A life for deer - John Fletcher

The social relationship between humans and deer goes back thousands of years. Our bodies are better adapted to eating venison than the fattier beef or lamb, and venison was the staple meat of Europeans from the earliest times. But deer were never domesticated, and until relatively recently were in decline from their mediaeval peak when there were thousands of deer parks. There are now more deer running wild in Britain than at any time since the last ice age. Nobody is better equipped to tell the fascinating story of deer than John Fletcher, who with his wife founded Europe's first commercial deer farm and has gone on to become the world's leading authority on deer matters, advising, among others, the Royal Family and the National Trust as well as governments and commercial organisations worldwide. John Fletcher's story is a compelling interaction between an intelligent, original and very likeable man and a group of particularly attractive animals, in which he skilfully blends the pattern of his life in deer farming from veterinary student to world authority, with digressions of scientific inquiry in the manner of Longitude.