Hello. Today we're gonna talk about the biology, management, and diseases of specifically farmed red deer. My name is John Fletcher.

I'm a vet, and I've worked exclusively with deer all my working life. I started my own deer farm in 1974 and have been closely involved with the deer farming industry worldwide for over 40 years. We've exported deer breeding stock from my little farm in Octomati to most European countries, to North America, and New Zealand, the Middle East, Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, etc.

And now we have a herd of white red deer which we're selling to amenity deer parks. The deer family are the serviae. They are a family of horned ruminants comprising about 50 living species within 16 genera.

By comparison, the other, another family, the Bovidy with which vets are probably more familiar, comprising cattle, sheep, goats, and antelope, comprises about 150 living species in 53 genera. It is true to say, therefore, that there is as much taxonomic difference between red deer and for example roe deer as there is between cattle and sheep. So it is very unwise to extrapolate from one species to another and remember that these.

Species, not breeds. Here are some deer on my farm, a stag, a red deer, obviously, a stag growing with velvet antlers in July, perhaps, and the hind on the left you can see has an udder, and it's the udder is very visible and that's quite an important thing to develop the ability to recognise. For the purposes of this talk, I'm talking about red deer, unless I state otherwise.

And that's because red deer are overwhelmingly the most commonly farmed species in Britain and New Zealand. This is because they are the species of choice for farming because they're relatively easy to handle. They are gregarious herd forming, which goes along with their ability to eat grass, so they're what we would call bulk.

Feeders and they're readily available with a big gene pool to draw on. They will also hybridise with their larger relatives, the Wapiti or elk in North America and the Asian species of Wapiti and elk. And they carve, of course, like most, temperate climate deer species, they carve when vegetation is most available and nutritious.

And that's something that of course the farmer can most conveniently provide. Like most species of deer, red deer are highly seasonal. This is an adaptation to ensure that hinds lactate when the vegetation is at its most nutritious and available.

In order to synchronise carving to achieve a tight carving period and in order to achieve a A tight calving period. Red deer have a short rutting period when the stag's antlers are hard and dead, and they function as weapons, and at that time of year they are very dangerous animals. If cornered or if they are very tame animals that have lost their fear of humans, then you must be very, very careful, and we always recommend deer farmers on commercial deer farms to remove the ants, which is something we'll talk about shortly.

Like most species of deer, red stags and hinds use day length to synchronise their reproduction. So declining day length after the summer solstice stimulates testis development, rising levels of testosterone, and changes in behaviour. So we see neck girth, for example, doubles as the muscles develop.

They produce a strong rutting smell, and of course the antlers cycle is related to this. So the antlers harden and shed their velvet in preparation for the rut, and there are many other changes too. And on the other side, Heinz, the female red deer stimulated by shortening days, commenced estrus cycling and Begins.

Here's a slide with too much information on it which I made many years ago, and it's intended to show the annual cycle relating the red deer to testosterone levels and day length. So along the bottom we've got January, February, March, etc. The red highlighted area is the rut in the autumn.

And then along the top we've got the antler cycle, and organising all this is the histogram showing diagrammatically testosterone levels from baseline levels through the summer, the spring and the summer. Towards the end of summer they start to increase very rapidly to reach very high levels during the rut. And this, amongst other things, controls the antler cycle.

So that blue bar at the top is the hard antler with the orange bar, the velvet, so you can see the hard antlers are cast in the spring around February time. March and immediately the antlers grow in start growing and they grow through the summer until they clean the velvet in the autumn and become hard ready for the rut. We'll look at that in a bit more detail shortly.

Hinds, which fail to conceive during the season, may cycle all through the winter until February at about 3 week intervals, and it's interesting that hinds, which for some reason have failed to conceive that Easter cycle becomes more and more pronounced so that by the end of the winter, the animals are behaving as nymphomaniacs, and the Heinz gestation lasts 230, 234 days. Stags experienced declining testosterone levels and cast their antlers in February or March as we seen. And here's a picture of a stag that's just cast its right antler.

