Charles J. Sharp / Wikimedia CommonsFashion victim: cultural attachment to deer-skin clothing and accessories nearly drove the species to extinctionCharles J. Sharp / Wikimedia Commons
Residents of small towns in the US have grown used to waking up to rose bushes stripped of their flowers, their stems appearing neatly clipped. The culprit is the white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), a species of deer whose population may now number as many as 35 million across the country. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, there were only 300,000 of them. Archaeologist Elic Weitzel of the Smithsonian Institution concluded that deer populations declined sharply as hunting surged between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, when deer-skin clothing was a status symbol. In previous millennia, Indigenous peoples appear to have better managed deer hunting. From the twentieth century onwards, hunting regulations allowed deer populations to recover and flourish alongside humans once more, though not without conflict (Journal of Anthropological Archeology, May 16; The Conversation, May 29).
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