Customer Reviews

The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I read this book because I wanted to learn about deer behavior, but I learned so much more. Thomas writes honestly and passionately about caring for and loving animals, not in an anthropomorphic way, but because they are themselves fellow creatures with us on this planet. Through her story of the deer groups surrounding her farm and how she fed them one winter, she brings in other stories about the inter-relatedness of other animals and plants in that ecosystem, including bears, coyotes, turkeys, oaks, and more. She relates how she gets a hunting license, not so she can hunt, but so she can understand the mentality of hunters and learn the tricks of how to track deer. Thomas is also poignantly candid about nature mistakes she has made, like when she put out poison to get rid of a giant rat in her house that was terrorizing her family and her pets, and the long-term consequences of that. And she tells about mice singing. The attitude of this book is summed up by her answer to the question, Why did you feed the deer? She replies, "They wanted to live. So I fed them." This book is for anyone who loves the earth and the animals (including ourselves!) in it. Engrossing and highly recommended. Easily readable by anyone!

As someone who has taken classes in animal biology and intelligence to earn a degree in biology, I was excited to see a book that appeared to be a study of animal behavior. Now, I'm not a believer that science need only be performed by those with degrees or laboratories--anyone with observational skills can be a scientist or naturalist. That said, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is not.

She writes about how she attracted the deer for the winter by feeding them corn--she goes on for a whole chapter about why she felt that the laws were BS and that she was just supplementing their diet, saving them from a winter of starvation. If she read up on the subject a bit she'd find that ruminates that eat corn have the acidity in their rumen go up and kill off the good bacteria causing difficulty digesting food and sickness. It's why we pump our cows full of antibiotics and other chemicals during finishing when they are on a high-corn diet. In other words--she not only was harming them but is encouraging others to harm them as well. Deer aren't meant to eat high carbohydrate feed in the winter--their system is meant for fibrous stems and grasses at that time. Please don't follow her lead!

She also doesn't observe so much as come up with her own random hypotheses without actually testing them in any way through her observations. She just gets excited and sees any little details as confirming whatever she believes. At one point in the books she feels she could "thought-speak" to one of them. She's very emotional, and I think the biggest example of her misinterpretation of animal behavior is when she thought that the small male deer were claiming a larger buck's territory after he was shot was them "honoring his spirit." No lady, it's very obvious that these animals were taking advantage of the fact that they could look larger than they really are by running their scent all over the areas where he rubbed his antlers higher than they could actually reach. FOr the reviews that say she doesn't anthropomorphize--I have no idea if they read the same book I did because she does it left and right.

I'm not going to deny that her writing style is easy to read an enjoyable--if it weren't for the crazy misinformation she has because she assumes so many things rather than look at others' research as well as a modern naturalist ought to. I would not be so annoyed if this book were touted about what it really is--a misguided animal lover who likes to come up with stories about the animals in her backyard. If this were a work of fiction or a memoir on naturalism I'd rank it 4 stars--as a book that pretends to be science I'm rating it 2. You will learn nothing of worth here, except an appreciation of nature.

This book is an amazing account of what the life of deer is like.
From the beginning to end the life of deer is revealed and you will most likely find that the life of deer are not so different than humans.
I highly recommend this to anyone who wishes to learn more about deer.

This is a warm book focusing on the observations of whitetail deer behavior on one woman's property in New England, it also explores some of the other lifeforms on this tract of land, including bear, turkeys, bobcats, rats, oaks, black gum trees, and more. Although the title and most of the content focuses on the deer, it is really about the complex community of farm and woodlot. It does not pretend to be a scientific work about deer (which is a criticism of some other reviewers), but is more along the lines of a love letter to the land which belonged to her family before her, wand which she expects to die and be buried on.

I have been raised in deer country, here in Montana, where we have both mule deer and whitetail. I learned some interesting things about deer behavior I didn't know. For example, Thomas learns it is too hard to identify the deer as individuals so she switches to identifying them as groups (the Tau, the Deltas, etc.), and then she begins to see the individuals. There are a lot of such little gems in here, such as when the bear is hit by a car, and survives an attempt to be "put out of his misery" by an impulsive move by Thomas. I was raised not to let an animal suffer, and I have killed because of it. But it is also true that sometimes injured wild animals do recover, and who are we to say they do not also appreciate every day above ground, even if they aren't quite perfect any more?