These are wild red deer, but tame ones on the Isle of Rum, and that stag on the left has cast his right antler, and he's immediately challenged by a stag on the right that was previously a subordinate. So they can, the stag on the right understands that the Dominant stag having cast an antler is now vulnerable, and he's forced to adopt a boxing stance because he's only got one antler which will fall off very shortly and because the new growing antler is vulnerable. And this is what it looks like just after it's cast.

You can see the new antler growing round the bleeding cast surface, and the blood trickling down. This is a perfectly natural process. There is a small amount of blood loss.

There seems to me to be pain associated with that casting procedure. The blood's got a very, very fast clotting time and doesn't run for very long, and the anther is immediately starting to grow. In fact, it's starting into growth before the antlers cast, so there's very active osteoclast activity, removing the causing the antler to cast very, very rapidly, and the other antler in this case we can see on the left that antlers cast a couple of days before the one on the right.

They were cast within a day or two of each other and occasionally they cast at the same time, you find one lying on top of another. They grow rapidly, of course, and here you can see the scab being carried up in the new ant that's grown. This is about 10 days old.

And here we are continuing to grow, and you can see in this picture perhaps the hairs on the surface of the velvet, the skin covering and sustaining the antler, and there are sebaceous glands and all sorts in there. It's fully differentiated tissue with cartilage in the making the main part of the antler, skin, the velvet, it's fully innovated with and fully vascularized too, so it's a, it is a complete organ. And it's the only organ that is regenerated in the mammal kingdom, and it's also the fastest growing mammalian tissue.

So you can see here some antlers that have been growing for about 3 months, or actually only about 2 months in this picture. A daily increment of about 1 centimetre a day. Here we are nearly coming up to 3 months probably.

This is probably July. And here are the antlers hardening now after the summer solstice. You can see the points becoming sharp, the velvet is beginning to, erode and die off.

And here we can see that stage a little bit further. The antler is calcified as a response to the rising testosterone levels stimulated by the summer solstice and the declining day length, and that dead velvet, the skin on the outside, will slough. As here, and within a day or two, the cleaning process is complete.

That dead velvet hangs down over the eyes and can sometimes cause a transient. Cor corneal opacity, but if there's vegetation around and something the stag can thrash his antlers in, the velvet comes off much more cleanly and quickly on farms without that, sometimes we do see that eye infection. It seems to pass off quite well by itself, and you can see just how sharp the newly cleaned antlers are here.

Well, we we've been talking about red deer, but here is a fallow buck, a male fallow, adult fallow deer, and you can see he's cleaning his velvet, and the antler cycle in fallow deer. It's very similar to that in red deer, and the velvet is cleaned off very impressively from these big palmated antlers. And as the Autumn progresses.

The antlers clean the velvet. The stag starts going into condition for the rut, so the antlers become burnished, as you can see here, through thrashing against trees and vegetation and so forth. The neck musculature doubles, the main length grows, the hair on the main.

The infraorbital gland in front of the eye opens up when the stags roar, and the stags raw. At very frequent intervals during the rut to advertise their presence and deter competition. And the stag's behaviour changes.

So they, they will fight, they become extremely aggressive, and injuries, this is, a fight here. Injuries during fighting are relatively common. It's a serious, A serious fight, not the spars which younger stags do or even older stags in the spring will rattle their antlers together playfully, but in the rut they're fighting, so there's a parallel walk as they assess each other, and it's a serious exercise.

Now from what I've been saying to you, you'll understand that if testosterone is absent, then . The antlers are going to grow and stay in velvet. In red deer.

This is a red deer that's had an accident of some sort and been accidentally castrated and it's obviously shot here, and the antler is covered in fur. The velvet, and it stays in that condition for the rest of the animal's life unless, you give it some testosterone to clean the antlers, . And the red deer castrates antlers are formed rather like that.

They don't go into the, massive hypertrophied growth that we see in some other species such as roe deer, where the growth of the antler in the castrate becomes what we call a peruke, a wig. Here's one that's rotted off and you can see the calcified, peruke there. That will eventually overgrow the animal and cause it to die.

