The Deer of the First Sermon

In Buddhism the deer marks the beginning of the teaching: the Buddha preached his first sermon in the Deer Park at Sarnath, near Varanasi, and a pair of deer flanking a wheel became a standard emblem on the roofs of Tibetan monasteries, recalling that scene. Deer accordingly carry connotations of gentleness, attentiveness and the receptivity of the first disciples. In Japan the deer of the Kasuga shrine at Nara are treated as messengers of the shrine's deity and are protected, wandering the town freely; harming one was once a capital matter. The animal's antlers, grown and shed and regrown each year, make it a natural emblem of renewal wherever it appears.

Antler growth is a genuine biological extreme worth stating plainly: during the peak of the growing season a deer's antlers are among the fastest-growing tissue known in any mammal, some species adding more than a centimetre a day, fuelled by an intense blood supply through the velvet skin that covers the growing bone before it hardens and the velvet is shed. In recent decades wildlife agencies across North America have had to manage a very different, modern deer problem, chronic wasting disease, a fatal prion illness now confirmed in wild and farmed deer across dozens of US states and several other countries, prompting regulated culls and carcass-movement restrictions unrelated to any older symbolism.