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is a daughter of an anthropologist, and is one herself, and she spent some of her youth among the San Bushmen of southern Africa. I am an anthropologist too, and read her fantastic book about the San, called The Harmless People. Many folks only know of the San through the caricature of them in the comic movie The Gods Must Be Crazy Series (The Gods Must Be Crazy / The Gods Must Be Crazy II).

One cannot truly understand this book unless one understands that Thomas has absorbed some of the science of her father and some of the animistic worldview of the San. She speaks of the Old Rules followed both by the Old People and by the animals of today, "the kind of rule that governs what you do, whether or not others are watching" (p. 36). Yes, Thomas does get a bit sentimental, and is subjective as hell, and the author does not pretend otherwise. This is a very personal book I think. Perhaps one of the last she will ever write. She talks about death and being buried there.

It is true, as other reviewers have criticized, that Thomas goes on and on about her internal struggle over feeding the deer in the year of poor acorn crops, and of her struggle with the Fish and Game over that feeding. She makes a point worth considering however:

"If the Old Way still prevailed, as it did for hundreds of millions of years without our meddling, things would level out eventually and I wouldn't need to worry about the deer. But we meddled. And we continue to meddle constantly, in almost every way imaginable. However, we do get to choose how we meddle. ...I will try to protect the deer who live where I live, not because I think they are mine but because I know who they are" (pp. 222-223).

This is not a biological or scientific treatise or reference on deer; it is a love letter to the Land itself, symbolized by various families of deer: the Betas, the Deltas, the Alphas, the Tau.

If spoilers are possible for a non-fiction book, there are a lot of them ahead to explain my strong opinion.

Welcome to the first one star review I've ever given. I didn't plan it that way; I thought it would be interesting to read something about deer from a non-hunting perspective, and I was just going to take the feeding as an unpleasant given without comment.

But the author spends so much time trying to justify her feeding the deer that it's impossible to not write about it. The attempt at justification of a primate feeding deer relationship is very poor and the author surely knows this. The fact that langur monkeys in India eat only parts of leaves and chital deer wait beneath the trees to eat what's dropped is completely irrelevant to putting out hundreds of pounds of corn.

Ultimately, her stated reason for feeding them is that they are individuals who want to live. To fully appreciation my opposition to her behavior, you need to understand that I live by that principle more than the author does--I don't eat animals, don't believe in using them for entertainment or experimentation, and I don't support hunting them. I've been a wildlife rehabilitation volunteer, and I occasionally toss something out the window for squirrels or crows or whoever wants it and enjoy watching them eat. In short, I completely understand the desire to feed them and if deer existed in a vacuum, I'd say feed away.

But of course they don't exist in a vacuum and her choice has far-reaching consequences, from directly depriving other animals of the food which would have been provided by predation and scavenging of weakened and dead deer, to the later destruction of rare plant life and ecosystems by the resulting overpopulation of deer. Anyone able to view things objectively can see what the overpopulation of the human species has meant to other life forms.

She cites one example of seeing a deer with claw marks which she hypothesizes came from a bear, and wonders with pride if her corn gave the deer the strength to escape. If it did, shame would be a more appropriate emotion for anyone who actually cared about nature as a whole. And of course by feeding the deer in a year of low acorn production, she's directly undermining the reason why there are years of low acorn production. Even the deer themselves attempt to override her feeding of them when the strongest prevent the weakest from eating.

In any case, the fact that deer are individuals who want to live apparently doesn't matter to the author when it comes to hunting. She declares that she'd rather be shot than killed in a slaughterhouse as if it's an either/or choice when in fact neither one has to occur. And then goes on to mention overpopulation as a justification for hunting even as she contributes to that overpopulation.

Although she claims that she has no interest in taking a life, she eagerly goes along to watch a hunter do so, and after he kills a deer he doesn't think is good enough for him, agrees to his suggestion that she lie and claim she killed the deer so he can kill another bigger one. This from someone she considers one of the best hunters, a man who elsewhere in the book she prevents from killing an injured bear who then lives for many years, a man she also criticizes for painfully dragging a deer who'd been hit by a car into the woods instead of shooting the deer on the spot. Considering her claim that the will to hunt is deep in our psyches, I suppose we should all be amazed that the overwhelming majority of people don't do it. Or maybe her claim is just nonsense.