Reindeer seem to produce a rather similar, hypertrophied antler in the cassrate. Right, we're going to talk a little bit now, having covered the annual cycle, about the way in which the deer are managed on deer farms. And this is the way we would recommend the animals are managed on deer farms.

So from the middle of August, we would always recommend that the adult stags have their antlers removed as soon as the velvet is shed. So this is before the aggressive behaviour has become deeply entrenched, so the animals are still relatively easily handled. And it's a good time to take the animals in and saw the antlers off.

It's obsolete because the antler is dead after the velvets shed. It's a painless exercise and of course it's illegal to remove antlers when they're still got velvet on them. So wait until the most part of the velvet is shed before you start removing the antlers, but nevertheless encourage deer farmers to remove the antlers for their own safety, the safety of the other deer, and the safety of the fences, and the safety of the people.

And it's a good opportunity at that time. Normally commercial deer farmers will put them in a crush to remove the antlers, and so that's a good opportunity to . Drenched them with an elmintics and dose them with copper, which we'll talk about later.

If that's required, yearling stags, should be de-antlered also as soon as the velvet is shed because this is necessary if they're going to be put in a truck and taken off to an abattoir for slaughter, which is what is generally recommended for deer farms, then those antlers will have to be removed because it's illegal to transport them in either velvet or hard antler. And at that time the target weight should be about 110 kg for live weight for stags and about 88 kgs for Hein. That's the target.

And after they've had their antlers off, then the breeding stags are turned out, into well set up pastures ready for the rut. This is a stag, in a crush, having his being prepared for its hand to be removed, . It's important that the animal can't throw its head around too much, so in this case, the ants have been securely tied with rope, and they can be sawn off relatively easily, and without any pain to the animal.

It's important to synchronise the calving, as we've said. This is a very crucial part of good farm deer farm management, and one of the ways of doing that, encouraging that is to avoid late calves. So remove the stags in November.

To try and prevent any lake calves being born. And of course, another factor is the age at which the calves are weaned off their mothers. In herds that are on rougher ground or with a less than perfect nutritional.

State, then we'd recommend that the calves are weaned before the rut. But in well established herds on good feeding, then it's perfectly acceptable to wean calves after the rut in November and December. So, at that time, the calves are going to be handled, they need sexing, tagging, and weighing, worm them at the same time, either with an oral dose or an injectable.

And also when the hinds are coming in at that time, it's a good opportunity to see if they have any others present and to record the presence of those. Cal, we would always recommend that people cull Heins that are dry on in successive years. And at the same time sort the hinds into rutting groups.

Assuming that, this is before the rut and introduced stags at a ratio of about 1 to 40, we would, Use in most cases, multi-sar mating, single cell mating only if you're particularly concerned about seeing which stag has fathered the calves, . And you can set up single size paddocks with 40 hinds in a stag or even more hinds with one stag, but assuming you're using a number of stags, then fit up mob sizes to suit the size of the paddocks. Monitor grazing through the rut and introduce silage or concentrate as required.

After the rut, removed the stags, as we've said, in probably mid November, set up wintering mobs in selected paddocks and feed good quality silage to the mature hinds or winter them on crop, which we're very keen to encourage because this also reduces worm exposure if the pastures are being rotated, and deer do really well on crops such as turnips, swedes, rape, etc. And you should allow around 2 kilogrammes of dry matter per head per day, along with good quality barley straw, to prevent, to provide some fibre. The young Hinds, the 2 year old replacement hinds need, they're still growing and they should be fed on a higher level.

So allows them to concentrate in addition to the . Silage or crop feeding. It may not be practical on smaller units to separate the young hinds from the adults.

And in any case, it's very important that care is taken to avoid young hinds being bullied. So where there is an opportunity to separate the young hinds from the older ones and winter them separately, it's preferable, but it may not be possible, as I say, on smaller units. Then through the winter, monitor the stock, remove any animals that are being bullied and separate them.

