Oh, deer me!

    We spent the morning driving around Paul's deer farm in his 4x4, up and down steep hills that brought Deborah face to face with her roller coaster phobia. I sat in the back and watched her face in the rear view mirror; I should have tried to get a photo. 

    We watched the two working dogs, Spit and Milo, move the deer into a new paddock, and Paul taught us an awful lot about how to run a deer farm - I feel almost as though I could take over tomorrow. It's a profitable form of farming, and seems an easy lifestyle, although the fences have to be higher than for sheep or cattle. 

    The soft green antlers, called "velvet", grow for about fifty days in the season leading up to Christmas. They are sold every year to Asian markets, and each part of them, from the "jelly tips" down to the base parts used for anaemic children or for pregnant women, have a part in Chinese medicine. 

    The market within China is controlled by about five important families, who distribute the parts; the "jelly tips" go for $2000/kilo at that stage, but no New Zealander will be allowed to access the end-user distribution network. Paul gets about $500 annually from each pair of antlers; less costs, he does well enough to live a comfortable lifestyle, so much so that in 2007 he and Josie toured South America for eight months - an experience that cemented their determination (compulsion?) to host travellers in their own home.  They usually only get requests from ones in their twenties, however. Deborah and I are quite the exception as surfers, in spite of the age of most of our hosts. The travellers reside in the rooms that their now grown-up children used to occupy. 

    Paul browses only male deer (he explains that they are "browsers" rather than "grazers", like cattle), and after a decade their teeth are worn down to the point where they can't thrive and grow a good set of new antlers, so they become venison, and part of that cash buys new young deer to repeat the cycle. There are no predators, and very few insect pests or diseases in New Zealand that these deer might be susceptible to in Europe. They spray for ticks, but that's about it. 

    Before the fresh antlers form, the "buttons", which are the hardened stumps from the previous year's set, fall off; he even harvests those and sells them to the U.S. for people who do scrimshaw art on them. He hunts, does odd jobs for other farmers and local businessmen, and has some goats and some beef cattle as well; he could keep pigs, there are feral ones around that look quite edible, but he doesn't bother. They don't even garden for fresh produce, but Josie works in town, minutes away, as a school nurse, so they always have cash on hand to buy store groceries. 

    She does keep one chicken, called "Chook", who gives them an egg every other day (she started with six, but dogs - their own and visitors' dogs - got five of them). Her dogs have learned to leave Chook alone, and she likes to rest with them, steal their food (and vice versa), and even holds her own against the cat Mucky. She comes to the wide open back door and politely asks for her breakfast but, like the dogs, she never steps beyond the sill. I took photos of her today, and the dogs, the deer, a few plants, the donkey Hazel, and a concrete pillbox on Paul's land, left over from WWII, when New Zealand soldiers watched for an invasion by the Japanese navy, which fortunately never came. 

    Tonight, we're having venison for "tea"...tomorrow, off to Napier