Most of what she writes about the deer is as much imagination as observation which was OK but is there anything actually good in this book? Yes, there's a page about scat which is well-written, and the last chapter of non-deer related nature anecdotes was good enough that I was going to boost my rating up to two stars. Then I came to the epilogue where she declares she's going to keep feeding the deer as long as she's alive regardless of conditions. One star is being generous for the way this book left me feeling.

At root, this is a book about a writer who lives on a farm in New Hampshire and watches deer the field out back. If that's your thing, well, then, read this book.

If you're not so sure, here's some more information. She's learned to be a pretty good observer of the natural world - - not a great observer, but pretty good. She figures out how to identify individual deer not by individual marks but by observing the small groups they live with, and then distinguishing individuals within that. She notices some aspects of deer behavior. If you were a deer scientist, I don't think you'd be impressed, but Thomas probably writes a lot better than our imaginary deer scientist. So it evens out.

She spends a lot of time obsessing about whether she should feed the deer when they're starving. She decides that she should, or that she will, which is not the same thing. However, the worries seem to take up half the book. Here's what I would tell her, if she asked me: if you worry so much about it, then you know it's not right even if you want to do it. So don't do it.

The best stuff comes at the end, when she talks about other animals. So, ironically, this book is at its best when she stops talking about deer.

She writes well, and it's a pleasant book to have in your lap in front of the fire with a snifter of brandy. But I find it hard to get much more enthusiastic about it than that.

From the title, "Hidden Life of Deer", I assumed this book was written by a naturalist and intended to give laymen more insight about these beautiful animals. But it's really written by a layperson, telling of her observation of the deer that she feeds on her property.

So my expectations were completely off. And I found myself really irritated with the lack of science, and the constant rationalizations of behavior that goes against recommendations of wildlife experts.

I might have really enjoyed this book, if I'd had appropriate expectations. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas obviously loves her deer friends, and has entertaining anecdotes to share. She's a kind-hearted soul, and a keen observer of "her" animals. Her writing is warm and friendly, rambling like a cozy conversation over a cup of tea - with occasional passionate outbursts.

If you'd like a cozy, relaxing narrative non-fiction about one woman's relationship with her local deer, this is your book. If you're looking for science, look elsewhere.

The last hundred years in the United States have seen a recovery almost unimagined of various mammal species. The Whitetail Deer was down to about half a million around the year 1900. Today, due to a variety of factors, including Resource Game management, the population of this variety of deer has grown to over 20 million. As a result, lots of Americans are seeing more and more deer crossing through and stopping on their property, and people are trying to understand the ecology of these quiet animals. The Hidden Life of Deer is not the book for the interested laymen, who are curious about the life of deer. It is a rambling account of one naturalists observations, philosophies, and attempts to understand her role in the local ecosystem.

Thomas has made a career of studying the social systems of dogs, cats, elephants and other animals. In this book of about 200 pages, she attempts to bring that same level of observation and analysis to the wildlife on her wooded family property in New Hampshire. The hook, or crisis of this book is her awareness that the acorn crop in the fall of 2006, was far below normal, and that the deer in the area would suffer from hunger as the New England winter came on. Her naturalist instinct would be to just watch what would happen as the wild deer struggle to find other food sources. Instead, Thomas began a corn feeding program on her property. For the rest of the book, she attempts to justify why she began this feeding program, while decrying how mankind, locally and historically, has intervened in the lives of wild animals, to the animals' detriment.

Unfortunately, the actual hidden life of deer, as observed by a trained naturalist, takes up far less of this book than it should. The author rambles on about mice, bears, Indian primates, local birds and insects and takes a lot of inconsistent stands on a host of issues. While observing a hunt with someone she hails as a great animal tracker, she ends up lying to state game officials about killing an animal she did not kill, so her hunter friend could chase a larger buck. The last chapter is a rambling account of her guilt over poisoning rodents that ended up in her home, murders she called them.