This is unlikely to happen really unless they're housed. And, adjust the feeding according to weather obviously. Here's a picture, courtesy of a Polish deer farm, Rodsy, of some, hinds sent out from my farm to Poland, being fed on good quality silage, through a diagonal feeding barrier, which is a very satisfactory system.

Another way, to manage the feeding is to strip graze, and here this is a John Burgess farm in Devon, where he's strip grazing hinds using electric tapes, on the crop of, rape or kale or something. Through the early spring, increased concentrates. So deer have a and they, their appetence is reduced naturally in winter, in midwinter, so they have mid-winter appetences.

Inhabitants, I should say, and they won't eat and make good use of a higher feeding regime until the spring, but at that time you can increase concentrates for in-wintered calves to around 400 to 500 grammes per day and separate out any that are being bullied, which may happen in late summer, in late winter with the calves. Monitor pasture and when it's ready, turn the calves out on the set up pastures in late April, it may be, and reduce the artificial feeding concentrate ration as grass growth starts. Prior to calving, check the fences because calves have a habit of squeezing out through the fences, unless the fences are in very good condition, seeking cover.

Even deer used to living on open ground will use trees and topography for shelter, and here's some wild deer being fed outside in sheltered woodlands. It's always counterintuitive, but in fact red deer are not very well insulated. So if we look at this results of an experiment carried out in the 1970s in Scotland, we're comparing the lower critical temperature for deer, sheep and cattle two different wind speeds, and you can see that the red deer effectively start to feel cold at a much higher temperature than do the sheep and cattle, so .

Bear in mind that they're less well insulated than sheep and cattle, and they also have lower energy reserves. So in a situation where heat loss exceeds metabolizable energy intake by 20%, the red deer only have about 2 weeks to 2 months of life in energy reserves, whereas sheep and cattle, you're talking about. 9 months colossal difference.

This may slightly exaggerate the vulnerability of deer to cold weather, but their survival does depend on their ability to anticipate changes in weather and move into shelter in wild deer. So on a farm you have to bear that in mind, and shelter is important for farm deer. So, through the summer, monitor worm burdens using faecal egg counts if that's what you want to do, we would not necessarily consider that to be a routine though.

Set stock the hinds through calving and ensure that the calving paddocks have areas of cover for the calves to hide in. It's very important. Rotationally graze the hinds once the calves are running with them.

So it's important to avoid late calves so that you can rotationally graze the hinds with their calves from mid-July onwards to provide best quality pasture for lactation. And you need to turn the animals out into silage paddocks or top the grass to maintain good quality summer grazing. Yearling hinds would carve a bit later than the mature hinds and shouldn't be allowed to become over fat before carving to avoid calving problem.

So here we see a hind carving, as we've explained, synchronicity of estre is induced by the short day length and the male rut, and the fixed gestation length causes the synchronicity of calving to make best use of spring grass. And the ultimate objective is to have a hind in good condition in early summer with a good well grown calf. That hind is going to produce up to 2 kg of milk a day, and the calf will grow extremely quickly, and it's very important that you maximise that biological advantage.

Now we're going to talk a little bit about handling deer. They can be easily trained to follow feed, so that you can move them between fields or into raceways if if the farm has been well laid out and well designed. Here we can see such a farm in New Zealand with a broad raceway and a big mob of 1200 hinds being gathered by one man on a quad bike with two dogs.

. Once animals are into a raceway, then they will be less inclined to run at the fence, which is the thing to avoid. It's very easy for deer to become panicked until they've got used to being handled, and they will run into a fence. And potentially injure themselves.

If you get them into a raceway, they're viewing the fence all the time, as a, as a almost a conspicuously opaque obstruction. So they're less likely to run into it. And a similar point is of value if you have to handle park deer, something to be avoided, really.

. This is a park where the deer are being gathered, and we've covered the fences here, as you can see, with black plastic landscape membrane so that the deer won't run into the fence and they we've constructed a temporary raceway so the deer can be gathered. Here they are coming up into the handling system. In hard antler, which is not an ideal situation, and this handling system has been designed with solid plywood walls, so the animals can be restricted in movement, so they can't run, gather speed and run at the sides.

