Deer in Human Culture
Deer are well loved animals and so it is no surprise to learn that they are very common in popular culture. When you ask people about deer that they can think of, Bambi from the Disney classic often comes to mind. The story is about a young fawn that loses his mother and then grows up to be a powerful buck. It shows the circle of life and stressed how important it is to find a balance in nature between animals and humans.
It may surprise you to learn that Bambi was actually a book before it was a family movie. Today both the book and the movie continue to be huge selling items that span over many generations.
One of the icons of America out there is the John Deere tractor products. The logo for them is a deer running very swiftly. Most of the time the equipment offered is green or red and the deer on it is gold. This has been a logo that almost everybody recognizes it, if they are part of the farming industry.
What is so ironic about that though is that farmers continue to complain about the problems that deer create for them. They can come into crop areas and feed heavily on corn, soy beans, and other items. They can also lay down in the fields for bedding areas. This can damage crops so that they don’t grow properly early on. Millions of dollars in crop damages are reported annually from farmers due to the invasion of deer into their farm land.
Today you can easily go on any video site such as YouTube and find lost of material with deer in them. Some are about hunting expeditions. Others are about surprise encounters with deer or even cars being smashed up after colliding with one of them. Some of them are very funny though such as one with a deer trying to eat the flowers in a ladies garden and her screening irrationally at it to go away.
Hunting is a common enough sport that involves deer. However, you can only do it during certain seasons and if you get a tag permit to do so. There is a very popular type of 3-D deer target shooting out there that continues to grow in popularity. There are courses where you can practice and these different targets pop up that you have to knock down. There are competitions held to determine who is the most accurate, who can knock down more of them, and even who is the fastest at completing the course.
On a more personal level there are hunting video games. You can find them at most arcades with very large screens. They even allow you to choose the type of deer you want to hunt and the type of weapon you will do it with. For home gaming consoles there are lots of these deer hunting games too. Many of the popular ones come out with updated versions all the time. You can buy the guns and other accessories to plug in for the best experience too instead of just using the tradition game controller.
Since there are so many species of deer and people tend to take to them quite well, don’t be surprised to continue seeing these animals out there in a variety of different popular culture developments. The exposure of them is good though because it does help people to remember that they are out there. It can help keep the idea in place that when we invade nature we can be taking away their homes.
