing clover..its soo easy to grow and they love it.

 

The fences cost a lot. We ordered deer fence from a website called JDlonghorn (I think) My FIL works in the oil fields and so we got oil field pipe for cheap for our posts. What cost a lot also was shade cloth. We wrapped the entire pen int his because we dont have any big trees yet. We want to build a "pavilion" for them. So there is nice shade and a roof, but no walls :D

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Hey I saw in the other post that you're training labs to hunt antlers! We have been doing that with our dogs just for the fun of it! We have an Australian Shepherd and a Blackmouth Cur and the Aussie is our best antler dog. I live near Yellowstone Park so the antler hunting options are endless and it's been fun to get the dogs involved. We go out on horses and pack home the horns!

 

It's Chronic Wasting Disease, btw, I think you had a typo in yours!

 

I've never thought about raising deer on a small scale, I've only seen the hunting farms in TX. I bet they're interesting!

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Hey I saw in the other post that you're training labs to hunt antlers! We have been doing that with our dogs just for the fun of it! We have an Australian Shepherd and a Blackmouth Cur and the Aussie is our best antler dog. I live near Yellowstone Park so the antler hunting options are endless and it's been fun to get the dogs involved. We go out on horses and pack home the horns!

 

It's Chronic Wasting Disease, btw, I think you had a typo in yours!

 

I've never thought about raising deer on a small scale, I've only seen the hunting farms in TX. I bet they're interesting!

 

Thanks for the typo alert, I cannot type to save my life. It takes me forever to post :D

 

It is awesome to hear from another antler person! My husband would be quite jealous of being by the National Park. We aren't allowed to take antlers from the public parks here :-(

 

How did you guys go about training your dogs?

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We can't take them from the Park either but we live in the mountains nearby and find them there. One of our favorite mountain ranges here is called the Elkhorns!

 

That little Aussie started it-when she was a pup she kept finding antlers and bringing them home and so we started rewarding her for it. But we knew she couldn't carry an elk or moose shed through some of the country we ride in so when we got the BMC dog we taught her to sing a bit when she found a horn and wait for us. It tied in to her hunting/treeing instinct and the aussie taught her to look for horns instead of animals! We taught them just playing around as we rode and when we got to camp in the mountains... just for kicks but they turned out to be a good team!

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Several years ago I met a man who raised either deer or elk. The main reason he did this was to harvest the antlers and sell them to a pharmaceutical company. I'm sure he sold the meat, too, but apparently he did very well financially with the antlers.

 

Have you looked into this?

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OK, I may be totally dense, but what do you do with the deer? Do you eat them?

 

 

No we dont eat the ones we raise. They are pets. We do sell the fawns to people tor aise and do as they please with them. Most people we sell to are raising to sell urine or to raise big bucks for the game ranches. We hunt wild deer for our food :)

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Several years ago I met a man who raised either deer or elk. The main reason he did this was to harvest the antlers and sell them to a pharmaceutical company. I'm sure he sold the meat, too, but apparently he did very well financially with the antlers.

 

Have you looked into this?

 

Wow..I have never heard of that and wil for sure look into that. Thanks for the tip!!

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We can't take them from the Park either but we live in the mountains nearby and find them there. One of our favorite mountain ranges here is called the Elkhorns!

 

That little Aussie started it-when she was a pup she kept finding antlers and bringing them home and so we started rewarding her for it. But we knew she couldn't carry an elk or moose shed through some of the country we ride in so when we got the BMC dog we taught her to sing a bit when she found a horn and wait for us. It tied in to her hunting/treeing instinct and the aussie taught her to look for horns instead of animals! We taught them just playing around as we rode and when we got to camp in the mountains... just for kicks but they turned out to be a good team!

 

That is really cool that they naturally did it. Our labs LOVE antlers. They get super excited to see one. Our #1 lab Dixie actually sits and watches hunting shows with undivided attention and goes nuts when she sees a buck or a big pile of shed antlers on there. Her biggest reward in life is getting an antler to play with. Fresh sheds she goes psycho over!

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