Once deer have been handled, then they often need loading out, and here we can see some deer being loaded into a truck, and it's a good idea to load them round a corner like this. They load much more easily and they move more easily round corners. And once they're in a truck, they will travel very well.

They load extremely quickly and easily if the situation is well set up, and they can travel given adequate space and good bedding or. It may be sawdust for shorter journeys, but I would prefer to use straw for longer journeys. Then deer will travel extremely well.

Here are some deer in Spain coming into a handling system, and the sides here have been visually obstructed up to about 4 ft with stock board or plywood and a mesh above. Some people use that system. Some people make the sides solid all the way, but in any case, it's important to try to avoid the animals feeling inclined to run at the fence or push their way through.

Here's Antonio Ortiz, a very experienced deer vet in Spain doing ultrasonic scanning of hinds to assess pregnancy, which is a very good practise for deer farms to adopt, so that they can sort out which hinds are dry or not going to have calves and which hinds are going to calve. We use artificial breeding sometimes in deer, which makes much more rapid genetic improvement possible. Here's, Antonio helping, a New Zealand vet, Mike Brihas, collecting, .

Eggs from a . A polyovulated height. So we've talked about the management of deer on farms, I'm now going to talk about some of the diseases that deer fall prey to.

Because red deer are essentially wild and unimproved and have not been selected for high productivity, we don't see most of the diseases associated with conventional livestock, so we don't see any ketosis or mastitis or magnesium staggers, no milk fever, relatively few foot problems, and very little dystopia. We do of course see infectious diseases, parasitic, bacterial, viral, as well as those which may be nutritional in origin. As I explained earlier, deer have very low energy reserves and not particularly well insulated, so winter is the time of difficulty for deer on farms, and most of the disease and mortality tends to present in the in the winter.

There are one or two good sources of information on deer disease. The Veterinary Deer Society published a book in 1994 in its second edition, and that is available as a CD from Mark Dalgliesh at the Moreland Research Institute for 10 pounds or through the Veterinary Deer Society. It's rather dated now, of course.

The best available source of information on deer disease, especially on farmed red deer disease, are the annual Deer Branch New Zealand Veterinary Association proceedings, which ran every year for very many years, and these should be available online through CyQuest. And I think, some people may have had difficulty gaining access to that, but it should be possible, and perhaps you have to speak to your librarian if you do have a problem, but I can't recommend highly enough that source of information. So if we look at the diseases early in life for the calves, one of the most important is cryptosporidia.

Occasionally there are cases of E. Coli and salmonella causing mortality in calves, and calves are also sometimes lost as a result of in hill country falling into . Ditches, and also sometimes on farms, low ground farms with little cover, especially first carver hinds can be quite aggressive towards calves.

You occasionally get a hind that would go around and attack other people's calves. So, that's all, something to bear in mind, and it's especially a problem, as I say with first carvers or on new deer farms. Once a deer farm's been established for a while, these sort of problems tend to reduce.

Try to manage for early carving, as we've said, by early weaning and by removing the stags and also ensure that there is plenty of cover during carving. So if they can run into trees, give as much space as possible, rough pasture, or if there's none of those things available, consider pulling trees out into the fields or fallen trees and branches. Cryptosporidia then.

It causes where it, where there is a problem, it can cause losses of up to about 20%, which is very distressing for the farmer and the calf and the deer, obviously. It seems to affect calves at surprisingly young age, probably less than 2 weeks. You'd expect that by maximising clean grazing through sorting hinds by calving date, if they're going to be scanned, you can do that.

. As I've mentioned, provide good cover is very important to do everything you can to reduce stress during calving, but none of these things seem to be hugely effective, and the disease can go on for a couple of years or more years before generally resolving spontaneously. There is some suggestion that there's an association with pastures that have been grazed by cattle, and I think perhaps you see it more often in the wetter, warmer west side of Britain. Once the summer has progressed, then you're going to be thinking about worm control strategies, .

