Fallow Deer Anatomy

Class Photos and Fallow Deer

For this last class, I didn't want to risk ending up with road kill again for the field dressing demonstration. So we arranged to get a deer from the very kind and gracious Gail Rose at her Deauville Fallow Deer Farm near Front Royal, VA. This way it could be killed only a few hours before we needed it, put on ice, and driven immediately to the site by Paul Fritz (who is also our class range safety officer) and Bob Smith. As it turns out, the anatomy is extremely similar in spite of their taxonomic distance from one another. The fallow deer lacks the full compliment of scent glands that the whitetail features. I expect that this difference occurs because fallow deer live in herds year round and have no trouble keeping track of one another. Whereas whitetails disperse for much of the year and keep tabs on each other through scent marking and the use of rubs and scrapes. Fallow deer also turn out to have a slightly differently shaped rumen, thicker musculature where the muscles of the two hindquarters meet over the bottom of the pelvis, a slightly narrower pelvis, and a liver with lobes fused to the side of the rumen more fully than has a whitetail. These differences are fascinating to me. This is part of what I've come to enjoy about hunting for food. It's science that you can eat.

The cyclopaedia of anatomy and physiology

Deer farming in North America, the conquest of a new frontier

The cyclopædia of anatomy and physiology

On the anatomy of vertebrates

Annals of anatomy