Product Code Database
A deer farm (technically a ranch) is a fenced facility, typically a piece of pasture suitable for grazing, that is used to breed and raise deer species (such as elk, moose, reindeer, sika deer or especially white-tailed deer) as livestock.
Farm-raised deer are typically harvested for commercially valuable animal product such as meat (venison), hide (buckskin), fur, (particularly ), deer blood and even deer penis, the latter three often used as ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine. , New Zealand is the largest supplier of farm-raised venison with approximately 3,500 intensive deer farms and an estimated stock of 1.7 million deer.
Deer are not native to New Zealand. The first deer were brought to the country from England and Scotland for sport hunting in the mid- to late 19th century, and released mainly in the Southern Alps and surrounding foothills. The environment in New Zealand, with no natural and comparable competitors, proved ideal for deer, and the uncontrolled introduced populations grew to high numbers. By the middle of the 20th century, these feral deer were regarded as invasive species pests because of their impact on the native forests. From the 1950s, deer culling were employed by the New Zealand Government to keep the feral numbers in check.
The export of venison from wild deer started in the 1960s, turning a pest into an export earner. Industry pioneers saw an opportunity to build on this base, and in the early 1970s started capturing live deer from the wild and farming them. A new industry was born and rapidly spread throughout New Zealand, and later to the United States and Canada.
Recently, as of 2014, cases of CWD have been found in both farmed and wild cervids in the US and western Canada.
New Zealand is free of CWD. The New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries undertakes an extensive testing programme which would identify the disease if it occurred in the national deer herd.
|
|