We would always hope that you could restrict your analmintic use to just the calves and the yearlings. You get very good immunity in adult deer, and worming on a well managed deer farm of adults should really not be necessary. We would always recommend that you use an injectable or an oral preparation because there's good evidence from New Zealand that poons have contributed to the development of antimytic resistance.

It seems as though the blood levels you get with poons last longer, but they're lower, so there are some parasites which will not be killed, and that can obviously promote resistance. We use the drugs in the list of priorities recommended by New Zealanders, prioritising moxidectin and with declining the other ones as listed here. Levamycol is probably ineffective.

Bear in mind that no drugs are licenced for use in deer of any sort. The main parasite we're worried about, and that a nematode parasite that we're worried about is the lung worm, Dickycorisaneldi, we think, which is a major contributor to mortality, often surfacing in the winter. I think this is still the major cause of death on deer farms.

Which is not really to excuse it, but it's there. Gastrointestinal helmins rarely seem to cause clinical disease, although I think that situation is perhaps getting worse. So whenever you handle the calves, so weaning, of course, then worm them, and yearlings should be treated in August for lung worm as well.

The animals won't cough. Deer won't cough necessarily when they have lung worm, and mortality can be quite. Acute Obviously use clean pastures as far as possible, grazing aftermaths, pasture that's previously been grazed by sheep or cattle, and use forage crops to provide a rotation.

And so the normal precautions that one would use in cattle and sheep should be applied to deer. Foetal egg counts don't seem to be terribly effective, bearing in mind that you're only monitoring adult worms, that the samples for lung worm have to be super fresh, ideally from the rectum. And if you are using them, then you probably need to monitor them weekly to ensure that you start treatment in good time.

Another disease which we tend to see . Actually, in the summer, is Yoni's disease. You can see it at any time of the year, of course, but, it's often most conspicuous in the summer.

It causes chronic diarrhoea and emaciation as it does in cattle, but you can sometimes in a herd that you know has infection recognise the disease sooner in that the animals may be showing delayed moulting into summer coat, which is very conspicuous. Some strains of deer are known to be more resistant than others. So, New Zealand information has shown that, English park deer strains are more resistant than East European and Wati and hybrid strains.

I think that if there's ample forage, the disease becomes in apparent very often. And certainly, where there's a high proportion, a high population of rabbits, then we tend to see more Joe's disease, I think. We would be if we had a deer health scheme, then, Yoni and TB would be the obvious priorities.

Here you can see two hinds grazing. The hind on the left is in good condition and healthy. The hind on the right is thin, scouring, and yet this is the summer when she should be in good condition.

And she's obviously got Joe's disease. We see sporadic losses due to, of course, many different causes. Deer are highly susceptible to ruminal acidosis, so we do see grain overload and deers have had access to concentrates, especially during the winter.

It's very important that stockmen are advised to change feeding regimes very slowly and carefully. In deer as well, unlike conventional livestock, we see higher levels of trauma associated with panic and stress, deer running into fences. Occasionally deer will fracture a limb, maybe a leg, and it is the case that if you leave those, they very often the deer are so agile that they seem to be able to stabilise fractures to a remarkable extent, and this may be from the animal's point of view, preferable to more invasive procedures to try and stabilise the joint.

So that would be a question of making a clinical assessment, but bearing in mind that they do respond extraordinarily well to rest, you have to be careful not to isolate because they're a gregarious species, but if they have a place they can seek solitude, then an animal with a fractured limb will often recover spontaneously. Dystopias, calving problems are uncommon. Usually where you do see them, it's associated with hinds that are too fat.

So that's a very important thing to bear in mind. And by reducing removing the stags at the end of the rut, preventing late calves, you will do a lot to reduce the possibility of dystopias arising from over fat hinds in late summer. One of the diseases we see sporadically is malignant cataral fever.