In between, Thomas asserts a mixed bag of naturalism philosophy, references to mother earth Gaia and other truth claims that really have no business in a book that should be about educating the uninformed reader about the life of the largest, native mammal in the eastern United States, other than the moose. As a result, a book with an interesting premise rests a lot on the author's guilt, needless philosophical claims and ramblings that have little to do with the point of her main theses. In the end, she really has a hard time justifying why she continues to feed deer, even after a better acorn harvest the following autumn.

The back of this book lists the author as a widely read "American anthropologist" and yet when I search for biographical information I cannot find out where her degree is from, if she even has one. What I do find is one book about her life with an African tribe, mostly during her childhood, and a fair number of books about how animals live. This is the first thing that confuses me about this book. Why is she qualified to write it? Because she feed and observed deer in her yard one winter?

Ok, let's say that is the only qualification she needs. I then expect a focused book on these observations and maybe some personal revelations she had during that year and since then. Instead what I get is a book that claims to be a solid study yet does not provide enough documentation to back that up, a book that claims to look at how deer function as a group yet too many side trips into other animals plus a limited period of observation, a book that claims to find out why deer do what they do but instead only really offers what she seems and speculates about.

As a fun read, this is entertaining. It is also thought provoking as she challenges our societies rules and law about feeding wild animals and interacting with them. I haven't read her other books but given the fairly long defense of charges against her for anthropomorphizing the animals she writes about, I'm not the only one uncomfortable with that though I think it human nature to do that to some degree.

I kept wanting more information, more objectivity from this book but had to remind myself that those might not be part of the goal for the book. If you just want a good read that will give you some new information about deer and help you think in new ways, this is a good book. If you want well-researched and a scientific approach to understanding deer, this will not be that book. Since it seems torn between these two worlds, I gave it a 3 star average.

If you can't tolerate the fact that people feed deer and you believe that this is something that people should not do, then you should do yourself a favor and skip this book. Elizabeth Thomas's arguments will not convince you that this is a good idea. Personally, I'm not convinced that feeding deer on her land some corn in her backyard was such a terrible thing. Although when she cited the story of how one deer came out of the forest and tried to cross the ice to get to the corn and almost broke through it and slipped in, it made me wonder.

A problem with her arguments for feeding the deer is that she'll say how reasonable and intelligent the reasons for not feeding deer are, and then say how she decided to ignore them anyway. It just didn't really make sense, and she did this a lot throughout the book which got to be rather tiresome after a while.

Now, before I get to the good stuff, let me get one more complaint out of the way. It's called the hidden life of deer, but only the first three chapters really live up to that title (an alternate and, I think, more appropriate title would be, "Observing Deer and Other Creatures" Or something along those lines). In those first three chapters, I did learn some new things about deer that I had never known before, and I thought this was shaping up to be at least a 4 star book, maybe even 5. Unfortunately though, she started as some other reviewers have already mentioned, getting a little bit too philosophical. She'd describe something that she saw and then speculate and say things like, "I'm pretty sure what just happened was..." and then explain it almost as if it were fact.

After the first three chapters, the book started to get a little disheveled. Chapter 4 was,"The Hazards of Feeding" which was unnecessary as she'd already made her reasons (whether they were right or wrong) clear in the preface. While there were many interesting anecdotes in the following chapters, they weren't really so much about the hidden life of deer. I looked over this seeing as how I just picked this book up on a whim, but had I been looking for a book that focused solely on deer I may have found the lack of focus a little frustrating. For instance, in the chapter, "Fawns" there is a quite lengthy story about a bear that visited her home, which while being quite amusing, had absolutely nothing to do with fawns in any way. The final chapter is what took this book down to 3 stars for me. Entitled, "Our Place in the World" this chapter hardly even had deer in it and felt really out of place. It was also one of the longest chapters and was, for me, quite tedious as I didn't agree with some of her viewpoints.

However, I still enjoyed the majority of this book, especially the parts pertaining to the main subject matter, the hidden lives of deer. I even learned about quite a bit of new behavior, and while they really didn't fit in, still enjoyed the lengthy passages about other creatures. So, if you're looking for a book about deer just to relax and learn a few things, and not as a scientific study, (and have no qualms with deer-feeding) then you'll most likely enjoy this book, mildly recommended.