knitting projects

Image: Theodore Pavlic, from book Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

The story

For a long time, Père David’s deer lived across China, but by 1860 all the remaining animals belonged to the Emperor, who kept them in a carefully guarded private garden. Breaking in was punishable by death.

A visiting French monk, Père Armand David (yeah, the same guy who told the West about pandas) somehow found out about—and then got his hands on—some of the deer.  How exactly he did this is unclear, but we can say pretty definitely that they were stolen, either by evading or bribing the guards.  Père David himself would probably have claimed they were a gift, which would have been a lie.  At any rate, a few of the deer were smuggled back to private collections in Western Europe over the years.

In 1895, a flood knocked down part of the walls enclosing the royal garden, and some of the deer escaped, only to be eaten by starving peasants.  The deer that had stayed in the garden were killed by German troops during the Boxer Rebellion soon after.

Meanwhile, the 11th Duke of Bedford had been gathering all the deer living in Europe at Woburn Abbey in England. All modern Père David’s deer are descended from 11 of the 18 animals he managed to find. Surprisingly, there don’t seem to be any problems from all this inbreeding (that we’ve noticed yet, anyway).  Starting in 1985, small herds were sent back to guarded nature reserves in China, and by 2005 over 2000 Père David’s deer were living in China. A few hundred currently live in the wild—they escaped after a flood, the same way as in 1895.

The takeaway

Obviously, despite its shady beginnings, this is a success story for captive breeding and reintroduction! Today, though, breeding programs are better than they were in the 19th century.  More attention is paid to inbreeding, and we tend to begin programs much earlier than we did in this case.  The cooperation of international zoos would hopefully keep a population from falling as low as the Père David’s did, and modern programs keep a stud book for the entire captive species to help prevent inbreeding.  

Programs also try to make sure that animals don’t lose their survival skills after a few generations in captivity.  There’s evidence that moose could lose their reaction to dangerous predators after three generations in captivity!  The Père David’s deer, though, still reacts well to their historical predators, such as tigers.  Overall, they’ve avoided a lot of the pitfalls that captive-bred species are especially vulnerable to, and a healthy, diverse, completely wild population might be coming soon to China.

Post sources (if you’re interested)

Jiang, Z et al (2000). Reintroduction and recovery of Pere David’s deer in China. Wildlife Society Bulletin 28(3): 681-687.

Jiang, Z. & Harris, R.B. 2016. Elaphurus davidianus. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T7121A22159785.

Li C et al (2011). Do Pere David’s deer lose memories of their ancestral predators? PLoS One 6(8): e23623.

Seddon PJ et al (2014). Reversing defaunation: Restoring species in a changing world. Science 345(6195): 406-412.

Yuan B et al (2019). Differential movement pattern of Pere David’s deer associated with the temporal rhythm using GPS collar fix. Global Ecology and Conservation 18:e00641