This is a picture that Alan Sneddon provided to me of one of his clients, Heinz, with blindness and all the signs of malignant cataral fever. Occasionally when it occurs, the animals are just found dead. It can be per acute.

It seems to be invariably fatal. Of course it's caused by herpes virus, which is carried in healthy sheep. They seem to excrete more of that at lambing time, so avoid contact between deer and lambing flocks or even people who are working with lambing flocks.

Cannot be spread from deer to deer, which is a reassurance to the farmer. Calves are very rarely affected, and it's not a common condition. In parks where the animals are left with their antlers on, antlers can cause a lot of problems.

Usually they get tangled up in wire, and deer farmers must be trained to make sure that there is no wire lying around on a farm, especially if there's any stags in hard antler, . They occasionally, very occasionally will, tangle each other up when they're in the rut when they're fighting, which can be very distressing. Usually one of them will die and the other one can then be darted.

Occasionally they will go around together for some time. But darting is really the, with a tranquillizer is really the only, way to saw the antlers off and clear the problem. Another obscure disease here.

This is Clostridium tetany. This was a yearling stag that went lame, started salivating, which raised thoughts of foot and mouth disease. But on diagnosis it was.

Tetanus. Clostridial diseases do present in deer, and it's a moot point whether we should consider vaccination. In general, people don't vaccinate.

There's not that much. We don't see very much evidence of clostridial disease, but quite a lot may pass undiagnosed. Foot problems where deer have been handled a lot, especially where they can run up against a wire or where the ground is sharp with stones and rough, then handling can cause lameness and occasionally foot abscesses.

These can be if they're caught in time can be treated well with antibiotics. Response is good. Sometimes lameness will recover spontaneously and is presumably caused by bruising after frequent handling through TB testing or transport, for example.

TB is, I'm not going to talk about that very much here. It's a major problem, of course, where it does occur. It's not common.

I don't think deer can track TB as readily as do cattle, but where we do have infected herds, the problems are very significant. Mortality may be quite low. Heds may appear quite healthy.

If you see a large number of abscesses in a group of deer, then TB should be part of a differential diagnosis, and here you can see a hind with with tuberculosis, bovine tuberculosis with an abscess. This was a herd of deer that was killed out, and 30% of those deer had visible lesions. Sometimes the abscesses will track out as in this case, .

Abscessed or inflamed mesenteric lymph nodes like we see these abscessed ones here in an animal that had bovine tuberculosis mustering alarm bells, and it is the case, I suppose, that deer that are going through abattoirs provide some measure of confidence that her does not have the disease, but the animals that are going through those abattoirs tend to be young animals, and perhaps the disease is not being picked up in the, we shouldn't certainly rely on, abattoirs to pick up the disease. We talked briefly about rheuminal acidosis. Housed calves that have been on a high carbohydrate rationed through the winter, such as potatoes, will often show overgrown hooves due, I guess, to laminitis.

If you clip those animals before they're turned out in the spring, generally speaking, the hoof will reshape quite nicely. We've talked about dystopia as a result of Heinz being too fat. Here we can see an overgrown hoof, caused reassumed by laminitis.

And as I say, if it's clipped at turnout, then the problem is resolved generally. Here's lung worm. You see massive populations of worms in affected deer sometimes.

They don't always cough, as I've said. It's pretty easy to diagnose, . An autopsy, and, we've talked about the measures to control that.

Another parasite which is sometimes affects the animals in large numbers in wild deer in Scotland especially is Hypoderma diana, the liver the warble, the deer warble fly, causing the warbles under the skin in the spring, and obviously this must impair performance. It represents a welfare issue as well. It seems to be whether or not the animals.

Are affected going into poor condition or the poor condition animals have a higher population of warble flies. I don't know, but there does seem to be a correlation. And there's also the bot fly, which causes the nostril maggots here, Cephanoma or ribarbis in red deer, not considered to be a significant threat to the health of deer, but surely must have some impact on the animal's welfare.

Copper deficiency is a disease that's often talked about amongst deer farmers. We see clinical signs of copper deficiency in calves at the end of the summer when they may exhibit swollen knee and hock joints, and when you look at those calves from behind, they appear to be, it's almost though the hocks are interfering. They're pulled in and pinched.

And in young adults we see sway back too, where this can be so pronounced in some situations that the animal does what appears to be a horizontal somersault. We used to see it a lot in deer parks. Most deer farmers will have it under control.

If a deer farm is being set up in an area where there is recognised copper deficiency, then it would be a good idea for the farmer to start treatment. We would recommend the same regime as is adopted by sheep at double the dose, and that should control clinical disease. There is a long held belief amongst deer farmers with actually relatively little experimental evidence to support it that all deer are slightly copper deficient and that to supplement them with high copper is is a useful thing which will improve.

The condition of the animals and there may be some basis for that. I do think that the species and strains which are more adapted to eating trees and bushes like the Elk and the Wapiti and the East European red deer seem to be much more susceptible to copper deficiency, and I think it may be that those deep rooted trees and shrubs have a higher level of copper and the animals are adapted to coping with that. We'd always recommend that deer farmers use compound rations designed for cattle with a higher level of copper than the sheep ones.

Bear in mind that copper toxicity does occur. Weaning is the most stressful time on a deer farm for the deer. We have, we used to see a disease called herpes virus of cervid strain one, which can cause severe conjunctivitis and .

Ulceration sometimes of the cornea and blindness occurred. We used to see that a lot when we were working with wild deer that had been brought on to farms with a higher level of stress. We don't see it at all often now.

Yocinia is also a common cause of mortality problems in red deer calves that had just been weaned. It's a very big problem in New Zealand. It's stress related, so we see it in animals that have been unchanged.

Feeding regimes or being transported, and especially when they've recently been weaned. Losses can be very rapid per acute, so you just find dead animals. You may not see the diarrhoea.

Adults don't seem to suffer from this very often. It does seem to me that if you have 2 or 3 calves in a mob suddenly found dead, then you could justify rapid intervention using long acting terramycin, and sometimes that has been incorporated into the food ration, and that's been effective as well as injecting. Liver fluke, .

Fasciola hepatica rarely causes clinical disease in red deer in my experience, and livers, even when livers carry many flute, this liver on the left here was the worst I ever saw, packed with fluke, and yet the animal was still in relatively good condition. Nevertheless, on farms where fluke are a problem for sheep, it would be wise to consider dosing deer as the fluke are bound to cause some loss of performance, as well as the real financial cost of liver condemnation in the abattoir. Any fleucoide would be good except closanty, which is contraindicated.

This fallow deer on the right had been treated with losanty, and you may be able to see that it's actually lost coordination in its fore quarter there. Some of the animals recovered, but there was some mortality, and we've seen several cases of that now. Foot and mouth disease is a bit obscure.

In the 2000 outbreak, there were a lot of high populations of deer on pasture where cattle and sheep had been killed out as a result of foot and mouth disease, and we thought this dead roe deer had perhaps got mouth ulcers. Representing foot and mouth disease, but in fact it turned out it was serologically negative and I think that was damage caused postmortem by rats, . In fact, we saw no during that outbreak, there was no evidence at all that deer had contracted foot and mouth disease, and although we know that in laboratories, experimental infection can cause disease in all the species of deer in Britain.

In the larger species, the red and fallow deer, the disease was relatively mild, but in the smaller species, foot and mouth caused disease were leading to death. It seems to me that red deer, and perhaps all wild deer in the wild, are surprisingly not particularly susceptible and not a high risk, would be the conclusion from the 2000 ft mouth outbreak. And finally, it looks like it's bath time.

Here's a big stag in Spain that photographs sent to me by Antonio, the vet in Spain. Wallows to leave on a controversial note, I think that wallows are quite good for the deer, and I would be happy for. The idea to always have wallows even if some people consider that they can be incriminated in spreading disease.

I think that their benefits in cooling and in providing release for stress wallows are good. Thank you very much. I hope you've enjoyed it and found it useful.